155,518 Re-employed

An entire floor of Rome's modernistic Ministry of Corporations clatters all day with the ordered bedlam of statistical machines. Last week they rang up a total of exactly 155,518 Italians re-employed since Oct. 16 as a direct result of an experiment begun that day by the Corporative State.

The experiment: shift Italian industrial workers from a 48 to a 40 hour week, keeping hourly wages unchanged.

One obvious effect: assuming the volume of production to remain un canged, Italian industry must take on one-fifth more workers.

Another effect: the proletarian who used to work 48 hours now earns one sixth less weekly pay, has one-sixth more leisure, knows he has given eight hours work to a fellow proletarian formerly unemployed.

Does the proletariat like it? An Italian who knows is His Excellency Tullio Cianetti, onetime organized labor boss in Turin ("Italy's Detroit"), today still exuberant and under 40 but a member of the Fascist Grand Council and President of the Corporative State's nation-wide Confederation of Workers in Industry.

As the Proletariat's Grand Councilman, Excellency Cianetti last week declared: "The experiment of the 40-hour week is for six months, that is until April 16. It is conducted through contracts signed between representatives of the employers' syndicates and the workers' syndicates in Italian industry. Since the worker gets the same hourly wage while his week's salary is less by eight hours' pay, the experiment is not an added burden to the employer, as was the case when a shorter week with the same weekly pay was tried in the United States, and it does not increase the price of goods. It does entail a burden on the worker, but we have simultaneously endeavored to better the lot of the worker's family by setting up a workmen's fund."

Into this fund goes 1% of the worker's pay, matched by a like sum which the State forces the employer to contribute. On overtime work the percentage is quintupled. "We calculate that the yearly sum thus raised will be 200,000,000 lire ($17,000,000)," said Grand Councilman Cianetti. "This is distributed among men with families, in proportion to the number of their children. The average works out to one lira per day (8 1/2-c-) per child."

Three days later the Fascist Grand Council rated Excellency Cianetti's experiment "successful," extended without limit Italian industry's obligation to function on the 40-hour week.

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