crosspost from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/885301

If it was initially decided to employ large numbers of Italian workers as a strategy against unemployment in Italy and emigration abroad, it soon became clear that this choice was counterproductive for several reasons. According to the Fascist sources, there were ‘moral’ reasons in the first place, because unskilled white workers were not considered suitable elements to populate the Empire due to a lack of necessary ‘moral virtues’.

There were also reasons of ‘racial prestige’: as the head of Labor Inspectorate for AOI, Davide Fossa, wrote in August 1937, it was the intention of the régime to use a growing number of native labor in order to ‘raise the dignity of the Italian worker who must be mainly involved in jobs that require skill and intelligence and in any case [in a rôle] of guidance and command of the natives: never confused with them’.

However, the main motivation was probably economic. The use of Italian labor was absolutely disadvantageous for companies whose budgets were already burdened by the very high costs of transport and raw materials. The minimum daily pay for Italian workers ranged from 33 lire for an unskilled worker to 55 for a foreman. The compensation made for a very high wage compared to the one paid at home: in Italy in 1938 the average daily wage of an agricultural laborer, the social category of the majority of colonial workers, was about 11.22 lire.

Moreover, the wage was incomparably higher than the sums proposed for the Indigenous workers: for example, an Ethiopian bricklayer could earn a maximum of 9 lire a day against 45 for an Italian equal.

Since the 40‐hour working week for the workers was established in 1938 across the [Fascist] régime, the Africans now found themselves in the position to work 56 hours a week more than the Italians, for a pay 8–10 times lower for an African blue‐collar worker compared to his Italian counterpart. Introduced to these numbers, companies and other institutions showed a preference for low‐cost African labor.

To reduce the number of white proletarians returning to the Fatherland, the PNF frequently resorted to bribing them with figurative doggy treats:

Italian workers carried out in the vast majority of cases the same tasks as their African counterparts, and yet they enjoyed privileged contractual conditions.

The transfer trip from Italy was entirely the responsibility of the company that hired them; they had free accommodation in the barracks, and a number of other advantages including a recruitment bonus of 300 lire for the demobilized ex‐soldiers, 50% more pay in the eventual hours of night work, a savings fund of 5 lire a day paid by the employer and withdrawn by the worker in case of necessity, compulsory medical insurance and, in the event of illness, half a day’s pay. Finally, from December 1938 they also stood to receive a Christmas bonus.

The color bar, despite the same duties, therefore guaranteed to the Italian workers good contractual conditions which, from the companies’ point of view, were totally anti‐economic, and soon to be eliminated.

[…]

The Party […] had, among its first tasks in the colony, sought control over the workers through propaganda and persuasion, while at the same time serving as interpreter of the needs and complaints of the workers. The Party acted as mediator and, in some cases, the only real protector of workers’ well‐being.

Thus, faced with the discontent caused by the increasingly frequent compulsory repatriation of white labor, the local sections of the Party were asked to ‘react to these sentiments with a healthy action of assistance and propaganda […] through conversations, conferences, newspapers’, insisting ‘on the need to consider the Empire as a training ground of honest, hard‐working activity, full of sacrifice’.

No doubt these concessions—cigarettes, wine, and so forth—managed to keep many white proletarians pacified for at least several days of the year, but not so fast:

In 1936 Davide Fossa wrote to the Party to make recommendations about the workers’ welfare. Based on the reports coming in to him, he noted that rations were of ‘insufficient and of poor quality’, ‘loan‐shark’ prices were being charged in the shops, and wages were often reduced by the companies.

In the same year the Minister of the Colonies, Alessandro Lessona, wrote to the Viceroy of Ethiopia and Governor General of AOI Rodolfo Graziani to report all the cases of abuse that he had come to know, and asked him to take measures because ‘every infringement must be punished without mercy’.

Almost all the workers were unhappy and demoralized, he cautioned, and wryly noted that at this rate ‘instead of having one hundred thousand propagandists in AOI we will have one hundred thousand defeatists’.

The guideline was therefore ‘the inexorable repression of all abuses of which the entrepreneurs are guilty’, alongside ‘a real assistance of the workers, not limited to some inspection or official visit with distribution of cigarettes’. The worker was to be aided ‘at every moment of his life, during and after work’.

The problems raised in this letter are confirmed by many other sources. From another document we learn, for example, that the Puricelli company workers were late receiving wages and compensation, and that the barracks that were supposed to house them were often tents or not even that.

‘Various sheds had been built,’ wrote the Labor Inspectorate, ‘but they are not covered because there are no metal sheets or boards’. Moreover, the ‘absence of any after‐work recreation’, a chronic ‘postal disruption’, and the ‘bad packaging of food, little variety, low quantity, absence of vegetables’ were also noted.

The problems were confirmed by a British observer, who in the same year described how the ‘white labourers live in miserable wooden sheds […] Apparently nothing is done to provide recreation etc. for them; in the evening they slouch around the town two and two in tattered khaki. The difficulty of feeding them is great’.

Here is something that you definitely won’t encounter antisocialists mentioning:

Law provided a series of protections, but in practice the companies acted autonomously. This disregard for the law was documented in a letter sent by Bruno Santini, AOI Inspectorate of the National Patronage for Social Assistance, to the MP Giuseppe Landi: ‘in any case of injury it would be necessary to prosecute the company for lack of insurance, for lack of complaint, for insolvency […] for non‐compliance with the minimum wages’.

Everyday, he noted, the authorities learned ‘of facts that bring shame to employers’, with small ‘companies and large corporations that don’t give a damn about the workers’ protection laws and mistreat them and mock them’. The situation only worsened, with constant delays in payments and the uninterrupted increase in layoffs by construction companies that massively demobilized national workers because they were too expensive.

In 1940, at the height of an economic crisis, with unemployment at its peak, a worker wrote in a letter: ‘here it is not a colony, but confinement without the benefit of the food ration’.

To the bad treatment by the companies and the threat of unemployment, we must add the concrete possibility of dying, as confirmed by data from the workers’ hospital.

Between June and October 1937, the hospital admitted 445 workers for malaria, 396 for rheumatic pain, 315 for venereal diseases, 236 in traumatology and injury surgery, 98 for acute and chronic enteric diseases, 87 for predominantly chronic bronchitis, 85 for caries, 83 for weakening, and 69 for gastritis mainly due to ‘bad chewing caused by lack of teeth’.

The data highlights the harshness of the conditions to which workers were subjected, along with general problems related to poverty and malnutrition.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

If you have the time to spare, I encourage you to read the rest of the analysis (it’s only seventeen pages total, excluding the preface) which discusses, among other matters, white proletarians being ordered to assault Ethiopians and take their cattle, and the Fascist police suppressing the white lumpenproletariat. In fact, this is almost a must‐read for any scientific socialist interested in focussing on capitalism in decay.