‘Everything has changed’: right-wing politics and experiences of transformation among German retail workers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Harder’s article investigates how changes in working and living conditions are experienced by workers and how these changes create the conditions of acceptability for right-wing politics. Drawing on qualitative interviews, mappings, questionnaires and fieldwork with workers in two retail workplaces in southern and eastern Germany, it outlines processes of logistification that impact workers’ routines of labour and social reproduction: that is, their everyday lives. Respondents testify to an intensification and isolation of labour as well as a general scarcity of resources for social reproduction and powerlessness to influence the changes. Their work environments demand continuous adaptation to new technologies and management strategies. These experiences are shaped by a metanarrative of societal decline that appears to lie beyond the workers’ control. Nostalgia—a romanticized imagination of the past—and reclusivity—a preference for privacy and suspicion of the public—emerge as responses to the perceived decline of their surroundings. They can constitute elements that far-right parties articulate against migration and towards authoritarian politics.