The Emergence of “Essential” Work Status in the Food System

In the context of the Covid-19–related health emergency, the category of “essential workers” has been widely used in both policy and vernacular language. Indeed, in most countries, policy responses to the health emergency envisage containing the spread of the virus in two main related and partly overlapping ways: (a) managing mobilities and enforcing physical distancing, and (b) shutting down entire economic sectors and recommending remote work whenever possible. In that context, essential workers were identified as those workers whose activities are considered “essential” in order to meet societies’ basic needs and function; among them, those whose labor could not be provided remotely—such as workers in agri-food chains—were identified as frontline workers. For the latter, job-related mobilities were allowed even at the heights of Covid-19 outbreaks, despite generalized stay-at-home mandates. Given its dependency on the policy context, the definition of “essential workers” is fluid and contentious. The very emergence of the category of “essential workers” can be traced back to a specific genealogy, related to the 20th-century military logic of total war: just as in the Second World War “essential workers” were identified as those workers who were exempted from the military service for their strategic roles in the military-industrial complex, throughout the Covid-19 syndemic, “essential workers” have been identified based on their central role in fulfilling societies’ basic needs. Fulfilling a strategic role in global supply chains, however, does not automatically entail a privileged position: precisely during the Covid-19 outbreak, it became especially visible how, in the agri-food sector as well as in other essential sectors, migrant workers receiving low wages and working in risky conditions were overrepresented among essential workers. This has given rise to a series of political and scholarly debates on the apparent paradox of being, at the same time, “essential” but also exploited, disposable, and vulnerable. This apparent paradox can only be understood through the logic of capital accumulation. In particular, it has been historically sustained, since the 1970s onward, by two main global transformations: (a) the retail revolution (or supermarket revolution), and (b) the transformations of regimes of migration and borders in the global North. Understanding the production and reproduction of a pool of essential (but disposable and exploitable) workers—characterized by flexible or informal occupational status, and specific sociodemographic characteristics (in the agri-food sector, migrants and racialized minorities are indeed overrepresented in this category)—requires understanding the aforementioned transformations. Furtheremore, it requires broadening the scope of the analysis to decade-long debates about food security and, more recently, Covid-19–induced interventions to ensure labor supply in the agri-food sector in times of disruptions in global supply chains.