Barilla saved its Foggia plant by cutting absenteeism from 10% to under 4%
Told the plant would close, manager Nicola Calandrea changed the culture — doctor house calls, letters, and hard truths — until absenteeism fell below 4%.
What was changed
A decade before NPR's 2012 report, the Barilla pasta factory in Foggia, in southern Italy, had a big problem with people skipping work: absenteeism ran around 10 percent, with sick calls clustering on Mondays and days of big soccer games. Barilla's factories in northern Italy had much lower rates.
The company told Nicola Calandrea, manager of the Foggia plant, that it would close the factory unless he brought absenteeism down. He decided the only way to save it was to change the culture. He started sending a doctor to the homes of employees who called in sick every week; he worked out which doctors were signing the most sick notes and sent them letters; and he told everyone in the company that absenteeism at Foggia was far worse than at Barilla's northern plants — and that the factory would shut if things did not improve.
Even workers with perfect attendance were, in the words of bowtie-pasta-line worker Michael Beneze, freaked out — and began pressuring colleagues to show up. The culture shift had a defining moment: a worker refused a day off, called in sick instead, and used it to play a soccer match — playing well, scoring a goal, and making the local paper. His coworkers ratted him out and he was fired, the only dismissal of the whole crackdown.
The plant's absenteeism rate fell from around 10 percent to below 4 percent.
Why it worked
Comparing Foggia's numbers to its sister plants made the problem a shared fact, not a management accusation.
Making the closure threat explicit turned attendance from an individual choice into a collective survival issue.
Chasing fraudulent sick notes at the source — the doctors signing them — attacked the system, not just the workers.
One visible firing, backed by the worker's own coworkers, set the boundary without a wider purge.
What can be applied
Chronic absenteeism is a culture, not a policy gap: transparency about the plant's survival and peer pressure did what threats from HR could not.
Aftermath
By NPR's 2012 visit, absenteeism was below 4 percent and the Foggia plant was still operating; the report aired as part of Planet Money's series on Italy's north-south divide.