Essential For What?
Wendland-Cook is proud to feature the next in a series of responses to our current public health, political, ecological, and economic crisis of COVID-19. Joerg Rieger, Founder and Director of the Wendland-Cook Program started off the series with his article, “The Ugly Truth of a Pandemic and the Logic of Downturn.” Read Joerg’s blog here: www.religionandjustice.com/blog/the-ugly-truth-of-a-pandemic-and-the-logic-of-downturn This is Part I of Posadas contribution. Part II will appear in May.
Jeremy Posadas is Director of Gender Studies and Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Austin College (on the rural Texas-Oklahoma border) and Wendland-Cook’s first faculty fellow.
“Already we are beginning to sense who the essential workers, those without whom we cannot survive, really are….” (Joerg Rieger)
The coronavirus pandemic has made more blatant than usual how much our collective survival and well-being depend on various kinds of workers, most of whom do not receive such attention, much less acclaim, in normal times. We are, for example, better able to appreciate, alongside the heroic life-saving efforts of hospital medical staff, the necessary labor of cleaning workers who constantly disinfect treatment areas and equipment, delivery workers who transport crucial equipment and supplies, and those who have initial contact with patients when they must seek treatment. Saving lives would be impossible without these workers’ dedicated service.
Most of us, fortunately, will not need to go to the hospital due to the coronavirus. Yet staying at home — whether with the benefit of continuing income or in the shock of sudden unemployment — is itself only possible because of the work of others who can’t afford to stay at home. Workers on farms and in food plants, workers driving delivery trucks and stocking grocery shelves, workers preparing meals and delivering them to homes: without all this labor, none of us could stay alive. Stockers and cashiers in stores and pickers and packers in warehouses ensure that we can obtain all the supplies we use to keep our bodies clean, clothed, and nourished and our homes habitable: this labor, too, is necessary for us to stay alive. The workers who are continuing to collect our garbage, deliver our packages, keep our water/sewer and electricity infrastructure operating, and manufacture all of the things we need to maintain our households on a day-to-day basis are keeping us alive.
Moreover, there are the workers who continue to assist older adults and disabled people with activities of daily living they cannot do for themselves: this work is essential at all times, but particularly in the face of a virus that preys so easily on those who already have health vulnerabilities. And there is another category of essential workers generally not explicitly named in stay-at-home orders but who are performing an essential service without which humankind could not survive: parents of children who normally attend school or daycare. With schools and many daycare centers closed, the intensive labor of watching after children and organizing and guiding the development activities that fill their day — which parents usually split with daycare workers and schoolteachers — must now be performed primarily by parents (supported by millions of devoted teachers doing their best online). The order for children to stay at home is, in other words, an order for parents to take over the daytime shift from another group of essential workers.
All of this points to one of the most important social questions raised by the pandemic: what are essential workers essential for? Despite many local variations, the stay-at-home orders’ definitions of essential workers (i.e., those who work in essential businesses) center on those workers making goods and providing services that are necessary for people and communities to stay alive. They are essential not because they are the jobs that return the highest profits, but because they are the jobs without which human communities can’t survive — and without humans, there is no market. Essential workers, in other words, are essential for reasons that precede and supersede capitalism, grounded in “ways of valuing that are not constituted by measures of market transaction” (as Rosetta Ross puts it in her contribution to this series).
The capitalist system simply takes for granted that there will be workers with the skills needed for the jobs that create the wealth that capitalists capture, workers who are, within their households/families, simultaneously the consumers whose demand sustains over two-thirds of GDP. Yet these wealth-creating and GDP-sustaining workers are one of two things that capitalist markets cannot supply to themselves (the other being natural ecosystems): they can only be generated through networks of human care, which are not primarily driven by the desire to maximize profit, but the desire to thrive in community with others. Although capitalism has, throughout its history, sought to ensnare these networks of care within circuits of profit — present-day manifestations including for-profit hospitals and charter schools and the absence of publicly financed universal access to high-quality childcare — they persist in evading capitalism’s grasp.
Many religious communities, in fact, have actively fostered networks of care that resist being incorporated within capitalist profit-making. They can play a vital role during and after the present crisis standing in deep solidarity with all who do the labor, whether paid or unpaid, of keeping all of humankind alive. Through practices of moral formation, public witness, and community organizing, religious communities can ensure that essential workers are honored, now and in the future, not with easy platitudes but with greater power over their workplaces and their lives. Such activism will be necessary as capitalism seeks to make essential workers as disposable as possible, as I will discuss in part II of this post.