An unresolved industrial and environmental crisis can turn into a crisis of trust in politics and democratic institutions. This is one of the findings of a study on the Ilva steelworks in Taranto, published in the international journal Administrative Science Quarterly and authored by Elisa Giuliani of the Department of Economics and Management at the University of Pisa and Andrew Spicer of the University of South Carolina.
“When workers are left to choose between their health and their jobs without being offered a concrete solution, responsibility is no longer attributed solely to the company, but also to regulatory bodies, the political system and the state,” explains Giuliani. “In workers’ accounts, the industrial scandal thus becomes the starting point for a broader critique of political representation and institutions.”
Giuliani and Spicer analysed more than 230 accounts. The material included statements drawn from news archives, books and audiovisual sources, together with 56 interviews conducted directly with current and former Ilva workers between 2020 and 2025, amounting to more than 63 hours of recordings. The authors also examined more than 3,000 pages of documentary sources and approximately 17 hours of audiovisual material.
The research focuses on two crucial turning points in the Ilva case. The first was the 2008 dioxin scandal, when contamination led to the slaughter of around 1,200 sheep raised near the steelworks. This marked a turning point in workers’ perceptions. Pollution, until then part of the normality of factory life, began to be understood as the cause of both personal and collective harm.
The second turning point came with the 2012 crisis, when judicial authorities ordered the seizure of part of the plant because of health and pollution-related risks, and around 8,000 workers opposed the measure and took part in a demonstration against the plant’s possible closure. Workers’ accounts capture the starkness of the dilemma: “Better cancer later than losing my job now.”
The study challenges a prevailing interpretation in organisational research: workers are not only fully aware of the harm they have suffered, but what they are defending is not the company—it is work itself, as a vital element of their dignity. Workers want to stay because they see no alternative: they need to continue supporting their families and, paradoxically, to cover the costs associated with illnesses linked to pollution from the plant.
Outside the factory, meanwhile, they find neither protection nor allies. Some members of the local community and environmental movements interpret their defence of their jobs as a form of complicity, in some cases even calling them “murderers”. As if pollution itself were not enough, the workers feel victimised twice over.
“Resignation inside the factory and a sense of abandonment outside it reinforce each other, generating what we have termed the ‘double-failure trap’,” explains Elisa Giuliani. “On the one hand, workers believe they cannot leave the company without jeopardising their livelihoods and the family and social networks on which they depend. On the other, they no longer believe that regulatory bodies, the state or the political system can protect them, remedy the harm or offer them a viable way out.”
Recognising workers as victims therefore has implications that are not only symbolic, but also social and political.
“When someone who is already a victim, while also being part of the organisation causing the harm, is victimised a second time—accused of complicity by the very civil society that should be their ally—a profound fracture opens up within society,” Giuliani continues. “And it is precisely this fracture that weakens the unity that would give both sides the strength to secure justice in cases such as this.”
In terms of policy, Giuliani concludes, “there is still a great deal to be done. Ilva may be an extreme case, but it is not an isolated one. As long as we continue to frame it as a trade-off between two mutually exclusive alternatives—health and jobs—policy will continue to move in the wrong direction. That trade-off treats the rights to health and life as negotiable commodities. But these human rights are not negotiable: they are non-derogable and inalienable and must be guaranteed as such. Put simply, in the hierarchy of rights, the rights to life and health must take precedence over the right to accumulate capital in tax havens—as effectively happened during the Riva era, when the political system protected the company rather than holding it accountable.”
The article, entitled The Double-Failure Trap: Workers’ Sensemaking as Insiders and Victims of Life-Threatening Organizational Wrongdoing, is published in Administrative Science Quarterly.
