Elon Email Reaches Italy and Workers Stopped Working at USA Base

“Ours is a system built on democracy, safeguards, and protections provided by contracts that must be respected,” Pierpaolo Bombardieri, center, the secretary general of Italy’s Uil union, said in a statement.Credit...Cesare Abbate/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Emma Bubola

Reporting from Rome

The 

New York Times

Share full article

Italian employees at the Aviano Air Base in northern Italy paused from flipping burgers, unloading trucks and restocking shelves recently to open an email from their bosses demanding that they list five key accomplishments from last week.

The email was a by-now familiar demand from President Trump’s chief cost-cutter, Elon Musk, carrying with it the threat of termination if they did not respond. But on this occasion, it did not land with government employees in the United States, but rather in Italy, a country where workers’ rights are held sacrosanct.

The result set the stage for a puzzling clash of cultures, with the world’s richest man and his job-thrashing chain saw on one side, and one of the world’s most protective champions of the forever job on the other.

“We are in Italy here,” said Roberto Del Savio, a union representative and an employee at the base. “There are precise rules and thank God for that.”

 

Aviano, an Italian air base that hosts the United States 31st Fighter Wing, employs more than 700 Italian civilian personnel who on a daily basis cook and clean and generally keep the base running.

In all about 4,000 Italian civilian employees work at bases serving about 15,000 American soldiers in Italy, turning each into a sort of a miniature American town where U.S. military personnel can find American food and other familiar items from home.

Those jobs, in keeping with longstanding labor traditions in Italy, are fully unionized and protected under Italian labor laws. But at the same time, the employees work for the United States government, which pays their salaries.

Labor unions say the email was forwarded from a department head to dozens of Italian civilian employees working in the Aviano base’s Army & Air Force exchange service, which provides goods and services to the U.S. Army.