Description
Building from their work on public health, care work, and racial capitalism, the panelists discuss the lengthy and ongoing crisis in caring labor that has only been exacerbated by the current pandemic.
Key moments
- 0:00 Introduction
- 0:50 Panel begins
- 14:19 – 15:20 Sharmila Rudrappa argues that surrogacy work is not considered to be real by the state. She also troubles normative distinctions between productive and reproductive work.
- 24:15 – 27:34 Snehal Patel argues that healthcare workers and mutual aid workers are also community organizers that work to build systems of community care when state systems fail.
- 30:37 – 33:30 Carrie Freshour touches on the experiences of Black women workers in the poultry processing industry and argues that we can see racial capitalism at work both in the production and processing of food and in the prison industrial complex.
- 58:04 – 59:48 Snehal Patel explores the limitations of public health policies to respond to the needs of workers and community members. Snehal recognizes the importance of collectives of workers, in the healthcare space and beyond, to be able to advocate for their needs and shape policy mandates.
- 1:00:40 – 1:01:24 Libby McClure pulls from her experience working for the Texas state government, arguing that there was not enough outreach done with workers around vaccine-uptake, even as there was also a lack of workplace protections during the COVID-19 pandemic.
- 1:09:32 – 1:11:00 Pavithra Vasudevan explores how workers are racialized in the context of global capitalism tracing racialization as a long-term, but evolving, global project. To do so she discusses the example of continuity in the racialized nature of agricultural labor in the U.S. south, even as the demographics of the workforce has shifted from predominantly Black farmworkers to immigrants.
