The risks, harms, and vulnerabilities caused by COVID-19 are being distributed in deeply unequal terms across society, including across the workforce. For several years now, my research has focused on labour within the horticultural industry, including the labour performed by temporary migrant workers and other precarious and low-paid workers, particularly at harvest time.

Paradoxically, these workers are amongst those being valued as “essential” in this time of crisis—critical as they are to the functioning of the food supply system—at exactly the same time that they are being excluded from the protections afforded to many other workers. Fruit picking and the sorting and packing of produce are not jobs that can be worked from home, a common feature across low-paid occupations within which migrant workers often predominate—think, for example, of Uber drivers, delivery drivers, Amazon warehouse packers. The conditions of these jobs are intensifying the risks of the pandemic.

Those who are losing their jobs, meanwhile, face other kinds of intense vulnerability. Temporary migrants are ineligible for Medicare as well as for the JobKeeper wage subsidy. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called on unemployed visa-holders to “go home”, and the Labour Party has countered with its own dog-whistle politics, with Kristina Keneally calling for reductions in Australia’s post-COVID migration intake.

The inequalities and racialized hierarchies evident now are not new, but they are being exacerbated under the conditions of the pandemic. What we are seeing, particularly, is an intensification of border thinking and border logic. This includes the literal closing of national and state borders, but also the discursive bordering that creates and intensifies distinctions between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, and accords differentiated rights to each.

The task for engaged research in these times is to document and analyse the unequal distributions of risk and precarity being exposed by this pandemic, but also to identify and support emergent forms of solidarity that are mobilising in response, for example progressive strands of the union movement, new alliances between temporary migrants and other casualised workers, and civil society action in support of undocumented migrants.

Dr Victoria Stead is an anthropologist whose work also has an interdisciplinary focus, engaging cognate areas of politics, geography, development studies, history, and postcolonial studies. Her current research coheres around two key areas of interest and activity. The first of these engages themes of conflict, memory, landscape and development in relation to the legacies of the Second World War in Papua New Guinea, including the growth of war tourism in the region surrounding the Kokoda Track. The second focuses on labour in the Australian horticultural industry, with a geographical focus on the Shepparton region in northern Victoria. Discourses and practices relating to horticultural labour are strongly inflected with considerations of race and class, and have complex histories that are also bound up with Australia’s colonial history. Pacific Islanders and East Timorese are amongst those who travel to the area to work as fruit pickers, and their experiences intersect with the labour experiences of Indigenous communities, as well as migrants and refugees from Asia and the Middle East, European backpackers, and an increasingly marginalised White local underclass. Connecting these two strands of research activity is a focus on the Australia-Pacific region, a concern with contemporary postcolonialism and the reverberations of the past in the present, and an empirical and theoretical attention to land and landscape.

Dr Victoria Stead is an anthropologist whose work also has an interdisciplinary focus, engaging cognate areas of politics, geography, development studies, history, and postcolonial studies. Her current research coheres around two key areas of interest and activity. The first of these engages themes of conflict, memory, landscape and development in relation to the legacies of the Second World War in Papua New Guinea, including the growth of war tourism in the region surrounding the Kokoda Track. The second focuses on labour in the Australian horticultural industry, with a geographical focus on the Shepparton region in northern Victoria. Discourses and practices relating to horticultural labour are strongly inflected with considerations of race and class, and have complex histories that are also bound up with Australia’s colonial history. Pacific Islanders and East Timorese are amongst those who travel to the area to work as fruit pickers, and their experiences intersect with the labour experiences of Indigenous communities, as well as migrants and refugees from Asia and the Middle East, European backpackers, and an increasingly marginalised White local underclass. Connecting these two strands of research activity is a focus on the Australia-Pacific region, a concern with contemporary postcolonialism and the reverberations of the past in the present, and an empirical and theoretical attention to land and landscape.

THIS ARTICLE IS PART OF A SERIES OF COVID-19-RELATED ANALYSIS AND OPINION ARTICLES FROM ADI RESEARCHERS.