Looking through the lens of “essential workers”: a landscape of (im)mobility, labor, and social reproduction

This article explores the contradictions the category of “essential workers” entails, especially in conjunction with the governance of their mobility, citizenship, and the dilemmas thereof. I concentrate on the temporary/seasonal migrant workers as the epitome of essential workers’ paradoxical assemblage of rights and value to scrutinize both labor and its production and reproduction in contemporary capitalism. The essential workers were not only caught between mobility and immobility but also between visibility and invisibility vis-à-vis their activity as labor and, outside of it, between worthlessness and being of value. Their governance and location in society and economy reveal the structural dilemmas of capital and labor, as well as social reproduction in contemporary capitalism.