ESSENTIAL

ESSENTIAL explores what happened when the coronavirus disrupted the mundane yet rudimentary realities of ordinary workers.

In the stormy days of Spring 2020, the health and economic crises were nearly indistinguishable, as the death toll and mass unemployment spiked simultaneously. Our anxious exchanges, obscured behind sneeze guards and face masks, had a clarifying effect. To weather the crisis, it was immediately clear that we needed a small army - nurses and physicians, mail carriers and convenience store clerks, grocery workers and growers, janitors and cooks, plus warehouse and delivery workers - actually reporting to a workplace. All over the world essential workers found themselves thrust into a hero cult that assuaged society's guilt for not doing enough to protect those doing much needed work. Cut to Spring 2022 and those heroes feel like zeroes with no more protections in place than before the pandemic started.

Exploring personal stories from the front lines and global research on labor, ESSENTIAL argues that society has gambled for a long time with our collective safety. We prioritize work, not workers. And when workers try to improve their conditions, which would benefit all of us, society stands in their way. The cure for COVID capitalism is worker organizing for economic and political change. This movement would need to propose sweeping policies designed not to save capitalism from collapse, but to sustain a transition to a more socialist economy.

ESSENTIAL actualizes author Jamie K. McCallum's aptitude for scholarly research, journalistic propensity for storytelling, and decades of involvement in Left politics and the labor movement. He has done research both in the US and abroad to get a sense of the full picture of work in the current global economy. The result is part history, part polemic, and part blueprint, providing empirical rigor to support the upswell of anger and activism that have been signal features of this crisis.

The pandemic spotlighted the multi-dimensional nature of essential workers' labor, and helped us to understand the importance, and by extension, the potential power of these workers. But as capitalism is requiring more of us to return to work, ESSENTIAL is a necessary text that highlights the societal good that could be accomplished by a new normal. It is the capitalist system's deep resistance to change - not its dynamism - that makes it so critical that we replace it. Our lives depend on it.

Jamie K. McCallum is an award-winning sociologist at Middlebury College and a lifelong activist. His book, Worked Over: How Round-the-Clock Work is Killing the American Dream,was released by Basic Books in September of 2020. His first book, Global Unions, Local Power, won the best book award on labor from the American Sociological Association. His work has appeared in scholarly journals and popular outlets such as The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Dissent, Jacobin, In These Times, and others.