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.
No one seemed certain whether it was a one-off misunderstanding or if Mr. Musk was attempting to assert his demands over Italian workers as well as American ones. A Department of Defense official said that while those emails were meant for U.S. employees, local employees “could receive emails,” too.
The confusion raised questions of whether Mr. Musk could export his brand of unbridled techno-libertarianism to a country that is “founded on labor” per the first article of its Constitution, or whether his chain-saw would snag on Italy’s notoriously thick bureaucracy.
“Ours is a system built on democracy, safeguards, and protections provided by contracts that must be respected,” Pierpaolo Bombardieri, the secretary general of Italy’s Uil union said in a statement.
Mr. Bombardieri called the emails “unacceptable” and the method “aberrant.” Italy’s unions wrote to the Italian government and the U.S. Embassy asking for explanations.
For now, the ground rule appears to be that Italian civilians must answer the email only if they receive it directly from the U.S. government — not if it is forwarded to them, as happened at Aviano and at least one other base in Italy, in the city of Vicenza. But it remained unclear whether the Department of Defense was going to reach out to Italian workers directly.
Some German employees of the U.S. government in Germany also received Mr. Musk’s first email asking them to explain their work output, said a senior diplomat in Berlin, who did not want to be named while talking about an ally. (Mr. Musk’s follow-up email appears to have been sent only to American employees in Germany, the diplomat said.)
In the meantime, some Italian employees had answered the email, said Mr. Del Savio. “One says I was slicing pizza, another says something else.” he said. “But we were all very puzzled,” he said. “Italy is not the Wild West like the U.S.”
Despite recent changes that attempted to make the labor market more flexible, Italy’s labor laws continue to offer broad protections to employees. Especially in the public sector, getting a permanent job is often seen as a guarantee to be unfireable for life.
Many in Italy value this system as a backbone of the Italian welfare state and its democracy, while others point to it as a rigid and inefficient juggernaut that prevents jobs from being created for young people.
Stories of half-hour long workdays and daylong coffee breaks are something of a legend in Italy. Some have said a touch of Musk-style slash and burn approach would not hurt here.
“Italy would also need Musk’s ax,” Nicola Porro, an Italian journalist and right-wing commentator, wrote in a blog post, decrying Italy’s “useless positions.”
Italians seized upon the juxtaposition. One TikTok creator, Alberico Di Pasquale, made a video pretending to show an Italian employee on a permanent contract answering Mr. Musk’s email. “No. 1: I come to work, No. 2: I clock in, No. 3: breakfast,” he said. “No. 4: tournament with my colleagues to see who will get the coffee; No. 5: I get the coffee. Repeat five times points 4 and 5. No. 6: I go pay my bills and grocery shop; No. 7, I clock out.”
But while some had fun with the demands from Mr. Musk, for union representatives at the American base in Aviano, and other Italians, it was serious business.
As Mr. Trump questions the U.S. commitment to NATO and insists that Europe must defend itself, fears of spending cuts are spreading at U.S. bases abroad.
Amid a 30-day freeze of federal credit cards, the U.S. government last week also froze the credit cards that Italian employees at Aviano used to purchase equipment for the base, then started a hiring freeze, the unions said.
Union workers said they did not know what was going to come next. But they said they were going to fight on.
“Musk can do whatever he wants in the United States,” said Emilio Fargnoli, a union representative. “If they are happy with it, sure,” he added. “Not here.”
Jim Tankersley and Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting.
