The non-essential-essential worker: Thinking with Collins's “Revaluing work after COVID-19”

Abstract

As I read “Revaluing Work after COVID-19” (Collins, this issue), I wondered how was it that garment workers making the personal protective equipment (PPE) so desperately needed during the pandemic were never considered “essential workers.” As governments wrestled with the need to sustain their economies while safeguarding the health of citizens, keeping health infrastructures functioning, and ensuring the basic needs of populations could be met, they had to determine whose work was “essential.” As Collins (this issue) shows, these debates exceeded the “narrow technical meanings coming to signify workers who were putting their lives on the line to insure the well-being of the rest of us.” Amidst celebrations of other “essential workers” and craftivists sewing masks from the comfort of their homes, the non-essential essential labor of garment workers stayed on the margins of the historical memory of COVID-19. This essay thinks with Collins to consider how garment workers got lost in between the scales of the national and transnational.