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National heroes, disposable workers. How collective action in the health and social care sector during the pandemic negotiated with the self‐sacrificing worker ideal

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  • Costanza Galanti

Abstract

During the pandemic, the ideal of the self‐sacrificing health and social care worker became both more powerful and more unsustainable than ever. This article explores the manner and extent to which health and social care workers collectively challenged this ideal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, this paper discusses mobilizations organized within three occupations: doctors in training, nurses, and social care workers. The study finds that collective action partially rejected and partially reproduced the self‐sacrificing worker ideal. Moreover, it shows how inequality regimes, imposing this ideal through classist, gendered, ageist, and racist‐nationalist processes in a pattern specific to each occupation, fundamentally shape the ways in which the ideal is challenged, as does the political culture of the groups organizing the mobilizations.

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  • Costanza Galanti, 2024. "National heroes, disposable workers. How collective action in the health and social care sector during the pandemic negotiated with the self‐sacrificing worker ideal," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(2), pages 606-624, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:gender:v:31:y:2024:i:2:p:606-624
    DOI: 10.1111/gwao.12852
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Longo, Matthew & Zacka, Bernardo, 2019. "Political Theory in an Ethnographic Key," American Political Science Review, Cambridge University Press, vol. 113(4), pages 1066-1070, November.
    2. repec:cup:apsrev:v:113:y:2019:i:04:p:1066-1070_00 is not listed on IDEAS
    3. Sabina Stan & Roland Erne, 2021. "Time for a paradigm change? Incorporating transnational processes into the analysis of the emerging European health-care system," Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, , vol. 27(3), pages 289-302, August.
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