The Deutsche Adria Zeitung admitted that a complete reform of the social system had to await the end of the war and the region’s incorporation into the Reich, but Rainer’s administration was aware of the Fascists’ disastrous social policy and was paying the closest attention to the working environment; to this end the high commissioner had set up a special department, the ‘factory workers’ bureau’.³⁸

Its remit was to support workers in every way, from ensuring proper health and safety conditions to promoting cultural and recreational activities. It would start by providing workers with new clothes — from overalls to overshoes — because (explained the Adria Zeitung) it had been noticed that men were often forced to wear old, inadequate clothing. The bureau would also provide work canteens³⁹ which would be instrumental in overcoming the food problems caused by the war, ensuring that everyone got a full and satisfying meal.

Finally, the bureau would distribute extra cigarette rations, since ‘although some might think that cigarettes are not really a fundamental need of life, it must be acknowledged that they are one of the little things that make life a bit easier and more endurable. […] Therefore the factory workers’ bureau, in collaboration with the High Commissioner’s business department, had always taken care to provide its protégés with an extra cigarette ration from time to time.’

The [Axis] propagandists were anxious to stress that recreational and cultural activities in the workplace would always be seen as fundamental to the welfare system, rather than an accessory: ‘Meeting the cultural needs of the workers is just as important as material assistance. To quote a well‐known saying, man does not live by bread alone.’⁴⁰

[…]

On 20 February, not long after the [Axis’s new] administration was set up [in Italy], the newspaper reported on a meeting between the gauleiter and a workers’ delegation. Rainer had begun by making a speech of welcome in which he expounded a favourite concept of [Fascism’s] social ideology: the [supposed] elimination of all social classes and distinctions. ‘The supreme law of all true socialism’, he said, ‘should be that there is no privileged class and no one is entitled to live at other people’s expense’.

After which, reported the Deutsche Adria Zeitung, he held a long conversation with the workers, ‘discussing economic and social matters and listening to their requests’,⁴¹ promising that the latter would receive the fullest consideration from the [Axis] authorities.

The real experience of workers in the operations zone was quite different from this rosy propaganda picture. No doubt Rainer was sincere in his desire to review wages and salaries, and he made a demagogic promise personally to ensure the creation of a welfare system; but the scanty measures actually taken were quite insufficient to guarantee workers, especially manual workers, a decent standard of living, and if improvements were made to working conditions in the factories, they merely papered over the cracks.

Propaganda carried small conviction to people who endured daily privation and overwork; shipyard workers in particular — to whom communism had much more appeal than [Fascism] — were prominent in the Italian resistance, many of them joining the ‘Garibaldi’ brigades in the mountains of Friuli.

Conditions were particularly bad for those working for the Todt organisation, either on the impressive defences being constructed to guard against a potential Allied invasion of the Adriatic coast or on securing vital road and rail links, which were being continually damaged by partisan attacks.⁴²

While the propagandists promised new clothes and shoes, abundant food and generous wages, the Todt workers — ostensibly volunteers, but most of them under coercion — were forced to work in appalling conditions, dressed in rags, living in improvised barracks near the building sites, ill‐fed and subject to implacable [Axis] surveillance.

The wages, it is true, were not to be despised, being rather above the regional average. But those who benefited most from Rainer’s labour policies were not the manual workers but the numerous entrepreneurs who chose to collaborate with the [Axis] and made huge profits out of munitions orders with the help of a thoroughly browbeaten workforce.

This is why no anticommunist’s appeals to the proletariat should be taken seriously: benefits for the lower classes invariably cut into the upper classes’ funds. One cannot serve two masters.

Besides wooing workers in the regional economy, the [Axis] propagandists had another primordial objective: to persuade as many local men as possible to go and work in [the Third Reich], either in munitions factories or for the Todt organisation. This recruitment of workers was a major preoccupation, vigorously pursued by the [Axis] occupiers all over Italy, not merely in the Adriatisches Küstenland: it engaged the attention of both the Reich plenipotentiary for the employment of labour, Friedrich Sauckel, and the Wehrmacht.

When calls for volunteers proved unprofitable, from early 1944 Sauckel’s organisation began to round up workers. But even forced recruitment did not yield the expected results: from 8 September onwards a mere 87,517 Italians went to [the Greater German Reich], whereas [Axis officials] had expected to send at least a million and a half.

As Klinkhammer has pointed out, this failure was partly caused by rivalry between various elements in the [Axis] occupation apparatus, and partly by curbs imposed on German rapacity by the RSI, whose representatives were quite successful in frustrating deportation plans, at least at local level.⁴³

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

There you can see the Axis’s usage of both the carrot and the stick: when the Fascist bourgeoisie’s promises and (very modest) concessions failed to attract workers, it called in the muscle.