Betim’s Fiat plant helped drive regional development

Agnaldo Francisco de Oliveira is the most senior Fiat employee working at Betim Divulgação Agnaldo Francisco de Oliveira had been looking to change his life for a while. Then one day, after riding the same passenger up to the seventh floor over and over—noticing the “Fiat Automóveis” sign each time—he finally worked up the nerve to ask the man for a job. Stellantis warns knock-down kits could become everyone’s model in Brazil Plug-in models drive Brazil’s electric vehicle boom Analysis: Who can stop BYD? It was 1974. Agnaldo, just 15 at the time, was working as an elevator operator in downtown Belo Horizonte, in the same building where Fiat had rented office space for the team preparing to open its first factory outside Italy two years later. What the company needed most back then was labor, and Agnaldo was hired on the spot as a messenger, running paperwork to notary offices, banks, and other stops around town—including out in Betim, which was still mostly farmland at the time. “There were a lot of Italians sorting out their immigration paperwork in Brazil,” he recalled. Now 67, Agnaldo is the longest-serving active employee at the Betim plant, working today as Stellantis’s accounting coordinator in Brazil. Over the decades he’s seen it all—sending spreadsheets to Italy by telex, buying the company’s first computers, and, most recently, the arrival of artificial intelligence—always with an eye for what’s new. Agnaldo likes to joke that he’s actually been with the company longer than Fiat itself has existed in Brazil. He was there for the factory’s opening, in fact—and liked the date so much he chose it for his own wedding day, July 9, 1983. A new auto plant never goes unnoticed in a city, and that was especially true 50 years ago, when Betim had just 40,000 residents—roughly a tenth of what it has today. The ripple effects reached well beyond city limits, extending into neighboring communities like Ferrujinha, a district of Conselheiro Pena, where father-and-son autoworkers Acenir and Geovane Barbosa still live. In towns like these, it’s common knowledge that getting credit can be as simple as saying you work at Fiat. “You can take the whole store,” a salesperson at retailer Casas Bahia once told Acenir when he went in to buy a TV. Geovane had a nearly identical experience at a car dealership. As a young man, Acenir—now 60—left farm work behind to look for a job, cycling through stints as a cleaner and a waiter before finally landing at the auto plant, where one of his brothers already worked. That was 31 years ago; Geovane was just a year old at the time. Once he was old enough, he followed his father into the plant without a second thought. Acenir has spent years working as a quality operator on the manufacturing line. His son, now 32 and 12 years into his own career at Fiat, was recently promoted to manufacturing quality team leader and has just started on the company’s newly created third shift. Engineer Carolina Turini, a supervisor for industrial methods and strategy, remembers grappling with the industry’s gender gap when she first joined Fiat in 2013. Those days—when the auto industry’s male-dominated culture could feel intimidating to women—are behind her now. Most of her team today is female. The plant’s sheer scale had fascinated Carolina long before she worked there, back when she was commuting from Jaú, in São Paulo state, to study control and automation engineering in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais. “I kept wondering what it would be like to work at a vehicle plant, in such an innovative industry,” she said. It worked out—she even met her husband there, a Minas Gerais native who, as it happens, was born right in Betim. Despite having been created back in 2021 through the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot Citroën, Stellantis remains a name most people in Minas Gerais still don’t quite recognize. “Where do you work?” a shop employee in Belo Horizonte asked Herlander Zola, president of Stellantis’ South American operations, a few days ago. “At Fiat,” he told her. Zola didn’t see any reason to spoil the warmth the Fiat name still carries with locals. Delighted, the woman immediately waved over coworkers who’d “also worked at Fiat”—and Zola wasn’t stretching the truth. He’d joined the company back in 2017, as a Fiat employee.