The 1919 law established the minimum requirements for all white‐collar contracts, both on an individual basis, and, potentially, for collective agreements. This law was further amended in 1924 with decree‐law number 1825, and later converted into law 562 of 1926.9 Private sector white‐collar employment, therefore, saw substantial continuity between the Liberal Age and the fascist period — a continuity that found no correspondence in any other category of employment.
[…]
In collective bargaining, white‐collar workers represented a weak counterparty. They were unable to manifest adequate autonomous trade union strength and not particularly willing to ally themselves as a subordinate component with the workers’ movement, given that they could not identify with the latter’s prevalently class‐based values.
From these factors emerges one of the specific reasons for white‐collar interest in fascist trade unionism: the 1924 law confirmed and restructured for the better the minimum guarantees for private white‐collar workers, and the union laws of 192617 established a new top‐down solution for collective bargaining and gave legal value to collective agreements. This solution best responded to the traditional needs and attitudes of the white‐collar class in general.
[…]
Overall, the industrialists behaved in the same way towards white‐collar workers as they had towards labourers, but following a formally contrary course. While the rapid establishment of contracts for manual labourers in the late 1920s had sanctioned a change in the balance of power, following the period of salary increases and regulatory victories of 1919–1920 (the ‘red biennial’), for white‐collar workers, it was the very absence of national contracts that allowed the erosion of the post‐war salary increases to take place.28
The Confederation of industrialists had also sought the abolishment of the white‐collar law of 1924, accusing it of being a product of class struggle and as such incompatible with the new régime29; this venture did not, however, meet with success.
(Emphasis added.)
Events that happened today (September 9):
1908: Shigekazu Shimazaki, Axis career officer, was born.
1936: The crews of Portuguese Navy frigate NRP Afonso de Albuquerque and destroyer Dão mutinied against the Salazar régime’s support of General Franco’s coup and declared their solidarity with the Spanish Republic.
1939: The Battle of Hel commenced, and became the longest‐defended pocket of Polish Army resistance during the Fascist invasion of Poland. (Coincidentally, Burmese national hero U Ottama starved in prison after a hunger strike to protest Britain’s colonial government.)
1940: The Hungarian Army perpetrated the Treznea Massacre in Transylvania.
1941: Hans Spemann, Fascist embryologist, expired.
1942: An Imperial floatplane dropped incendiary bombs on Oregon.
1943: The Allies landed at Salerno and Taranto, Italy. Coincidentally, Reich bombers killed the former Axis admiral Carlo Bergamini.
1944: The Axis lost the Kingdom of Bulgaria because of the armed rebellion throughout the country and specifically the military coup in the capital.
1945: The Empire of Japan officially surrendered to China.