Lessons from COVID-19: Transformative Categories and Mobility Regimes
In the COVID-19 pandemic, foreign-born workers contributed to maintaining the essential services on which the UK depends. They faced the double edge of public gratitude in contrast with insecure working and living conditions, compounded by often precarious immigration status. Recognizing the essential worker status could be a catalyst for transformative change, improving the resilience and preparedness of the workers beyond the pandemic.
In July, the first report on the UK’s ongoing COVID-19 Inquiry concluded its review of the country’s resilience and preparedness pre-pandemic. As the first of eight planned modules on the pandemic response, this module report spans the breadth of preparedness problems. It concludes with ten recommendations based on a review of two years of evidence.
Yet, foreign-born essential workers are not identified in the report. The role of essential workers was evidently paramount to the UK’s ability to respond to the COVID-19 crisis, speaking back to the Inquiry’s original Terms of Reference to examine ‘the impact on health and care sector workers and other key workers’ (Terms of Reference 1.a.xii).
This blog explores the links between essential migrant workers and pandemic resilience, considering what this oversight might mean in terms of lesson-drawing from the COVID-19 crisis. As such, it questions whether essential worker status could work as a transformative tool between migration governance and future pandemic preparedness.
Pandemic Spotlight: Essential but Precarious
By now, the COVID-19 pandemic has been well-documented as an extraordinary moment that reveals the inequalities of socio-economic life. As I highlighted in a previous nccr – on the move blog post, essential workers were an important category of pandemic mobility governance.
The management of essential workers was complicated by entangled socio-economic inequalities – as a category overrepresented by women and ethnic minorities and paid less than the average UK income. According to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, foreign-born workers are overrepresented in certain sectors considered essential (non-EU-born comprise 19% of IT and 16% of healthcare workforces). Despite efforts to secure essential workers, insecurity and fearing loss of income led to reports of many essential workers avoiding COVID-19 tests and continuing to work while sick.
Research has demonstrated that being an essential worker as someone born outside the UK was a distinct experience. The project on Migrant Essential Workers identified gaps in social security coverage for Polish workers in the UK, depending on their status since Brexit and access to in-work and unemployment Universal Credit in the pandemic.
The research points to communication gaps in that many workers were not aware of their entitlement to COVID-19 support measures. Migrant workers are equally entitled to Statutory Sick Pay in the UK and benefit from temporary changes to SSP payments from day one rather than day four of sickness.
While during the pandemic the UK did not suspend the immigration status No Recourse to Public Funds (in contrast, migrants with pending applications in Portugal were given access to social support), migrant workers were also eligible for COVID-19 support measures, including the Coronavirus Job retention Scheme and the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme. These emergency measures point to some awareness among policymakers that secure working conditions for migrant workers are important in keeping essential services going.
Yet, the temporary nature of these measures misaligns with the COVID-19 Inquiry’s emphasis on long-term, radical change (at least, in view of preparedness and resilience). Referring to essential workers altogether, the report insists that “the expert evidence suggests that they will be called upon again(…).” Meanwhile, the majority of the measures brought in under the emergency legislation of the Coronavirus Bill expired in March 2022.
Reframing the Debate in Terms of Systemic Resilience
The COVID-19 Inquiry reflects on the work of non-state actors who see the pandemic as an opportunity for long-term change. Although seen cynically now, “clap for carers” and “build back better” signaled to policymakers that the public saw the crisis as an opportunity for transformation. This momentum generated efforts like online petitions to Parliament aimed to improve the residency status and remove healthcare surcharges for essential migrant workers.
Anderson, Poeschel and Ruhs (2021) argue that the role of migrant workers should be taken into account when considering the systemic resilience of essential services. Systemic resilience describes the ability to maintain the provision of essential goods and services to meet society’s everyday needs and which, they argue, is substantiated in large part by transnational regimes of labor migration.
Systemic resilience is a key theme of the Inquiry’s first report, which highlights the need to draw lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic to prepare for ‘whole system civil emergencies’ (p. 3). The report emphasizes the importance of considering societal contexts, including inequalities and social deprivation, in building resilience. During the pandemic, various measures were introduced to address the precarity of low-paid essential migrant workers in the UK. These efforts would help strengthen the broader capacity of essential systems to endure crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Unfulfilled Potential
In view of the UK’s recent reforms for lower-waged immigration, the Migration Observatory estimated that around half of migrant essential workers (working full time and aged 25 to 64) would not qualify for a Tier 2 visa under the rules that were proposed in 2020. This estimate is not based on the reform that eventually passed in 2023, and does not recognize essential workers that come to the UK as students or family members. But it points to the politics of immigration reform in the UK that is moving away from, and not towards a more secure immigration status for essential workers in lower-pay and so-called low-skill jobs.
The pandemic put a spotlight on the double edge of personal vulnerability and societal dependence on essential workers, raising the transformative potential of this status especially for migrant workers. Framed in terms of systemic resilience, the personal vulnerability of essential foreign workers amounts to the wider vulnerability of essential services and their ability to withstand future “crises”. Drawing on the experiences and expertise of state and non-state actors, lesson-learning exercises, such as the UK’s COVID-19 Inquiry, present important opportunities to improve these co-vulnerabilities.
Eloise Thompson is a Doctoral researcher at the nccr – on the move and the University of Neuchâtel. She is part of the project “Towards a Novel Mobility Regime? The Legacies of the COVID-19 Pandemic Regarding the Governance of Human Movement”.
References:
–Hallett, H. (2024). Module 1: The resilience and preparedness of the United Kingdom. A report by The Rt Hon the Baroness Hallett DBE, Chair of the UK COVID-19 Inquiry. July 2024. Accessed 10/09/24.
–Anderson, B., Ruhs, M., & Poeschel, F. (2021). Rethinking labour migration: Covid-19, essential work, and systemic resilience. Comparative Migration Studies, 9(1), Article 45.
