COVID-19, divisions of labor, and workers struggles in the United States: insights from anthropology

Like all capitalist crises, the one triggered by the coronavirus pandemic did not wash evenly over communities. Instead, it deepened existing inequalities and set in motion new ones. In the United States, long-standing divisions of labor along lines of race, gender, immigration status, and skill were animated, while new ones were called forth. Essential/inessential; in-person/remote; protected/unprotected became familiar antimonies. African Americans, indigenous people, immigrants, and people of color were more likely to be frontline workers, and suffer disproportionate rates of COVID-19 infection and death. Ten weeks into the pandemic, the U.S. population was registering these naked facts when an African American man George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. Forty million were unemployed, 100,000 had died from COVID-19, and racial justice protests erupted across the country. The triple crisis - health, economic, and racial - exposed processes of inequality typically hidden from view. Labor was named, categorized, valued and devalued by capital and the state in plain sight. In this chapter, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork on left political organizing and social change in the mid-sized city of Reading, Pennsylvania to reflect on these developments. Reading is a majority Latinx and heavily immigrant city located in the U.S. rust belt. Processes of labor differentiation are played out there in stark relief and in ways that are consequential for strategy, organizing, and movement building. Two fieldwork vignettes are suggestive for this discussion: The first describes protests to demand that excluded immigrants be included in a second federal pandemic relief bill. The second details a debate among labor organizers over the designation ‘essential workers.’ I use insights from the Anthropology of Labor to interpret these episodes. I engage a growing body of literature in the anthropology of labor that attends to uneven capital accumulation and puts difference, heterogeneity, and the totality of social relations at the center of class analysis. This is a fruitful starting point for charting on-the-ground politics during the current trifold crisis.