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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Unemployment rate in the U.S. was the lowest in decades prior to the COVID pandemic in March 2020. Once different states and cities announced a lockdown, media reports showed the lines to apply for unemployment benefits. Politicians worried about a slowdown and mused about reopenings even when the infection rate went up. This rhetoric implies that there are too many idle hands waiting for work. Most working mothers and “essential” service workers would disagree that economic activities have reduced. In fact, some workers were so overwhelmed that quitting their jobs was the only way to cope.
The contradiction between economic statistics and lived experiences shows that a pre-pandemic working economy relied on invisible gendered labor. This labor tends to be provided by women, people of color, and newly/undocumented immigrants. The lockdown economy revealed this invisible labor when middle-class working parents found themselves being teachers and caretakers at once.
While many pondered whose labor had been expensed in order to make possible a middle-class, two-income family lifestyle, information technologies companies marketed themselves as solutions to exhausted working mothers by promising household help from food delivery to grocery shopping. They promise to connect those who are time poor to those who have idle hands. These technologies obscure the workers—people of color, newly or undocumented immigrants—who provide labor at the expense of their health. These technologies at the same time discipline this labor, subjecting it to conform to the time and emotions set by these companies.
All work, low pay in a lockdown economy: How the pandemic reveals invisible gendered labor and how information technologies obscure it
Unemployment rate in the U.S. was the lowest in decades prior to the COVID pandemic in March 2020. Once different states and cities announced a lockdown, media reports showed the lines to apply for unemployment benefits. Politicians worried about a slowdown and mused about reopenings even when the infection rate went up. This rhetoric implies that there are too many idle hands waiting for work. Most working mothers and “essential” service workers would disagree that economic activities have reduced. In fact, some workers were so overwhelmed that quitting their jobs was the only way to cope.
The contradiction between economic statistics and lived experiences shows that a pre-pandemic working economy relied on invisible gendered labor. This labor tends to be provided by women, people of color, and newly/undocumented immigrants. The lockdown economy revealed this invisible labor when middle-class working parents found themselves being teachers and caretakers at once.
While many pondered whose labor had been expensed in order to make possible a middle-class, two-income family lifestyle, information technologies companies marketed themselves as solutions to exhausted working mothers by promising household help from food delivery to grocery shopping. They promise to connect those who are time poor to those who have idle hands. These technologies obscure the workers—people of color, newly or undocumented immigrants—who provide labor at the expense of their health. These technologies at the same time discipline this labor, subjecting it to conform to the time and emotions set by these companies.
Bio
Micky Lee is a Professor of Media Studies at Suffolk University, Boston. She is the author and editor of a number of books on feminist political economy, critical studies of technologies and information, and East Asian media. Her latest titles are Information (Routledge) and Media technologies for work and play in East Asia (Bristol University Press).