Dying to Work: Oʻahu Hotel Workers’ Efforts at Well-being in the Face of Autoimmune Capitalism†

Abstract

The settler colonial state of Hawaii has fostered tourism as its primary economic activity, despite its being only one-fifth to a quarter share of the economy. As a result, the push to reopen tourism in the face of COVID-19 pandemic conditions, which ground the industry to a near halt in 2020, has been acute. Based on our long-term involvement with UNITE HERE! Local 5 and our participation-observation of union members’ activities since May 2020, we examine worker-led safety protocols and practices to promote public health in the face of state and industry actors’ conscious exclusion of their expert knowledge in order to revive tourism. This exclusion put barriers in the way of hotel workers returning safely to their jobs and ultimately cost lives. We call this self-destructive urge “autoimmune capitalism,” an autophagic assemblage that consumes the mostly immigrant and Indigenous workers integral to the operation of tourism in the state. As tourism returns, hotel workers continue to organize for life-affirming practices even as their radical care to ensure community well-being gets absorbed as an invisible and uncompensated component of the pandemic service economy.