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Essential Labor
Created May 03, 2020
Edited by Josh Fisher ([email protected]), Western Washington University
The global COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated, with brutal clarity, just how quickly the world of work can change. Labor markets have been upended and unemployment numbers continue to climb. Workplaces are shuttered, though the term “homework” has gained new meaning for parents and other caregivers stepping into the role of teacher while tending to remote responsibilities. At the same time, a new category of work has emerged — that which is deemed essential labor. This category includes a striking assortment of jobs in terms of pay or prestige, spanning sectors like health care, law enforcement, agriculture, food service and distribution, energy, waste, transportation, communication, and logistics. Taken as a contemporary social fact, however, essential labor is poised to teach us important lessons about the world of work.
DA
Published: May 06, 2020
We have always allocated protections and obligations based on the degree to which a particular job is considered essential. What has changed with COVID-19 is the referent: essential to whom?
AF
Published: May 12, 2020
The radical roots of alternative institutions need to be recovered if we are to emerge from this crisis with a more just and vibrant food system.
ER
Published: May 23, 2020
While the virus has drastically diverging effects rooted in institutional racism, this fact is a "reveal" only for those who have, until now, had the privilege not to pay attention.
AA
MH
Published: Jun 03, 2020
This essay responds to the exceptionalization of labor conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing these exploitative conditions to have long preceded the present crisis.
JL
Published: Jun 17, 2020
Support and care became confused on the frontline, and this confusion has consequences for what essential labor entails.
JS
Published: Jul 09, 2020
When a campus real estate boom promises profits, tradespeople and their families are left with few good choices.
CA
Published: Aug 13, 2020
Despite the vital role that Brazil's domestic workers play in maintaining their employers' homes and lifestyles, the workers’ own survival proves to be of little concern.
BH
Published: Sep 09, 2020
In exchange for abiding by rules designed to serve the public interest, taxi drivers in coastal Mexico qualified as essential laborers during the COVID-19 pandemic. So why are they sitting idle?
JM
Published: Sep 16, 2020
For nightworkers, the designation of frontline daytime laborers as essential has implicitly cast those who work backstage and through the night as expendable.
HV
Published: Oct 06, 2020
A survey of teleworkers in Catalonia during the early months of the pandemic sheds light on how they coped with the blurring of boundaries between work and life.
OA
Published: Oct 16, 2020
As we speak of COVID-19 as the prime culprit of deaths on the job, we tend to forget that workers—essential and not—have been sick and dying all along.
ST
SG
Published: Nov 02, 2020
Taboos and neuroses rooted in capitalist social relations afflict Trinidad and Tobago, where elites strive to keep their distance from the care and street workers on whom they rely.
AN
YY
BM
Published: Nov 02, 2020
As online forms of intimacy like camming present alternatives to in-person encounters, sex workers navigate a patchwork of policies that point to double standards about the services they provide.
SB
ZP
Published: Nov 02, 2020
If the construct of heroism entails taking on personal risk voluntarily, then what does it mean to apply it to essential workers of color who have little choice about continuing to show up?
AB
Published: Dec 15, 2020
Scenes from a hub providing support for hospital workers in London show how volunteer labor, grounded in an ethics of encounter, can sustain frontline work.
AC
Published: Feb 03, 2021
The patches that Mexico City repair workers use to shore up the city's water grid keep things functioning even as they sustain urban inequality.
MB
Published: Dec 06, 2021
The limitations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic have not hampered migrant women labor activism in Argentina, but instead have galvanized political action.
MB
Published: Dec 06, 2021
Las limitaciones impuestas por la pandemia del COVID-19 no han impedido el activismo por los derechos laborales de las mujeres migrantes en Argentina, sino que han impulsado la acción política.
