Essential Labor

Angela Garbes argues that mothering, and caregiving more broadly, is essential labour in the literal sense the pandemic revealed: the work everything else rests on, performed disproportionately by women and immigrants, and structurally unpaid. She writes as a daughter of Filipino immigrants and as a mother of small children, moving between reporting, labour history and her own domestic life, and she is more interested in what the arrangement costs than in advice about surviving it.