Since 2020, the category of “essential work,” and the exploitative conditions it legitimized during the COVID-19 pandemic, has sparked waves of labor protest across the globe. Feminist scholars saw the global emergence of the category of “essential work” as holding emancipatory potential, as it publicly affirmed the value of reproductive labor (Stevano and and Jamieson 2021; Collins 2023; Côté et al. 2024). At the same time, the pandemic exacerbated precarity across essential sectors, and essential workers often lacked adequate pay and protection. Globally, this coalescence of recognition for and neglect of “essential workers” triggered strikes, some of which led to tangible gains (Kashmir 2021; PTI 2021; Pym and Foster 2023). Yet many contradictions at the heart of essential work remain unresolved. In this sense, the pandemic’s transformative potential for improving labor relations remained incomplete.

In this essay, I argue that the contradictions surrounding essential work stem partly from the ambiguity of the category itself: a designation that was at once necessary in a global crisis, and complicit in intensifying pre-existing exploitative forms of production and consumption. While “essential work” during the pandemic most often referred to paid frontline labor, the moral and political logics through which it was justified closely echoed long-standing discourses surrounding reproductive labor. The mobilization of this category enabled societies to function during the pandemic by placing amplified demands on workers engaged in life-sustaining activities, while drawing on tropes of care, sacrifice and duty that have long underwritten the devaluation of reproductive work (Graeber 2014). How can workers be deemed essential yet remain underpaid? This paradox reflects an ambiguous logic of “essentiality,” one that valorizes labour symbolically while legitimising its exploitation materially, and that travels easily between unpaid reproductive labour and poorly paid frontline work.

In what follows, I examine how the politics of “essential work” intersect with the essentialization of care and reproductive labor. The label “essential” does more than signal necessity; it exerts a normative force that fixes certain kinds of work – and the bodies performing it – into roles imagined as indispensable. This process reinforces long-standing essentialization, particularly in professions such as community health care, domestic labor, and delivery work. During crises like the pandemic, this dynamic becomes stark: workers are positioned as unable to opt out, and their availability is treated as a given, even under heightened risk. I analyse these dynamics through pandemic discourses surrounding ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) workers, female community health workers in India’s public health system, drawing on government policy documents, media reports, and secondary analysis of qualitative research.

First, I examine the overlap between “essential” and “essentialized” work, both semantically and materially, as a mechanism enabling the extraction of undervalued labor through the case study of ASHA workers. Second, I read the discourse surrounding “essential work,” that was at once laudatory – publicly affirming the social value of this labor – and coercive – compelling workers to continue working under crisis conditions – through the psychoanalytical concept of disavowal (Zupančič 2024). I hold that this discourse operates as a form of disavowal in that it simultaneously affirms society’s dependence on essential workers and celebrates their service, while refusing to enact the structural changes needed to support them. In doing so, it disavows the reality that maintaining life-as-usual during a global crisis depends precisely on upholding exploitative conditions.

Essential / Essentialized?

Globally, essential care work is predominantly performed by women and ethnically minoritized groups (ILO 2023). Labor that is most essential to society is often also essentialized: discursively constructed as naturally suited to particular groups along lines of gender, caste, race, or class (Benston 1969; Federici 1975; Folbre 2001). During the pandemic, feminist scholars mobilized the category of “essential work” to challenge this essentialization, demand recognition for care labor, and revalue life-making over profit-making work (Bhattacharya and Dale 2020; The Marxist Feminist Collective 2020; The Care Collective 2020). Yet the language of essentiality contains a persistent slippage from what is essential to society to what is essential of particular laboring bodies, simultaneously affirming care work while legitimizing its exploitation.

Pandemic policies around “essential work” extended this essentializing logic across many professions, curtailing workers’ choice and autonomy, blurring the public/private divide, and exposing workers to suspicion and discrimination. These dynamics, however, were unevenly distributed. In some sectors, essentialization intensified pre-existing moral obligations, while in others, such as medicine or policing, it emerged more abruptly. Although these workers were likewise expected to absorb risk, and to expose themselves to the virus, they had access to far greater state protection, including quarantine provisions and security support.

The way labor essentialization plays out in the politics of essential work is thus not uniform, but maps onto pre-existing patterns of inequality and can thus be ethnographically examined. In the case of ASHA work in India, essentialization operates along three intersecting axes: gender, community membership, and, more complexly, caste. During the pandemic, these pre-existing discourses of essentialization were re-activated to justify shifting a disproportionate share of the care labor required to keep society functioning onto the shoulders of ASHA workers.

Axes of Essentialization: Gender, Community, and Caste

1.     Gendered Logics of Care

Launched in 2005 under India’s National Rural Health Mission (now part of the National Health Mission), the ASHA program aimed to improve rural health access by recruiting local women as community health workers, linking households to public services. ASHAs were conceived as “activists, facilitators, and service providers,” rather than formal employees: a framing that justified their classification as volunteers paid through performance-based incentives instead of fixed salaries. Drawing on global community health worker models such as China’s “barefoot doctors,” the initiative reflected a broader shift toward decentralized, low-cost, community-led health governance (Kumar and Malhotra 2025).

ASHAs constitute the world’s largest community health workforce, comprising around one million workers. Eligibility criteria require women to reside in the village they serve, be married, widowed, or divorced, aged 25 to 45, and be literate, ideally up to the 10th standard. Over time, their responsibilities expanded to include basic care delivery, disease surveillance, vaccination drives, and assistance with institutional births. Despite this expanded role, compensation remains minimal: Rs. 2,000 (about $23) plus task-based incentives.[1] The ASHA’s “volunteer” status has been widely criticized for legitimizing the exploitation of women’s care work (Shanthosh, Durbach, and Joshi 2021; Hamid 2024; Sattar and Raman 2025).

The government’s refusal to classify ASHAs as formal employees is justified by claims that the work  “does not interfere with her normal livelihood” (National Health Mission 2005, 8). Officially, the role involves two to three hours of work a day, four days a week. In practice, many ASHAs were already working seven to eight hours daily before the pandemic, while lacking basic protections such as paid leave, maternity benefits, or unemployment insurance (Niyati and Nelson Mandela 2020).

This logic is reiterated by policymakers. Senior officials have argued that salaried positions would dissuade “genuine” women from serving their communities: “once you make it a government thing… that lady would just say I am not kind of interested” (Ved et al. 2019, 5). Others have claimed that formalizing the role would reduce performance: “She’ll stop working” (Ved et al. 2019, 5). These statements contradict an 2011 government evaluation (NHSRC 2011), which identified “hope for a government job” and “financial reasons” as two of the top three motivations for ASHAs, right after “serving the community.”

Despite their low pay, many ASHA households rely on this income (NHSRC 2011). This dependency deepened during COVID-19, when ASHAs often became their families’ sole earners while their workload intensified. As “essential workers,” they were assigned new responsibilities, including households’ surveillance, quarantine enforcement, delivering medications, promoting hygiene and distancing, distributing food, and supporting vaccination drives. These tasks lengthened already long workdays by several hours, even as regular incentives were suspended. Prime Minister Modi publicly praised ASHA workers as “frontline warriors” alongside doctors and nurses. Yet despite performing similar work and facing comparable risks, ASHAs were never fairly compensated.

An ASHA worker in Kerala recalled: “We have not got any rest since the vaccination duty started. We needed to enter details in the Cowin portal a day before vaccination and inform the persons for coming. Some days, the work would get extended till midnight. We were working without food and sleep” (Nair et al. 2024, 5). In Maharashtra, an ASHA described taking oxygen levels and temperatures for each self-isolated patient three times a day and submitting handwritten reports: “This duty was stressful because the patients wouldn’t cooperate with us, and many times even turned us away … But we couldn’t abandon this duty – otherwise the virus would have devastated everyone” (Jain 2022).

The expansion of responsibilities persisted beyond the pandemic. Rathnamma, an ASHA in Anekal, explained: “Before COVID, our work majorly focused on pregnant women and children. Now, after COVID, we are caring for everyone – the entire village, the entire taluk, the entire district” (Prabhu 2021).[2] Since COVID-19, ASHA labor has thus expanded far beyond care once framed as part of women’s “normal livelihoods,” yet the program still depends on gendered logics that naturalize women’s availability for unpaid or underpaid work.

2.     Community and the Politics of Belonging

The restriction of ASHA work to women is discursively justified on cultural grounds: male workers, policymakers argue, could not assist in pregnancy care without provoking social disapproval. As a policymaker in New Delhi put it, “no family would allow that” (Ramaswamy 2024). One ASHA worker echoed this sentiment: “the kind of work we have… these are the kind of things that only women can do, right?” (Ramaswamy 2024). Feminist scholars similarly link the program’s effectiveness to workers’ community embeddedness. Das and Das, for instance, argue that ASHA labor rests on an “epistemic basis” of emotional, voluntary, and embodied labor, in contrast to the “detached objectivity of biomedicine” (2021, 15).

While ASHAs do draw on their social positioning to perform their work, their responsibilities are, in fact, largely biomedical and biopolitical. They deliver immunizations and medications, ensure treatment adherence, collect health data, and provide public health education. Framing ASHA labor as embodied skill may challenge the perception of community care work as “low-skilled,” and support claims for paid roles for women with caregiving experience. Yet this discourse is double-edged. Emphasis on culturally embodied, feminized labor, combined with the misrecognition of its centrality to biomedical infrastructures, often serves to justify the meagre compensation that community health workers receive.

Although ASHA work offers women some status and remuneration, and many ASHAs emphasize the social value of their labor (Ved et al. 2019), community health programs in India and elsewhere also function as mechanisms for extracting low-cost labor from women in hard-to-reach communities. This labor occupies in a liminal space: neither fully public nor private, formal nor informal (cf. Sathi 2023, 296) – yet is vital to the functioning of health systems, especially in times of crisis. During the pandemic, ASHAs made it possible to trace infections and deliver care in otherwise weakened health services (cf. Phadke, Kumar, and Pujari 2024).

3.     Essential Work and the Question of Caste

The relationship between caste and ASHA work is uneven and context dependent. Nationally, ASHAs are drawn from diverse caste backgrounds (NHSRC 2011; Kohli et al. 2024). In some states, ASHA workers predominantly belong to marginalized caste groups.[3] Ethnographic research in Odisha found that communities viewed Dalit women as particularly suited to ASHA work due to its association with bodily waste, illness, pollution, and servitude, reinforcing caste-based occupational hierarchies (Biswal 2022, 532). In Madhya Pradesh, lower caste ASHAs have reported being barred from entering upper-caste homes or prohibited from sitting in certain spaces (Shrivastava et al. 2023).

At the same time, upper-caste ASHAs have been documented discriminating against Dalit and Muslim families (The Third Eye 2021; Ramaswamy 2024), while Dalit women are sometimes excluded from ASHA recruitment altogether (Biswal 2022). Caste hierarchies are thus reproduced in multiple and contradictory ways within the ASHA system, even as the work itself cannot be reduced to caste identity.

The politics of “essential work,” more broadly, intersects with caste in unsettling ways. Pandemic governance divided populations into “essential” and “non-essential” workers: those required to remain exposed, and those who could retreat into isolation. This binary cut across caste and class lines, encompassing both elite and precarious groups: from doctors and police officers to agricultural laborers and delivery couriers. Yet the effects of essentialization aligned with existing inequalities. In Delhi, for instance, doctors quarantined in luxury hotels and received police protection. They faced enormous strain but also accessed forms of state support not extended to ASHA workers, delivery couriers, and others in informal, low-paid work.

In this sense, the politics of “essential work” echoed caste-based logics of separation, service, and pollution.[4] Social distancing, long central to maintaining caste boundaries in India, took on renewed spatial and moral force during the pandemic. Essential workers were tasked with sustaining collective life while simultaneously positioned as bearers of exposure – bodies to be kept at a distance even as their labor was deemed indispensable.

ASHA workers faced particularly unsafe conditions due to inadequate protective gear, and many lost their lives (Phadke, Kumar, and Pujari 2024). They encountered suspicion and violence in the communities they served (Menon, Bisht, and Nair 2025), and, living in cramped homes where isolation was impossible, many took extreme precautions to protect their families, including sleeping outside (Amnesty International, 2020). Despite fears of bringing the virus home, ASHAs often felt unable to stop working as other sources of household income disappeared during COVID-19 (Niyati and Nelson Mandela 2020).

This collapse of private and public boundaries mirrors caste-based divisions of labor, which tie specific forms of work to socially constructed identities. As Soumyabrata Choudhury (2020, 107) argues, the label of “essential” during COVID-19 consigned certain workers to the realm of necessity, stripping them of the freedom to isolate retained by the “non-essential”. Essential service, he writes, demands constant availability, dividing society into those fated to serve and those entitled to expect service as a kind of birthright (Choudhury 2020, 107).

Keep Society Functioning: The Disavowal of Collapse

During the pandemic, over 600,000 ASHA workers went on strike demanding better pay and formal recognition. Many faced police violence and arrest, often under the Essential Services Maintenance Act (Srivastava 2021; Jain 2022; Singh 2024).[5] Still, sustained protest led to modest gains in some states, including temporary COVID-19 allowances and slight honorarium increases (Saha 2025).

Yet ASHAs remain precariously employed: classified as volunteers, they earn below minimum wage, receive inconsistent incentives, and are excluded from social security. In March 2025 in Kerala, ASHAs staged hunger strikes and publicly cut or shaved their hair (Thakur 2025) – acts that assert bodily autonomy and challenge gendered exploitation. ASHA protests are not only about material conditions, but about resisting the paradox of being hailed as heroes while treated as expendable. During the COVID-19 pandemic, one ASHA worker in Himachal Pradesh remarked: “no one else was going into peoples’ houses to give them support. The big staff workers were also not going. ASHA would go even if she is sick or if she has young children. [speaking jestingly as if to imitate superiors] ‘Sacrifice her for everything. ASHA is always prepared for death’” (Nichols, Jalali, and Fischer 2022, 7).

How then should we understand the paradox of essential work during COVID‑19? I suggest reading it through the psychoanalytic notion of disavowal. For Zupančič (2024), disavowal names a condition in which a fact is openly acknowledged yet rendered inconsequential. Disavowal, argues Zupančič, is what allows crises to arrive one after another without meaningful resolution. While some groups do engage in outright denial, the majority, people and governments alike, readily acknowledge these crises, yet fail to address their root causes, adopting at best symbolic gestures that change little. Disavowal does not mean repressing facts in the sense of removing them from consciousness; rather it renders these facts ordinary, removing thus only their traumatic impact – repressing, in other words, their eventiveness.

ASHA workers’ pivotal role in tracking infections and providing basic care is publicly acknowledged.[6] Similar praise was showered on other essential but undervalued sectors worldwide. These tributes avowed the essentiality of marginalized workers, and confirmed the value of the work they do. But another insight that the emergence of the category of “essential work” brought out remained disavowed.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed how contemporary societies deeply depend on informal labor to sustain life, even as this labor remains excluded from full social and political belonging. It showed with full force that these systems cannot function without relying on, sometimes deliberately, marginalized workers. In times of crisis, it is this labor that pulls a society through to come out – more or less – unscathed at the other end, while enabling those in higher-income jobs to watch the pandemic spectacle from the safety of their homes. As Butler (2022) argues, as much as we might wish to dwell in a common world, the COVID-19 pandemic showed that the common has not yet been achieved. Certain zones of life exist and persist outside of the common – as peripheral zones where people dwell that do the work for those included in the core. These people are tied to zones “through labor, but are not for that reason of it, if by ‘of it’ we mean to designate a mode of belonging” (Butler 2022, 1–2).

The politics of “essential work” trap workers in a contradiction: indispensability becomes the very reason they are denied the universality and equality presumed by citizenship.  Because their labor is framed as a social obligation rather than a contractual right, indispensability becomes a rationale for denying essential workers the protections and entitlements extended to others in moments of crisis. This contradiction weighs heaviest on informal sector workers, who answered it with mass protests, rejecting symbolic gestures of gratitude and demanding, instead, fair wages and job security. Their struggle constitutes a broader claim for the recognition of a universal essentiality: a call to value the labor that sustains life itself. If the category of essential work is to hold any emancipatory potential, it must begin with this recognition.

Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to the photographer Sanket Jain for granting me permission to use the beautiful images he published as part of his photo essay on ASHA work during the Covid-19 pandemic.

I would also like to thank Yasmeen Arif, Carlo Caduff, Nele Jensen, and Ellen Hausner for incisive feedback on drafts of this paper.

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[1] Payments depend on the state and the volume of work done, but on average, an ASHA worker earns between ₹4,000 ($46) and ₹8,000 ($92) per month.

[2] Krithi Ramaswamy in her paper on ASHA work (2024) poignantly analyzes this in relation to Swaminathan’s notion of the ‘feminisation of development,’ wherein poverty alleviation schemes and social development efforts “rely almost entirely on the imagined characteristics of women from poorer communities: not only are they integrated in the communities, but the burden of care and affect that falls on them within the sphere of their familiar relations is further extended to care for the neighbourhood and … the nation at large.”

[3] For example, in Uttar Pradesh, 80% of the ASHAs are Dalitbahujan – comprising Scheduled Castes (Dalits), Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes (OBCs) (Manav 2023); and in Gujarat, the majority (68%) of ASHAs belonged Other Backward Classes (OBC). OBC is a constitutionally recognized category comprising socially and educationally disadvantaged castes that fall outside the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Bhanderi, Varun, and Sharma 2018).

[4] A point emphasized by Carlo Caduff in a paper he presented at one of the workshops for our broader project on The Biopolitics of Global Health (May 2025; Ithaca, New York). Drawing on fieldwork in Mumbai during COVID-19, Caduff noted that hospital staff – often from higher-caste backgrounds – suddenly faced harassment and discrimination in their local communities. This shift was linked to their continued mobility during lockdowns, which others both envied and feared. While most people were confined to their homes, ‘essential workers’ moved through public space, and their mobility came to signify both privilege and threat: a potential source of viral transmission.

[5] This 1968 Act grants the Indian government the power to prohibit strikes in so-called essential services to preserve “public order and the normal life of the community”.

[6] For example, in 2022, ASHA workers were among the six recipients of the WHO Global Health Leaders Award for their outstanding contribution towards protecting and promoting health.

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