COVID-19 and Key Workers at the Intersections of Inequalities and Everyday Mobilities

This blog takes a closer look at the category of key workers as a method to govern mobility during the COVID-19 pandemic. This category revealed and emphasized the ways in which mobility intersects with inequalities. Yet, while these inequalities were made visible at an extraordinary time, the pandemic was not as transformative in terms of mobility justice. By continuing to focus on pandemic-era categories, the longer-term impact of the pandemic in terms of inequality can be made more apparent.

At the height of the pandemic, categories such as key workers became an apparently ordinary part of organizing everyday movements. At that time, a post-pandemic future without these categories seemed, at times, far removed. By now this discourse seems largely forgotten in everyday interactions where COVID-19 restrictions are no longer in place. In turn, the long-term, unfolding effects of the COVID-19 mobility regime are also largely invisible. A closer critical look at the making of pandemic-era categories, positioned in historic and contemporary contexts, can bring our attention back to these invisibilized processes in terms of (re)producing inequalities. Such an approach can help discern the pandemic’s long shadow over everyday, local mobilities, or what we might call a novel mobility regime.

By focusing on the case of key workers in the UK, it is my take that this categorization can reveal and emphasize the entrenchment of inequalities through these categories, among them being class, gender, race, and migration status. I use these axes of difference while bearing in mind that these categories are constructed, normalized, and instrumentalized by different actors for different agendas (see Dahinden 2016).

Categorizing “Key Workers” in the UK

During the heaviest restrictions, the UK Government asked that everyday, local movements be limited to essential journeys and work from home wherever possible. Key workers (also known as critical or essential workers)_came to be identified in the UK as an important feature of the pandemic-era mobility regime, where the lockdowns implemented from March 2020 were fairly restrictive. They were not only exempt from certain mobility restrictions but were obligated to continue moving. They would also receive priority COVID-19 testing and access to childcare and schools. According to this definition, key workers would include, for example, frontline healthcare workers, social care workers, grocery store workers, train operators, and childcare providers, as well as others. The restrictions and exceptions on mobility were more complex than a simple binary between openness and closure; the rules often changed, and were detailed and conditional depending on occupation, time, geography, vaccination status, or infection, for example. As powerful as the category of key workers was in terms of sorting mobilities at a time of intensive restrictions, it also remained open-ended as guidance for employers to self-determine which workers were “critical to the COVID-19 response.”

Entrenching Inequalities

From an analytic perspective, the governance of key workers has drawn attention to the complicated relationship between mobility and inequality. Rather than drawing a simple, positive relationship between more mobility and greater privilege, the obligation of key workers to continue moving and working during the pandemic raised significant issues of injustice and inequality. In the UK, key workers are overrepresented by women and ethnic minorities, and they are more likely to be born outside of the UK and be paid less than the average UK income.

Being on the move during travel restrictions also meant being subjected to enhanced surveillance and checks during commutes and in the workplace, as well as greater exposure to the virus for themselves and their households. Since the pandemic, the choice to work from home continues to be seen as an advantage when set against the cost of commuting, the unaffordability of housing, and the wider cost of living crisis in the UK since the pandemic (Plyushteva 2022).

Continuities and Change

The extraordinary period of lockdowns significantly changed everyday routines of work and care, raising the vulnerability of those in already precarious and unequal socioeconomic positions. Despite this rupture, it is less clear to what extent this emphasis on key workers has been transformative in terms of injustice and privilege.

In some ways, the new-found attention drawn to the injustices faced by key workers during the pandemic also renewed public gratitude. This has been partly realized in symbolic and short-lived ways such as the daily “clap for carers” from front doorsteps during lockdowns, and, perhaps more substantively, the “build back better” discourse that demanded a more just transition out of the pandemic. It should be acknowledged that the category of key workers brought together different socioeconomic groups under a shared category which briefly brought in to parallel the value or ”essentialness” of cleaners, domestic staff, waste disposal and other so-called “dirty jobs,” alongside health professionals and other traditionally societally-valued positions.

However, there has also been criticism that this public gratitude for key workers has faded with a return to the pre-pandemic “normal.” Where these injustices have become invisible again, analyzing these pandemic-era categories such as key worker can help to interrogate this apparent return to an everyday mobility regime resembling normality. Following these categories since the COVID-19 pandemic therefore opens up an avenue for further research where we might better understand the pandemic’s legacies in the governance of mobility. By asking that mobility be justified in terms of essentiality, the process of categorization is thus embedded in the ways in which different forms of work are valued. Rather than resigning key workers to the history of the COVID-19 pandemic, clearly this period cannot be separated from particular forms of inequality that continue to shape (and be shaped by) naturally given assumptions about the value of particular workers in society.

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.”

This blog post is part of our series “Towards a Novel Mobility Regime.”

References:

-Dahinden, J. (2016). A plea for the ‘de-migranticization’ of research on migration and integration. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(13), 2207-2225.
-Plyushteva, A. (2022). Essential workers’ pandemic mobilities and the changing meanings of the commute. The Geographical Journal, 188 (3), 459-463.