National heroes, disposable workers. How collective action in the health and social care sector during the pandemic negotiated with the self‐sacrificing worker ideal

Abstract

During the pandemic, the ideal of the self‐sacrificing health and social care worker became both more powerful and more unsustainable than ever. This article explores the manner and extent to which health and social care workers collectively challenged this ideal. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Italy, this paper discusses mobilizations organized within three occupations: doctors in training, nurses, and social care workers. The study finds that collective action partially rejected and partially reproduced the self‐sacrificing worker ideal. Moreover, it shows how inequality regimes, imposing this ideal through classist, gendered, ageist, and racist‐nationalist processes in a pattern specific to each occupation, fundamentally shape the ways in which the ideal is challenged, as does the political culture of the groups organizing the mobilizations.

Lived Experiences of Female Nurses with COVID-19 Deaths on Their Watch

“…Normalizing nurses’ risk exposure, enforcing model citizenship, celebrating heroic and self-sacrificing nurses, and preserving power connections are all examples of phenomena that limited frontline nurses’ ability to set the conditions of their job [ 32 ]. Institutions must adopt structural strategies that promote nurses’ self-care knowledge so that they can provide better care for others during and after a pandemic [ 56 , 57 ].…”

The angels and heroes of health care: Justified and appropriate, or harmful and destructive?

“…This creates tension for health‐care workers because there is a need for public sympathy to support health‐care needs, and the portrayal of self‐sacrificing heroics fosters this sympathy. 14 However, this may only work in the short term. Arguably this “sympathy” does nothing to improve the public's understanding of the complexity of health‐care professionals' work and employment conditions and the cost of preregistration and ongoing education and equipment and thus does nothing to engender motivation to improve funding and conditions.…”

“…Thus, the artist, Banksy, chose to represent a female in his famous drawing of a toy “flying” nurse, which was held by a small boy who had discarded some “hero” toys in a bin beside him 16 . Other artists have chosen female doctors in their murals because “a woman better represents someone who takes care of other people.” 14 Connotations of caring work (aka health care) being “women's work” that is vocational, focused on servitude and self‐sacrifice detract from the multifaceted nature and expertise of health‐care professionals' work, the need for extensive education, and thus remuneration.…”

“…This creates tension for healthcare workers because there is a need for public sympathy to support health-care needs, and the portrayal of self-sacrificing heroics fosters this sympathy. 14 However, this may only work in the short term.…”

“…16 Other artists have chosen female doctors in their murals because "a woman better represents someone who takes care of other people." 14 Connotations of caring work (aka health care) being "women's work" that is vocational, focused on servitude and self-sacrifice detract from the multifaceted nature and expertise of health-care professionals' work, the need for extensive education, and thus remuneration.…”