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Notes on Essential Labor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2020

Verónica Gago  and
Liz Mason-Deese
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Extract

The pandemic exposes (and leaves us exposed to) the totality of capital; its most intricate and subterranean links come to light. The extractivist push and its relation to Indigenous genocide in the Amazon, as well as its direct effect on the financialization of land in cities’ poorest neighborhoods becomes apparent. It also becomes clear how the precarization of labor manages to extend working days in a way that relaunches the silent war that Marx saw condensed in its duration. At the same time, it highlights how tasks of reproduction are directly assembled with the so-called platform economy. From August 2019 to now, the Amazon experienced its largest fire in its history, and today clearcutting continues at full pace, while the e-commerce platform with the same name is one of the companies that has most profited from the pandemic, in what continues to be a literal catastrophe.

Type
Pandemic Roundtable
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 99: Pandemic Roundtable; The Labor Movement As an Educational Movement; Gender, Race, and Migrant Labor in the “Domestic Frontier” of the Panama Canal Zone , Spring 2021 , pp. 24 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2020

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References

NOTES

1. On the plane of registered wage labor, that labor traditionally defined as productive, the category of essential labor gave rise to a dispute over its definition. In Argentina, workers of certain companies, for example, those producing alcoholic beverages, snack foods, and oil pipes, claimed they were not essential in a dispute with employers who would not let them stop their work; see Victoria Basualdo and Pablo Peláez, “Conflicto laboral en la pandemia del COVID-19 en Argentina: desafíos de fuentes, metodología y conceptualización,” Economía y Tecnología de FLACSO, 2020 https://www.flacso.org.ar/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Procesos-de-conflictividad-laboral-COVID-19-V-Basualdo-y-P-Pelaez.pdf. In Chile and Brazil, that same battle was directly connected to the delay and reluctance of the governments to declare a quarantine. The British American Tobacco Company of Chile, to cite an illustrative case, was vindicated as essential production, even while registering a high level of infection among its workers. Which sectors were included in the category of essential became a sort of test of companies’ power to lobby, to confront measures obligating them to not lay off workers, as a way of receiving state subsidies to pay wages, and even to force concessions on wage cuts in the agreements between unions and employers in a “peaceful context.” A second moment is characterized by registered waged workers, categorized as essential, demanding improved safety and health conditions in their workplaces, thus translating that essentialness into terms of rights and protections. This demand was particularly notable in the unions of health care and supermarket workers.

2. Barchiesi, Franco, “Liberation from work?” Interface: a journal for and about social movements, 4 (2, 2012): 230–53Google Scholar.

3. Federici, Silvia, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (New York City, 2012)Google Scholar.

4. Mies, Maria, Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London, 1998)Google Scholar.

5. Cavallero, Luci and Gago, Verónica, A feminist Reading of debt. London: Pluto Press (2020)Google Scholar.

6. See “Cross-border Feminist Manifesto,” https://spectrejournal.com/cross-border-feminist-manifesto/.

7. Luci Cavallero and Verónica Gago, “A feminist perspective on the battle over property,” dossier Confronting the Household, Feminist review (London, 2020). https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/07/21/a-feminist-perspective-on-the-battle-over-property/.