The COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for urban essential workers

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically affected people all over the globe, yet its impact has been unequal depending on the resources and opportunities people have to protect themselves and to cope with the multiple consequences of the pandemic (National COVID-19 Task Force 2020). These inequalities have been exacerbated in cities, especially with regard to urban labour issues (Wade 2020). Only some workers could work from home, while others had to step out and up, becoming what we call now 'essential'. Essential workers help the rest of us keep a semblance of normality and reduce our risk of infections (Kabeer et al. 2021, The Lancet 2020, Grever 2022), while risking their health, and in many cases not receiving the most basic health and safety measures themselves (McNicholas and Poydock 2020).While the first image of essential workers that might come to mind is that of healthcare personnel, most of those composing essential labour are made up of low-wage service workers (Kabeer et al. 2021), working in jobs related to care and maintenance (Bhattacharya 2017, Coss-Corzo 2021). People performing these jobs are infrastructural to the functioning of our societies, and they range from day care personnel to bus drivers and waste collectors. Intersectional burdens, expressed in the overlapping of race, class, and gender, have been reproduced in the pandemic (National COVID-19 Task Force 2020, Ho & Maddrell 2021), as care and maintenance work has fallen disproportionately on the shoulders of women (Bahn et al. 2020), people of color (Holder et al. 2021), and migrants (The Lancet, 2020).We propose a multimethod and interdisciplinary research project that connects qualitative and quantitative social science methods and that is informed by public policy, urban studies, and labour studies. We will retrospectively examine the situation of non-healthcare urban essential workers (such as public transportation drivers, day care personnel, urban cleaning workers, and delivery workers) during the pandemic in the five biggest Swiss cities. This focus allows us to examine not only their often precarious working conditions, but also the mismatch between their received policy support and their provision of key labour at the frontline. Given their 'essentiality' but low valuation, it becomes fundamental to understand their experiences, needs, and demands as a basis for developing more effective policies to support them. Furthermore, we will study how Swiss decision-makers and the wider population perceive and valuate these workers and policies in support of them, and how these valuations contrast with the lived experiences of urban essential workers. Four research questions guide our project:1)What are the experiences and struggles of non-healthcare urban essential workers during the pandemic and their corresponding policy support demands?2)How do those experiences, struggles, and policy support demands differ between diverse types of non-healthcare urban essential workers? (see Table 2 for a typology)3)How do decision-makers assess the need for policy support for different types of non-healthcare urban essential workers?4)How are policy support measures for different types of non-healthcare urban essential workers accepted by the population?