How can organizational wrongdoing that produces life-threatening levels of environmental harm to local communities nonetheless persist and even grow over time? In this paper, we address this question through an extensive field study of worker attitudes at the Italian steel company, ILVA. The workers in our study describe two long-term processes by which environmental wrongdoing seeps through the boundaries of the firm to corrode the ecological and institutional environment in which they live. As ecological harm intensifies to reach life-threatening levels, the workers begin to prioritize short-term concern for increasingly at-risk and sick family members over longer-term imperatives. And as organizational wrongdoing is repeated without consequence, they also begin to distrust the social control agents and community leaders that they believe should have stopped its progression far earlier. These ecological and institutional processes have the unintended effects of leading workers to support their wrongdoing employers in order to protect their jobs despite the harm they suffer as a result. Life-threatening environmental harm therefore has the ironic effect of protecting the very firm that created the problem from the counter-mobilization of one set of its primary victims, its own workers.