Essentiality of Work: Volume 36

In this chapter, we introduce the topic of essentiality of work, exploring its implications for workers, labour markets, and public policy. The essentiality of work often corresponds in a dialectical way with the precarity of work, raising pressing questions about how societies value and, more pertinently, devalue various types of labour, thereby influencing life chances and societal integration. What we see in the contributions to this volume and the wider evidence is that essential work is typically performed by workers who are treated as expendable, or inessential. We proceed to outline the various contributions from the studies compiled in this volume. These present diverse perspectives on ‘essentiality’ and the experiences of essential workers. Offering a range of new empirical insights, the volume underlines the vitality and lasting relevance of essentiality – both as a concept and in the experience of workers – beyond the pandemic.

Drawing on interviews with two types of essential workers – wound clinicians and care workers – the chapter examines stigma management in dirty care work through the lens of emotion management. The study combines two dimensions of dirty work: physical taint in relation to bodywork and social taint linked to working in close proximity to socially stigmatized clients. Hence, stigma management extends to dealing with the physically and socially dirty features of essential care work. In addition, the authors’ assessment of social stigma includes how essential care workers also sought to alleviate the social stigma encountered by their clients. In so doing, the authors extend the literature on dirty work to identify how emotion management skills are central to the stigma management strategies of the essential care workers in this study. The authors demonstrate how both groups deal with their stigma by emphasizing the emotion management skills in ‘doing’ dirty work and in the ‘purpose’ of this work, which includes acknowledging how the authors attempt to address the social taint encountered by their clients. Additionally, by comparing two occupations with different contexts and conditions of work, the authors show how complex emotion management skills are gendered in care work to expand the understanding of gender and stigma management. Furthermore, these emotion management skills emanate from the deep relational work with clients rather than through occupational communities. The authors argue that by focussing on emotion management, the hidden skills of dirty work in gendered care work are illuminated and contribute to contemporary debates about whether stigma can be overcome.

This study examines the construction of essential labour during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Research questions include: (1) How have government policies shaped designations of essential versus non-essential labour? (2) What are the consequences of these designations for essential workers? To address these questions, the author employs a case study of custodial services employees at Prairie University, a large public university in a major Texas city (Prairietown). The author begins with an examination of federal, state, and municipal guidelines about COVID-19 safety and critical infrastructure in order to understand the policy landscape within which custodial employees at Prairie University were formally deemed essential. Drawing on theories of non-nurturant care work, the author shows how government guidelines for essential work released during the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic discursively invisibilized cleaning labourers. The author then demonstrates how this invisibilization contributed to Prairie University custodial services staff members’ exposure to COVID-19. The author concludes by considering the implications of the findings for future research on care work and the construction of essential labour.

This study applies Garfinkel’s (1967) concept of ‘breaching experiment’ to explore the impact of COVID-19-induced disruptions on the ‘emotion management’ practices of residential care workers in the United Kingdom and Germany. It examines the influence of professional feeling rules on workers, emphasizing the prescribed importance of displaying affective, empathetic concern for residents’ health and well-being. Findings demonstrate that authenticity and adherence to professional feeling rules in relation to emotional management are not mutually exclusive. The authors underscore how adherence to professional feeling rules upholds authentic care by reinforcing a professional ethos, which acts as a cornerstone motivating residential care workers. Ultimately, the study showcases how a professional ethos substantiates altruistic motivations, guiding proficient emotion management practices among care workers. It highlights how these workers drew upon their personal understanding and experiences to determine the appropriate emotions to express while providing care for residents amid the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic.

This chapter focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the recognition through discourses of essentiality, of low-status workers and more specifically of care aides as an occupational group that performs society’s ‘dirty work’. The pandemic appears as a privileged moment to challenge the normative hegemony of how work is valued within society. However, public recognition through political discourse is a necessary but insufficient element in producing social change. Based on the theory of performativity, this chapter empirically probes conditions and mechanisms that enable a transition from discourse of essentiality to substantive recognition of the work performed by care aides in healthcare organizations. The authors rely on three main sources of data: scientific-scholarly works, documents from government, various associations and unions, and popular media reports published between February 2020 and 1 July 2022. While discourse of essentiality at the highest level of politics is associated with rapid policy response to value the work of care aides, it is embedded in a system structure and culture that restrains the establishment of substantive policy that recognizes the nature, complexity, and societal importance of care aide work. The chapter contributes to the literature on performativity by demonstrating the importance of the institutionalization of competing logics in contemporary health and social care systems and how it limits the effectiveness of discourse in promulgating new values and norms and engineering social change.

Public health measures implemented early in the COVID-19 pandemic brought the idea of essential work into the public discourse, as the public reflected upon what types of work are essential for society to function, who performs that work, and how the labour of essential workers is rewarded. This chapter focusses on the rewards associated with essential work. The authors develop an intersectional lens on work that was officially deemed essential in 2020 to highlight longstanding patterns of devaluation among essential workers, including those undergirded by systemic racism in employment and labour law. The authors use quantitative data from the CPS-MORG to examine earnings differences between essential and non-essential workers and investigate whether the essential worker wage gap changed from month to month in 2020. The authors find that patterns of valuation among essential workers cannot be explained by human capital or other standard labour market characteristics. Rather, intersectional wage inequalities in 2020 reflect historical patterns that are highly durable and did not abate in the first year of the global pandemic.

This chapter presents a study of ‘floral ethics’, defined as a set of standardized practices for handling flowers shared among members of the florist occupation. Drawing on 36 months of ethnographic fieldwork in flower shops in Switzerland and Chicago, it contributes to the sociology of work and professions by providing a nuanced understanding of the tensions that can arise between the professional expertise of florists and the aesthetic preferences of customers. The findings on the micro-level reveal that adherence to floral ethics serves as a strategy for protecting and maintaining occupational legitimacy. By uncovering divergent conceptions of what constitutes ‘work well done’ among florists, this chapter offers a broader argument on the power asymmetry inherent in service relationships.

This comparative book review is concerned with two recent studies of essential workers in Germany: Jana Costas’ Dramas of Dignity and Peter Birke’s Grenzen aus Glas [literally ‘borders made from glass’]. While Costas is interested in studying how individual cleaners preserve their sense of dignity despite their widely believed stigmatizing work roles, Birke is interested in the power resources migrant workers can potentially mobilize for improving their working conditions despite the multi-dimensional (inter-sectional) precarity they confront in their life situation. In the context of German industrial and organizational sociology, both studies represent comparatively rare exemplars of detailed qualitative and ethnographic work that illuminate the labour process from taking a workers’ perspective. Using different approaches to fieldwork, both studies reveal the precarious nature of being an essential worker in areas such as meat packing, warehouse work, and cleaning. This general observation gives rise to some concluding speculations about the emancipatory potential of ethnographic research, in labour studies and beyond.

It has been 50 years since the publication of Studs Terkel’s groundbreaking book, Working, which consists of a compilation of interviews carried out with over 130 workers in the United States. In this chapter, the author revisits this masterpiece, which offers a penetrating analysis of the dehumanization and degradation of work. The author argues that Working is an ode to, and guide for, ethnographic scholarship on work and that it remains as powerful and relevant today as when it was originally published a half of a century ago.