Lost somewhere in-between – the moral economy of essential work in non-healthcare settings during a pandemic
Chris Degeling1, Jane Williams1, Sittichoke Chawraingern1, University Of Wollongong 1University Of Wollongong
Abstract
Pandemic planning has sought to prepare society for large scale infectious disease emergencies through measures that sustain public and common goods such as reliable and accessible healthcare and, more broadly, public health. Reliable food supply chains are public goods that are taken for granted in high income countries such as Australia, and have not been substantively included in recent pandemic plans or associated ethical frameworks. In 2020 and 2021, as Australia sought to eliminate COVID-19 through strict public health controls, the networks and assemblages that sustain reliable food chains were put under significant stress. We draw on in-depth interviews with supermarket staff in two states in Australia to show how strict public health controls contributed to increased inequities. In doing so we reveal the moral economy of ‘essential work’ in non-healthcare settings in a pandemic relies on expressed but not necessarily practiced norms of social duty, reciprocity and communitarian mutuality. Unlike essential healthcare workers, low-waged supermarket workers faced new and heightened precarity at work and at home. They were at the forefront of new social rules and roles, required to police restrictions and provide pastoral care to vulnerable shoppers while themselves facing abuse and alienation. Our analysis shows how (even) in a wealthy country with comparatively good worker protections and provision of universal healthcare, ‘essentialness’ at times of public health emergency, simultaneously dehumanises and reifies key workers through moral and social obligations and their impacts on institutionalized structures of community, family, and work organization.
Biography
Chris is Principal Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Engagement, Evidence and Values at the University of Wollongong. A social scientist and empirical bioethicist with expertise in qualitative and deliberative technologies, Chris leads programs of research focused on the intersection of social and public health policy and infectious disease control and prevention.