"The Work Is Essential, but the Workers Are Not": U.S. Grocery Store Workers' Experiences on the "Front Lines" of the Covid-19 Pandemic

The term "essential worker," which emerged near the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, seemed to indicate a moment of increased attention to work and a discursive recognition of its essentiality. However, this rhetorical change has not resulted in a substantive shift in contemporary value regimes in the U.S. that construct some jobs as unskilled labor deserving of minimum compensation—at least not in ways that have been felt by working people themselves at present. In this paper I explore the tension between the discourses that have circulated over the past year and a half, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, that portray essential workers as "heroic," and the material reality that has in many ways remained the same or worsened for those working essential jobs, who continue to be undervalued and underpaid. My main arguments center around how people are divided into groups according to labor-based hierarchies and how these divisions are upheld and naturalized through ideology. I explore how popular understandings of the pandemic as an event, rather than a process, allows it to be conceptualized as exceptional, which in turn allows a return to normal to be portrayed as the ultimate societal goal. This constructs everything that preceded the pandemic, including already extant social inequities, as normal and desirable, obscuring structural analyses and limiting possibilities for the imagination of alternative conceptualizations. Drawing on discourse analysis, survey responses, and interviews with people working in grocery stores during the pandemic, I attempt to show processes of normalization as they occur. I see these processes that have occurred during the pandemic as a continuation of the ongoing process of normalization that allows workers' exploitation to be regarded as commonplace, inevitable, and even deserved.