Anna D’Ambrosio (Politecnico di Torino)

LABOR Seminar –  Fear is the path to the dark side: electoral results and the workplace safety of immigrants

Populist parties’ propaganda often portrays immigrants as a threat to native workers’jobs. When propaganda materializes at the polls and electoral results signal a change in social preferences about immigration, natives may become more likely to express anti-immigrant resentment, also at the workplace. We employ Italian panel administrative data on workers in the manufacturing sector to explore whether the electoral results of an Italian populist party, the Lega Nord, drive actual differences in native and foreign workers’ labor market outcomes. We find that a 1% increase in the votes for the Lega Nord increases injury rates of foreign workers by 0.9% within job spells.
The effect is driven by firms with less than fifteen employees, which are less likely to be unionized and do not offer employment protection.
Our results are suggestive that the increase in injury rates is due to a reallocation of migrants to nightshift schedules, which draws on increased rigidity in immigrants’ labor supply.