It is no revelation to say that the far right gets a fair chunk of its support off scapegoating and demonizing immigrants. Nor is it a surprise that the far right’s rise generally makes life harder for refugees and migrants. But does right-wing populism also make the workplace more dangerous? That’s the question Anna D’Ambrosio, Roberto Leombruni, and Tiziano Razzolini tackled in a new study at the Journal of Population Economics.
The authors examined data from Italy that covers the period of 1994 until 2005 and dug into whether there is a connection between electoral support for Italy’s right-wing populist party the Northern League (Lega Nord) and injury rates among manufacturing workers.
Then, the researchers looked at the rate of on-the-job injuries in the lead-up and wake of Italian elections in certain provinces in 1994, 1996, and 2001.
Since its establishment in 1989, the Northern League has grown from a regionalist party to an ultra-nationalist one. As immigration became a more prominent issue in Italy, the party made a nationalist turn, framing immigrants as a threat to Italians and their culture.
“Over the years,” the authors pointed out, “Lega Nord’s anti-immigrant rhetoric became increasingly explicit and confrontational.”
In 2003, the paper noted, then-party leader and reforms minister Umberto Bossi ordered the Navy to shoot at ships carrying refugees and migrants to Italian shores. (“After the second or third warning [shot],” he said, “bang … we fire the cannon.”)
“Populist propaganda often hinges on the concern that immigrants compete with natives for jobs,” the paper explained, but the existing academic literature “has so far neglected whether populism affects immigrants at the workplace.”
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Before scraping through the data, the authors were working on the assumption that workplaces with less unionized employees would yield more injuries alongside spikes in support for the Northern League. Unions, after all, generally fight for both equal working conditions for everyone, including immigrants, and push for the inclusion of migrant workers.
Populist propaganda often hinges on the concern that immigrants compete with natives for jobs.
On top of that, active unions might, say, deter bosses from discriminating against foreign-born workers or trying to sneak around workplace regulations.
In the end, the study found that the Northern League’s electoral successes during the 11-year period it probed “had a detrimental differential effect on the working conditions of foreign workers, increasing their risk of injuries mainly during night shifts.”
This was especially true, the authors explained, in workplaces that had no more than 15 employees. Their assumption that workplaces with lower rates of unionization would prove more dangerous panned out.
In other words, smaller workplaces more often offloaded riskier work schedules — the night shift, the graveyard shift, and overtime hours — onto foreign-born workers, and the comparably larger injury rates testified to the impact of that “well-known phenomenon.”
All of this is likely, in part, due to the way that a rise in far-right sentiment also presents a sense that “social sanctions” against anti-migrant practices are out the window.
But if a more dangerous workplace is a symptom of the far right’s popularity, the authors wrote, then (with a caveat or two) the study’s findings “suggest that stronger employment protections can mitigate the impacts of populism.”
