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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.

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.

In general, this Clause deals with the requirements pertaining to the recruitment and employment of Contractor’s Personnel. ‘Staff and Labour’ are not defined terms but this Clause deals primarily with Contractor’s Personnel, i.e. also the employees of Subcontractors and ‘any other personnel assisting the Contractor in the execution of the Works’, see Sub-Clause 1.1.16. However, some of the Sub-Clauses in Clause 6 [Staff and Labour] do not make it clear whether they relate solely to the Contractor’s ‘staff and labour’ or to Contractor’s Personnel in general, but this could be clarified in the Special Provisions

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.

Kerala, being the most literate state in India, has at least one newspaper being subscribed to every household and thus the Print industry in Kerala is doing a commendable job. Labour welfare as a part of industrial relation is assuming greater significance with the growth of industrialization. An industry today is a co-operative undertaking with both the capital and the labour as equal partners. The workers in the modern context are not simply a marketable commodity to be purchased by the owners, but human beings with their own needs, emotions and aspirations who invest their labour in making the industry a success. It is normally believed that the model employer maintains harmonious relation with the employees. Considering the conflicts are usually natural, the employer always tries to minimize the disputes by offering the right mix of labour welfare measures and ensure the loss of man days and the loss of production to the lowest possible extent. This article delineates the industrial relations in Kerala newspaper industry. The data were analyzed related to age, occupation, region of working, education and experience on the leaders' attitude on various factors related to labour welfare. The primary data collected from the trade union leaders were analyzed using the statistical computer package SPSS. Appropriate tests were used for analysis. It can be seen that the leaders were not at all satisfied with any of the facilities except for safety practices for the employees and the grievance handling process since they were directly involved.

This chapter examines how more women in the workforce can contribute towards making businesses more resilient. The overall objective of the study is to assess how women's employment influences various factors related to resilience and that in turn drives business activities. The methodology used is qualitative in nature using thematic analysis as a tool. Some quantitative data have been assessed in order to understand how companies survived the pandemic and to examine the trends in female labour force participation. This chapter also builds on observational research methodology in places to arrive at certain key inferences. The analysis examines top performing firms and sectors that survived the pandemic, key characteristics of business resilience and characteristics of women's labour and their role in building business resilience. A conceptual framework has been developed to discuss how female labour force participation can contribute to different sectors in order to build resilient businesses.

This study investigates the relationships among digital transformation, technological innovation, industry–university–research collaborations and labor income share in manufacturing firms.

The relationships are tested using an empirical method, constructing regression models, by collecting 1,240 manufacturing firms and 9,029 items listed on the A-share market in China from 2013 to 2020.

The results indicate that digital transformation has a positive effect on manufacturing companies’ labor income share. Technological innovation can mediate the effect of digital transformation on labor income share. Industry–university–research cooperation can positively moderate the promotion effect of digital transformation on labor income share but cannot moderate the mediating effect of technological innovation. Heterogeneity analysis also found that firms without service-based transformation and nonstate-owned firms are better able to increase their labor income share through digital transformation.

This study provides a new path to increase the labor income share of enterprises to achieve common prosperity, which is important for manufacturing enterprises to better transform and upgrade to achieve high-quality development.

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 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.