The technocratic origins

As an idea, the dopolavoro was the American-inspired invention of a technocratic reformer. As an institution, it owed its origins solely to the political opportunism of the fascist movement's trade union organizations. First presented in Italy as a scheme for a company social service by Mario Giani, the former manager of the Westinghouse Corporation's subsidiary at Vado Ligure, it might have remained one of many similarly simpleminded “paper” projects for improving labor–management relations in the early twenties, had it not been for the need of the National Confederation of Fascist Syndicates to attract a worker following and assuage employers' fear of fascist militancy at the same time.

For the early policy of fascism toward labor organization was entirely “productivist,” based on the primacy of the workplace, utilizing the fascist unions where possible to gain the allegiance of the workers, and force where necessary to discipline them. At their most comprehensive, fascist schemes for the restructuring of the state envisaged the formation of corporations. Whether controlled by an authoritarian state in the version proposed by the Nationalists, or assisted by “councils of experts” as preferred by the “revisionist” technocrats, or simply consisting of the mixed employer–worker associations as urged by the syndicalists, there was little if any thought given to the organization of the workforce outside the factory or off the fields.