The Devaluation of Essential Work: An Assessment of the 2023 ILO Report

ILO, World Employment and Social Outlook 2023: The Value of Essential Work. Geneva: International Labour Office, 2023. xxv + 254 pp. www.ilo.org/publications/flagship-reports/world-employment-and-social-outlook-2023-value-essential-work

The value of essential work, while long debated, became a central point of discussion during the COVID-19 pandemic, when workers across the world continued to perform what was deemed essential work while exposed to multiple risks. The 2023 International Labour Organization (ILO) flagship report World Employment and Social Outlook 2023: The Value of Essential Work rekindles this discussion by shedding light on the persisting disparities during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic between the societal recognition of certain types of work as essential and the actual conditions faced by those performing such work. Despite public expressions of gratitude during the pandemic, tangible improvements in working conditions for this group of workers have largely failed to materialize. In some cases, the mental and physical well-being of these workers has even deteriorated in the long run.

This Assessment explores the key insights and limitations of the report from a feminist political economy perspective attuned to power dynamics across various scales. The report provides valuable data on essential or key workers and enterprises, elucidating who they are as well as their working conditions both before and during the pandemic. Essential or key workers are defined in the report as those people in occupations deemed essential by 126 countries at the onset of the pandemic in March and April 2020, bar those workers who could carry out essential work from home. Importantly, the report centres the paradoxical nature of essential work — its recognition as vital for meeting the needs of society and its severe undervaluation despite this. However, it fails to consider that essential work is not merely a reflection of societal needs but is also a result of class struggles, political negotiations and historical biases. The ILO's adoption of a universal definition of essential work therefore obscures the contested nature of this category that was used by governments worldwide during the pandemic. Furthermore, the report lacks an explanation for why essential work is undervalued, offering useful but limited policy recommendations. This article argues that the devaluation of essential work stems from a fundamental dilemma within contemporary capitalism: its inherent tendency to destabilize the conditions necessary for social reproduction.

Before proceeding, a clarification of terminology is necessary. In the report, the ILO acknowledges that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the terms ‘key worker’ and ‘essential worker’ were often used interchangeably — something that is reflected in literature, policy and public discourse. However, the term ‘key worker’ is used in the report because the term ‘essential services’ is cited as being frequently associated with legislative restrictions regarding the right to go on strike for certain groups of workers. This essay does not intervene in debates on essential services legislation, as the focus is clearly placed on work and workers from a (feminist) political economy lens; hence, the terms ‘essential’ and ‘key’ work or workers are used interchangeably here.

The second section of this Assessment explores the report's noteworthy contributions, while the third section examines its limitations in grasping the true nature of the essential work category. The fourth section critiques its failure to provide an adequate framework for understanding the devaluation of essential work, and the final section offers a brief conclusion. Throughout this analysis, the urgency of a paradigm shift in economic thought is underscored. Such a shift is imperative for recognizing the interconnected nature of value creation, gendered and racialized labour and global hierarchies — and for truly valuing the work that is essential for social and societal reproduction.

The ILO report makes a crucial intervention by foregrounding the misalignment between the poor economic and/or social recognition of essential work and the vital contribution this work makes to society. This stark contrast was immediately visible from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as highlighted in early reflections on the use of essential work designations in response to the pandemic (e.g. The Lancet, 2020; Reid et al., 2021; Stevano, Ali and Jamieson, 2021a). This was further demonstrated by public expressions of appreciation for essential workers during the lockdowns (Catungal, 2021), at least in some countries. Yet, in the aftermath of the pandemic, symbolic forms of appreciation for key workers have failed to translate into concrete gains for these workers (Farris and Bergfeld, 2022). Aside from one-off bonuses paid to selected categories of workers, especially in the health sector (as mentioned in the report), and some relief measures such as an increase in cash transfers, food aid and utility bill waivers targeting vulnerable populations (including at times some essential informal workers) (Chen et al., 2021), there is very little evidence of long-term changes in the working conditions of key workers across the globe. Any changes that have taken place are likely negative for many key workers due to long-term effects of poor working conditions on their mental health and well-being (see, for example, Chowdhury et al., 2022) and the compounding negative effects of inflation on the living conditions of low-paid workers worldwide (ILO, 2022; Lapavitsas et al., 2023).

The report does not provide a systematic analysis of the long-term consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on key workers and enterprises — that is, those consequences extending beyond the pandemic; it is more focused on mapping the low compensation and poor working conditions of key workers before and during the pandemic, with a view to proposing a set of recommendations to address these concerns. In doing so, it draws attention to essential work itself, highlighting the misalignment between its economic and social value but failing to provide a robust explanation for this gap — a shortcoming that will be discussed in later sections. Nevertheless, the report makes two important contributions. First, it provides a wealth of data on key workers and enterprises. Second, it emphasizes the ambivalent nature of essential work. These contributions are discussed in the following sections before I turn to reflect on the limitations of the report.

I will now discuss more significant omissions and blind spots in the report. It is understandable that the report had to establish an operational definition of essential work that, although imperfect, would allow for a global analysis of the experiences of essential workers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. As noted in the preceding section, the report defines essential work based on the similarities in classifications adopted by several countries. However, beyond the inevitable simplification of essential work, two glaring omissions are apparent: first, the report overlooks the considerable discrepancies in how essential work was designated across countries and, second, it neglects to account for the processes of contestation and power struggles that shaped these classifications, which during the pandemic determined who could continue working and who could not. A significant implication of these omissions is that the assertion made by national governments of essential work ‘serving the essential needs of society’ demands further scrutiny, particularly in light of recent evidence showing otherwise.

Highlighting both the discrepancies and similarities in essential work designations is fundamental for understanding how governments define essential work. In an early study of essential work during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on research we conducted from March to July 2020, we argued that the term is far more ambiguous than it initially appears (Stevano, Ali and Jamieson, 2021a). We pointed out that, at first, there was no universally recognized definition of essential work and that its usage prior to the pandemic was quite sparse, ad hoc and context-specific (ibid.). Our account of the usage of the term before the pandemic is confirmed to some extent by the ILO report, which provides a brief historical overview of its use and shows that it was used especially during wartime, previous pandemics and in the context of preventing certain groups of workers from participating in industrial action. However, interpretations of essential services continue to vary (Knäbe and Carrión-Crespo, 2019), as illustrated for example by the UK Conservative government's recent introduction of the Strikes (Minimum Services Levels) Bill that limits workers’ ability to go on strike in the health, transport and education sectors.4

The lack of consensus on what constitutes essential work persisted during the pandemic. Our analysis across seven countries (Brazil, Canada, England, India, Italy, Mozambique and South Africa) revealed that they had only 13 out of 53 essential work categories completely in common (Stevano, Ali and Jamieson, 2021a). For example, agriculture, forestry and aquaculture were designated as essential sectors in Canada, India, Italy, Mozambique and South Africa; natural disaster monitoring in Brazil, India and South Africa; and mining in Brazil, Canada, India, Italy and South Africa. Regarding manufacturing, all countries restricted production to inputs necessary for the provision of what were considered essential goods and services, except Brazil, which permitted all industrial activity. Only South Africa and Italy included paid domestic work, with the former restricting this to live-in staff. England did not classify cleaning staff as essential, while Brazil and Mozambique did not include care personnel. Although the list of discrepancies is longer (the reader can refer to Table 1 in Stevano, Ali and Jamieson, 2021a), these examples illustrate such differences and how they are rooted in existing biases as well as different economic, social and political contexts (ibid.; see also Orleans Reed, 2022). Unevenness has also been documented in the informal economy, where market traders and food street vendors were more likely to be classified as essential, while waste pickers were included in some cities only and domestic workers and home-based workers were the least likely to be considered essential (Orleans Reed, 2022).

Far from being a process driven solely by the logic of ‘serving the essential needs of society’, as suggested by the ILO report, the categorization of essential work was strongly contested and fundamentally political. At the onset of the pandemic, its anticipated impact on capital accumulation was expected to be catastrophic (Grigera, 2022), to the point that the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) described COVID-19 as a ‘crisis like no other’, as global economic activity slowed down at a rate not seen since the Great Depression (Georgieva, 2020). In this context, it is not surprising that capital sought to protect itself from the economic downturn and that industrial capital lobbied for concessions from the state to maintain operations during the lockdowns — a move heightened by a rhetoric of ‘health versus the economy’ that gained traction in some quarters but was quickly debunked (Deaton, 2021). Nevertheless, power struggles, or more specifically class struggles, significantly informed the designation of essential work in the early stages of the pandemic. In Italy, the first country after China to become severely affected by the pandemic, the delay in halting productive and commercial activities was attributed to the lobbying activities of Confindustria, the umbrella organization for employers, which is particularly powerful in Lombardy, the region where COVID-19 spread most rapidly at the onset of the pandemic (Tassinari et al., 2020). Larger trade unions responded meekly, while smaller rank-and-file trade unions opted for a more militant approach, with workers even engaging in wildcat strikes to demand adequate health and safety measures (ibid.). In the UK, the absence of a definition of essential goods allowed multinational technology company Amazon to continue delivering all sorts of goods, making it one of the top winners of the pandemic as the value of its stock reached an all-time high (Braithwaite, 2020; Stevano, Ali and Jamieson, 2021a).

In the Global South, where governments had limited fiscal space to protect workers and due to their long-standing ambiguous relationship with informal work, various associations representing informal workers campaigned to have certain jobs included in essential work classifications (Orleans Reed, 2022). For example, by putting pressure on their respective national governments, the South African Informal Traders Alliance and the National Association of Street Vendors of India succeeded in having street vendors selling foodstuffs recognized as essential workers (ibid.).

In summary, there is much evidence indicating that essential work designations emerged from class struggles that unfolded in different ways depending on contextual specificities. Labour fought to protect its health and earnings; capital fought to maximize profits. Depending on how these forces played out, states made decisions that were driven either by the imperative to protect life and humanity or by the choice to protect capital accumulation, even where it was not needed for the sustenance of workers (for example, by paying them wages). They might even have been implicated in workers’ exposure to the virus.

The report extensively details how the working conditions of key workers are generally worse than those of non-key workers, as discussed above. However, no satisfactory explanation is given for key workers’ systematic subjection to poor working conditions. Understanding the underlying causes of the devaluation of essential work is critical for charting a path towards change, which is one of the aims of the report. While interesting and promising policies are put forward, including various measures to advance the decent work agenda as well as sectoral investments (see Chapters 5 and 6 of the report), it largely falls short by failing to recognize — and therefore to address — the structural determinants of the devaluation of essential work.

In recentring the discussion on the societal recognition of essential work as important and its paradoxical undervaluation, the 2023 ILO flagship report makes a significant intervention that sheds light on a fundamental problem in contemporary capitalism. This Assessment has identified two key contributions of the report: its provision of a wealth of systematically derived, case-specific data on the poor working conditions of essential workers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic; and its emphasis of the dissonant relationship between the poor working conditions faced by key workers and the essential contribution this group of workers make to society. However, upon critically engaging with the report, some fundamental shortcomings also emerge. First, the report does not recognize the contested nature of essential work, especially how it was defined and deployed by governments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, the report fails to offer any explanation as to why essential work is systematically devalued in contemporary societies. In an attempt to answer this question, albeit partially, this article has emphasized mechanisms of unequal exchange in the global economy, the concentration of marginalized socio-economic groups in essential occupations, as well as the systemic devaluation of social reproduction work, which overlap and present parallels with essential work in contemporary capitalism. These factors and processes should be considered key elements for a structural understanding of the devaluation of essential labour. Finally, this article shows that at the core of these issues lies a reductionist, or more likely misleading, understanding of value.