Italy begins enforcing one of the world’s strictest workplace vaccine mandates, risking blowback

The new rules are supported by a majority of Italians, but also prompted violent protests last weekend — and experts have warned about the possibility of major disruptions everywhere from farms to factories.

As part of the measures, workers without a Green Passes can be suspended without pay. A Green Pass can be obtained with a negative test, but workers who go that route would need to be retested every few days; Italian media has reported that swabs are suddenly in such demand that some pharmacies are hiring new employees and extending hours.

“The day of truth,” the Italian newspaper La Repubblica said in its front page headline, reflecting widespread uncertainty about how the policy will play out.

In interviews over the last week, employers and union leaders say the policy is causing divisions among workers, as increased absences will complicate shift schedules and production.

Some companies are scrapping vacations for the weeks ahead, suddenly uncertain about how many workers will show up. The research company Teneo says somewhere between 2.2 to 2.5 million of Italy’s 23 million workers are unvaccinated, and in some crucial sectors — including at ports — the rate of unvaccinated workers nears 40 percent. The firm also noted about 60,000 members of Italy’s police force are not vaccinated.

Since midsummer, Italy has shown more willingness than other Western nations to use the government-issued health certificate as a tool to influence the unvaccinated. As a result, Italian society is beginning to separate into different tiers of privilege — in a way that might have seemed far-fetched a year ago. Those with a Green Pass can dine indoors, go to a museum, see a concert, and board a high-speed train. Those without a Green Pass cannot.

The country has a fairly high vaccination rate — 80 percent of the eligible population is now fully inoculated. And that rate, along with near-universal indoor mask-wearing, has helped the country avoid a fierce delta variant wave.

But when it comes to convincing the holdouts, the gains have been slow. The bump in new first doses has been modest since the workplace policy was decided last month. The government estimates that the policy caused about 600,000 people who otherwise would have remained unvaccinated to get their doses.

At the same time, many Italians have been caught off guard by the scale of the resistance. Last weekend, as helicopters ran loops in the sky over Rome, some 10,000 people protested in Piazza del Popolo, and then a smaller group — including members of the extreme right group Forza Nuova — stormed the headquarters of a major union after being pushed away from approaching the prime minister’s office.

Police tried to constrain the most violent protesters with tear gas and water cannons, and the scene was volatile enough that security officials shepherded House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in Rome at the time, out of a church where she’d been attending Mass.

Some workers in the Italian port of Trieste held a strike on Friday, potentially bringing a major point for imports and exports to a standstill. In a Telegram group used by those who oppose the Green Pass mandate, video showed one sign reading “No Green Pass, No Discrimination,” while dockworkers chanted, “People like us never give up.” Protests also took place in front of many other workplaces across the country — and even among air force personnel, who held a sit-in in front of a naval air base in Sicily.

One of the common demands of protesters is that swab tests be made freely available for the unvaccinated.

“It is blackmail,” a de facto requirement of payment to go to work, said Antonsergio Belfiori, a spokesman for an air force union, who is personally vaccinated but said it was important to represent those who aren’t. Belfiori said that unvaccinated personnel are no longer allowed in the barracks, and workers are raising money for alternate lodging.

Other Western democracies have employed less far reaching measures. Some countries have required certain sectors, like health-care workers, to be inoculated. In the United States, the Biden administration has pushed for private companies to make vaccination mandatory, mandating all businesses with more than 100 employees to require immunization or face weekly testing.

In the face of the virus’s enduring virulence in the United States, Biden has said the refusal of the unvaccinated has “cost all of us.”