Abstract
The impact of shocks and crises on workers and workers’ crisis coping strategies are issues of global concern and have generated a rich literature on resilience and sustainable livelihoods. Drawing on insights from social reproduction theory and biographical-narrative research, we draw lessons for the resilience literature from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on workers in a high-outmigration area of Eastern Europe. The area had some of the highest mortality and lowest vaccination rates in the European Union and is heavily dependent on remittances from work in German, Italian, and British agriculture, construction, and cleaning and care services. We use biographical interviews to show how respondents’ coping capacity builds on previous experiences of crisis and on social relationships and care arrangements at work and home, which are both sources of support and vulnerability; and we discuss why young workers in sectors deemed ‘essential’ during the pandemic were particularly vulnerable. By showing how care arrangements translate into both support and pressure, our findings speak to global debates about resilience and its costs for workers in high migration areas and beyond.
Introduction
Through its adoption by international organizations, the sustainable livelihoods (SL) approach has become a key perspective on poverty reduction in development studies; resilience has undergone similar mainstreaming and international adoption following the Financial Crisis (Jones and Tanner, 2015; Miller et al., 2010; Natarajan et al., 2022). This article asks how the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on worker lives help expand our perspective on SL and resilience. SL and resilience are predominantly seen as a function of having ‘livelihood capitals’, including the support networks constituting social capital (Heltberg et al., 2013; Munshi, 2014; Reva, 2012; Tanner et al., 2015; see Hanrahan, 2015 for a critique). However, while leaving out the wider power relations explaining differences in capital endowments (Dijk, 2011; Mosse, 2010; Scoones, 2009), social capital approaches struggle to explain resilience differences between people having similar social capital levels (sharing similar ‘life chances’, Archer, 1996 [1995]: 257; see also Liebermann, 2012).
Despite the focus on individuals-in-communities implicit in the sustainable livelihood approach (SLA), reducing the agency of individuals to social capital as having and using support networks understates the complexity of individual lifeworld and renders individuals overtly autonomous and skilled in a seemingly unproblematic (once individuals have them) use of connections; perspectives centering the constitution of individuals and their crises responses through relationships within households, at the workplace, or neighborhoods are still relatively rare, despite forceful and repeated criticism of such omission (Hanrahan, 2015; Mosse, 2010; Natarajan et al., 2022; Scoones, 2009).
Building on insights from the livelihoods literature seeking to shift research from capital-centered to relations-based approaches to livelihoods (Hanrahan, 2015; Mosse, 2010; Natarajan et al., 2022), seeing inter-personal relationships as both constitutive and ambivalent for livelihoods, we ask how exploring the care relations supporting workers during the COVID-19 pandemic produce insights about SL and resilience. We understand these care relations as relations at the workplace and within workers’ households and families between genders and generations; they involve negotiations of care obligations and life trajectories (Hanrahan, 2015; Parreñas, 2001; Plyushteva and Schwanen, 2018). We argue that these relationships are key to understanding resilience during crises; their absence undermines resilience, while their inherent conflicting obligations can both support and strain individuals.
The pandemic, we contend, heightened this tension through the ‘essential work’ narrative. The pandemic brought a deterioration of jobs in the Global North in sectors from public health to domestic work and restrictions on movement or migration that severely hampered workers’ livelihoods in the Global South (Agarwal, 2021; Mezzadri, 2022; Pandey et al., 2021). However, the disruption of work and migration patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic also facilitates a better understanding of the social prerequisites of resilience, the sources of individual workers’ resilience, and the capacity to ensure SL during crises.
The article proceeds as follows. The next section discusses this article’s approach and contribution, while the third section presents an empirical ethnographic study of how the pandemic affected workers in a high outmigration eastern border area of the European Union. The section discusses the resilience of surveyed individuals and households and argues for more attention to people’s biographical-relational resources.
A biographical-relational livelihood perspective
Following Amartya Sen’s (1981) and Martha Nussbaum’s (1986) capability approach, and Robert Chambers’ (1983) sustainable livelihoods (SL) framework, studies of the everyday survival strategies of people going through shocks and crises have seen the SL literature coexist with a growing resilience literature. The latter emerged around a series of papers in development studies (e.g., Miller et al., 2010; see Jones and Tanner, 2015 for an overview), with an important strand coming from World Bank work on poverty and asset provision (e.g., Heltberg et al., 2009; Moser and Holland, 1997; Siegel and Alwang, 1999) incorporating SL into a broader and measurable resilience and risk management framework (e.g., Heltberg et al., 2009; Reva, 2012; see also Jones and Tanner, 2015; Quandt, 2018).
A minimal understanding equates resilience with coping, meaning an intensification of what individuals or households had been also doing before the crisis (using savings more, working harder, etc.) and referring to what individuals do to avoid the ‘worst impacts of shocks’ (Heltberg et al., 2012b: 26), from eating cheaper or less food to diversifying income sources. Resilience is a subcategory of coping that avoids ‘long-term harms’ (Heltberg et al., 2013: 708). For others, resilience goes beyond coping, involving transformative adaptation and agency that drive lasting, sustainable (irreversible) improvements in livelihoods (Dagdeviren and Donoghue, 2019; Quandt, 2018; Tanner et al., 2015). This language closely follows the SLA, defining SL as ‘when [a livelihood] can cope with and recover from stresses and shocks and maintain or enhance its capabilities and assets both now and in the future, while not undermining the natural resource base’ (Carney, 1998: 2).
From the perspective of livelihoods and resilience studies, individuals ideally react to crises through adaptations allowing them to (at least) protect their livelihoods, for instance, by changing or diversifying occupations or income sources (e.g., Dagdeviren and Donoghue, 2019; Ellis, 1998; Quandt, 2018; Reva, 2012; Rigg, 2006). Such occupational change (and other adaptation forms) comes from individuals having sets of ‘livelihood capitals’. Migration, for instance, ‘succeeds’ because or when individuals hold higher levels of ‘livelihood capitals’ (connections or social capital, money, health, etc.) than others (for criticism, see Dijk, 2011; Hanrahan, 2015; Natarajan et al., 2022).
Contributions in various other fields – from migration studies to biographical mobility research and social reproduction theory (SRT) – have looked beyond capital-centered approaches as SL to center the social relations in households and families that support migration and other occupational change forms – and, more generally, livelihoods. Contributions from SRT have stressed the ‘invisible [never remunerated] economies of care’ [that] allow the poor and workers, in general, to subsist at low to no pay, social security, and healthcare (Shah and Lerche, 2020; see also Mezzadri, 2019). From an SRT perspective, the SLA tends to neglect the ‘people at home’ taking care of the (migrant) workers’ children, elderly, and households; by centering the pay-earning worker, ignores the agency and role of various others, from children to the elderly (Hanrahan, 2015; Razavi, 2011). Indicative of such neglect is the 2012 World Bank study of resilience following the 2008 Financial Crisis finding that ‘Women played an important role in shock absorption [. . . because of] their responsibilities for food sourcing and cooking as well as for child care’ (Heltberg et al., 2012a: 11–12). The study does not mention SRT making similar arguments since the 1970s (see the overview in Backer and Cairns (2021) and Bhattacharya (2017), but see Heltberg et al. (2013)).
As SRT moved beyond the household, it currently represents a ‘generative framework’ for ‘theorizing global migration and transnational relations of care’ (Backer and Cairns, 2021: 1093). Recent contributions have shown how care obligations and arrangements guide workers in maintaining their livelihoods (Hanrahan, 2015; Plyushteva and Schwanen, 2018; Porter et al., 2023). These care obligations or ‘arrangements’ (Hanrahan, 2015) – in the household, family, and neighborhood – pressure workers by restricting their career, job, and educational choices and influencing the migrant workers’ motivation to stay, leave, or return (Kontos, 2003; Parreñas, 2001). In other words, they affect how workers undergo and experience what SL calls immediate ‘shocks’ and prolonged ‘crises’ (Chambers and Conway, 1991). Most importantly, they represent both an underpinning of resilience or SL and a source of vulnerability resulting from people’s efforts to fulfill care obligations (Hanrahan, 2015; Reva, 2012).
Our study suggests that vulnerability can also result from conflictual care obligations or arrangements. Care obligations also emerge in the workplace and can serve as a ‘resilience underpinning’ for workers; however, they can clash with obligations vis-à-vis worker families. The social workers, teachers, and healthcare workers in our sample construct idealized notions of the relationship between them and their beneficiaries that translate into an ethos of care motivating workers to stay on the job, increase work time, or accept unfamiliar, new working conditions. However, many suffered from seeking to fulfill what became conflicting obligations to beneficiaries and to their families. The public expectations encapsulated in ‘essential work’ amplified the conflict. A specific aspect of the pandemic was the ‘essential’ or ‘frontline’ work discourse, with authorities and the broader public highlighting certain professions or sectors as doing particularly valuable work during the pandemic (Doumbia-Henry, 2020; Mezzadri, 2022). This emerging notion of value structured public perceptions of workers, often by combining recognition with deteriorating working conditions, as some workers were expected to work more or to tolerate firings (Pandey et al., 2021).
We also argue that those less affected by conflicting expectations had previously undergone other crises, resulting in care arrangements making them more resilient during the pandemic. Here, our biographical approach comes into play. Exploring our respondents’ biographical narrations, we observed how respondents with previous crisis experiences highlight key formative experiences in their biographical narratives: for instance, how their personal ethos developed around care obligations and arrangements. They used these experiences and corresponding reflections for orientation during present-day crises.
We treat such experience as a biographical-relational resource; biographical resources in biographical-narrative research refer to knowledge accumulated in past biographical events that individuals use in pursuing their life projects (see Kontos (2003) for a review of key German-language contributions, including Alheit (1995) and Hoerning (1989); later contributions include Lalak (2015) and Liebermann (2012)). Not only do they reflect societal norms in valuing certain events more than others as ‘worthy’ experiences (e.g., motherhood over career; see Boryczko et al. (2014)); individuals can (re-)interpret the same event (‘motherhood’) differently (Alheit, 1995, 2010). As Maria Kontos (2003) critically noted, contributions have largely focused on the cognitive uses of experience and less on motivational ones; and we would emphasize while noting the ambivalence of biographical resources that individuals construct events into experiences that can both enable and prevent resilient responses (Alheit, 1995; Boryczko et al., 2014; Kontos, 2003). Research on causes for such ambivalence – beyond asserting the individuals’ self-reflective capacity (Alheit, 2010) – has yet to advance.
We use the term ‘relational’ to underline how biographical knowledge is constituted through the care arrangements in an individual’s household, extended family, or workplace (within groups sharing ‘the same life chances’; Archer, 1995: 257). ‘Biographical-relational’ thus emphasizes the importance of relationships in shaping personal experiences through meaning-making and, less explored, meaning-giving. Similar to relational ontology (Emirbayer 1997; Hanrahan, 2015), seeing social life – from individual biographies to social structures – as constituted through relationships, the focus on relationships is valuable for understanding how biographical knowledge and experiences are formed, which, in turn, helps approach the underpinnings of resilience.
It also helps address the ambivalence of resources for resilience, as biographical experiences can both encourage and discourage (Alheit, 1995). We suggest that the ambivalence of such experiences (e.g., the pandemic) can result from the different and potentially conflictual obligations developing out of relationships during crises. Furthermore, negotiating care obligations during previous crises and the corresponding ethos explain resilience during current crises. Such biographical-relational resources were less available to the younger ‘essential’ workers in our sample, who faced the high expectations associated with ‘essential work’ largely without the sense of mission acquired over professional experiences and the care arrangements at home that constitute biographical-relational resources.
A biographical study of resilience
We rely on ethnographic fieldwork interviews in the Romanian-Ukrainian border region of Bucovina/Bukovyna (on both sides of the EU border; 26 interviews in Romania and 5 in Ukraine) and seven interviews in two other areas of Romania; fieldwork took place in 2022–2024, building on earlier ethnographic fieldwork (Varga, 2023). Interview partners included hospital nurses, rural teachers, and social workers, and – due to the people’s reliance in the fieldwork area on seasonal work abroad – also migrant seasonal workers (Ryabchuk, 2012): Romanian and Ukrainian workers migrating to Germany to work in cleaning and agriculture; Table 1 presents an overview. The intention behind selecting workers from these categories was to have variation in ‘essentiality’. In our sample, worker perceptions of their ‘essentiality’ ranged from high for nurses to low, but still feeling ‘entitled to more’ due to an ethos of contributing to society (teachers, social workers), to not having such perceptions (agricultural and cleaning workers); instead of emphasizing an ethos of obligations vis-à-vis society, these latter workers emphasized the care obligations for their families. Next to life course questions, we asked about the workers’ experiences during the pandemic and the ensuing crisis (the inflation, especially after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, drove fuel and food prices up) and about their perceptions of inequality and political protests; across these very different cases, we sought commonalities and how the workers’ socio-economic location translated into specific experiences during the crisis.
Respondents overview.
We explored how respondents coped with the pandemic and specifically whether they underwent moments of struggle; in how they narrated their reactions to such moments, we studied whether respondents found ways of coping and how. Such coping would qualify as minimal resilience (building on the discussion above); higher levels are present if respondents could undergo adaptive transformations of their lives (Dagdeviren and Donoghue, 2019) or whether they succumbed to feelings of suffering and loss of control (we use here the theorization of ‘suffering trajectories’ in biographical research; Riemann and Schütze, 1991). We differentiate three respondent biographical categories. First were those showing trajectories of suffering (no resilience; only three respondents, given the difficulty of reaching out to respondents willing to share negative experiences). Second, are those showing limited resilience (coping) during the pandemic and inflation crises and/or throughout their entire biographies. Third, those who experienced repeated occupational change and crisis adaptation throughout their lives (during recent and/or past crises; this group included also four out of five respondents in Ukraine, who had coped relatively well with the pandemic but currently were struggling to cope with the war in their country, having for instance to accept the death or disappearance of close ones, prolonged power shortages, inflation). The analysis of biographical change and adaptation uncovers the complex role played by care obligations – usually between generations, genders, and siblings within the respondents’ families – both motivating and forcing (committing) respondents to undergo such change.
The fieldwork region and the pandemic
The fieldwork area is a high-outmigration region on the Romanian–Ukrainian border. Following the fall of communism, the region saw decades of welfare retrenchment, deindustrialization, and massive outmigration. The largest previous crisis that interviewed workers had experienced – and was well remembered in the communities where fieldwork took place – was the Transition Recession of the 1990s (Ghodsee and Orenstein, 2021). Large (state) industrial and agricultural employers disappeared; few could migrate as borders were closed, and people typically relied on combining temporary formal work and informal occupation. The typified biographies
1
of communism were disrupted; as narrated by a Ukrainian respondent: We feel sorry after the past, sorry after the stability, [about] nothing else. Even then, there were difficulties, and there were conditions [you had to fulfil], but we knew what we were learning. I knew that I would finish school. I went, studied, after which [I could join] a technical school. After that, you had a job; you had something to choose from. The choice was very big . . . But when the [Soviet] Union fell apart, then the plants, factories, became very rare, they all turned into shops . . . Where the factory stood, there is a depot store now . . . The young people have nothing to work (Sveta, agricultural worker, 2023).
The Financial Crisis triggered massive migration from the fieldwork area (the pandemic and ensuing inflation partially reversed this trend). Ever since, outmigration turned remittances into the most important income source for local households – including those of public sector workers in care and education. 2 Workers in these sectors either interrupted their formal employment and migrated during crises to Italy or Germany, or other family members did so in their place.
As the pandemic sent many temporary migrants back home, the region saw one of Europe’s highest death tolls and resistance to masks and vaccines. With communities largely dependent on migration for their livelihoods, the pandemic was an intense yet brief initial financial shock, eliminating seasonal labor migration from the households’ livelihood sources for several months. But, unlike the Global South, the EU periphery is an institutionalized labor source for Western Europe. Western European countries relaxed their entry requirements for the Eastern European workforce employed in agriculture, construction, and food, even when still having lockdowns. The German public debate, for instance, changed to perceiving the migrant workers in these sectors as ‘essential’ and demanded their return (Ana and Voicu, 2023; Seeliger and Sebastian, 2022).
The fieldwork region is home to a large semi-urban and rural population of Evangelicals–several neo-Protestant denominations that spread throughout the region, especially after communism. The largest Evangelical communities overlap with Roma populations, having a long history of destitution and discrimination (Beck, 1989; Surdu, 2019): slavery until the mid-19th century, ‘liberation’ from slavery without receiving agricultural or housing land until late in the 20th century, coupled with an employment pattern during communist times that allocated Roma to light industries such as textiles and collective farm work – the first to succumb to the Transition Recession and the millions of jobs lost after communism (Varga, 2014). Several recent trends countered the historical pattern of destitution: state programs to distribute housing land that, coupled with state- and business-mediated temporary work migration to agricultural work in Western countries (by 2023, mostly to Germany), improved living conditions.
Second, the spread of Evangelical communities brought new institutions to poor communities – credit, Sunday schools, and limited employment opportunities in farming. The Evangelical denominations’ emphasis on schooling encouraged many families to keep their children in state schools. However, important problems remain – these countertrends have been too unequal to translate into a general improvement, with many Roma in the fieldwork area still landless and unregistered at their residence. Furthermore, locals lack digital literacy and resources such as the Internet, computers, and knowledge about accessing social services online.
The pandemic challenged interviewed agricultural and domestic workers by making work in Western Europe impossible for months; furthermore, the workers’ children stayed home for over a year, studying online. Interviewed teachers and social workers (many Roma themselves) saw online teaching and online management of documents for social work beneficiaries as the most significant pandemic-related work disruption. Moving to online services ignored the particularities of poor semi-urban and rural communities, lacking digital literacy, Internet coverage, and computers – and frustrating the interviewed teachers and social workers. One teacher at a school for children with disabilities reported being embarrassed to attend school inspections that, as of March 2020, took place online. The online format felt absurd, as she considered it detrimental for children with disabilities or special educational needs, preventing teachers from carrying out standard and necessary activities: Inspections were only carried out online. And they [the children] were at home with their mom or grandma, all in front of laptops. I was asking myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ I was perfectly aware that a child with mental deficiency, a child with autism, or a child with various syndromes involving mental disability is never going to make any progress in front of a laptop (Ioana, teacher, November 2023).
Online activity was stressful for interviewed educational and social workers, questioning the shift to online formats despite acknowledging the efforts to facilitate children’s access to online instruction, for instance, by handing out one Internet-capable tablet per family in areas without Internet coverage. Still, these measures overlooked that many families had several school-aged children. And such programs hardly considered the broader needs of communities, apart from schooling. Social workers particularly emphasized how they fought for their beneficiaries’ access to specific services (shifting to online registration): For instance, when submitting a disability classification file, besides helping the person compile it, we also had to scan it to help the person send it to the institution where they had to submit it because most of the people who needed to obtain a disability certificate did not have internet, and they did not have the possibility to scan the documents at home and send them. We had to take over all this work. . . . Plus, for example, the disability commissions for children and adults were done on WhatsApp, and most of the people who needed it didn’t have WhatsApp [on their] phones. Even my work phone didn’t have WhatsApp, and so we had to use our personal phones. . . . Anyway, such a commission takes quite a long time; your personal phone was blocked, and you couldn’t say to the person, ‘I can’t help you’”. I mean, I helped you send the file, I helped you draft it, I helped you . . . and now you know what? I can’t help you with WhatsApp (Ana, social worker, July 2023).
Resilience underpinnings
The challenges mentioned above contrast with most respondents’ narrations that they had navigated the crisis relatively well. Two factors stood out in these narrations as potential ‘resilience underpinnings’: the respondents’ relation to their profession, their sense of mission acquired over professional experiences (1); and their personal experiences in previous crises (2). Both factors – which we call biographical-relational resources – characterized the older respondents. In contrast, younger ‘essential’ workers with only a few years on the job were negatively affected by the crisis, as they were less experienced and more precariously employed; furthermore, all ‘essential’ workers in our sample experienced a conflict between obligations to their beneficiaries and their families. As a result, even if, for most respondents, the crisis and the increasing workload were not strong enough to trigger trajectories of suffering, those negatively affected had adopted a pessimistic perspective on relationships at the workplace and in their communities, highlighting in their narrations how the pandemic deteriorated relationships.
Sense of professional mission
Many respondents reported a sense of professional mission or obligation vis-à-vis beneficiaries that they saw as crucial for overcoming the pandemic. Such a ‘sense of mission’ thus worked as a biographical resource that professional workers in care and educational jobs could mobilize around their professional identity and ethos of obligation vis-à-vis beneficiaries. These are biographical-relational resources that build on the professional-beneficiary relationship. For instance, interviewed teachers emphasized how they must constantly adapt and learn to meet the needs of ‘new’ or ‘different’ generations of children. Similarly, interviewed social workers highlighted how they must remain attentive, capable of adapting, and patient vis-à-vis the frequent legislative changes that define and redefine groups of beneficiaries and the services social workers offer them. In the words of a respondent: Do we remain stuck in those times, or do we adapt? I think we must adapt, not hold them [the pupils] back with outdated methods and ideas. As I said, I accept things that I might not have accepted in the past, but . . . I am aware that this is a different generation (Alina, teacher, July 2023).
Workers gained such biographical-relational resources from the idealized relations to beneficiaries characterizing their professions and from individual experiences of dealing with past crises. Their biographical experiences featured diverse adaptations to previous crises, as the region had experienced extreme crises before, the Transition Recession and the Financial Crisis. Biographical change following previous crises included changing jobs and sectors or switching between formal and informal employment, or between domestic unsalaried and salaried work, in ways making the respondents – who were old enough to experience them as grownups – relatively resilient to the pandemic’s lockdowns, school closures, and subsequent inflation. Older respondents’ biographical narratives reflect such change by emphasizing how changing jobs in the past responded to extraordinary events that shaped their lives, such as returning debt and avoiding unemployment or imprisonment; such a response involves arranging care obligations to motivate respondents to tolerate difficult adaptations, as the excerpts below will illustrate.
Past experiences with crises
Respondent Tina, a 50-year-old social worker with a Roma and Evangelical background, underwent the most spectacular biographical change in our sample: after losing her municipal street cleaning job during the 2007–8 Financial Crisis, she became a social worker in her community, going back to school with 37 to finish 5 more classes and reach the minimum educational requirements for social workers. Her biographical narrative strongly emphasizes her religious conversion to Pentecostalism but also suggests that the most important developments in her life – migrating from her village to the peri-urban area where she later became a social worker – were driven by the care obligations she felt vis-à-vis her mother, her daughter, and increasingly the responsibility vis-a-vis the local Roma community. She would see such responsibility mainly in religious terms (‘I serve God’) and less in the professional ethos terms of social work (‘serving the beneficiaries’).
Respondent Marian, a 49-year-old unregistered rural worker, sharing with Tina an Evangelical (Pentecostal) and Roma background, when recalling his biography at the start of the interview, places his life under the hardship of the prison sentence he received for assault and battery in 1998, shortly after his first child’s birth; and the impact that overcoming that event had for him. He then recalls his livelihood experience of switching between jobs (and illicit and licit activities) since his 14th birthday until he started working in German agriculture in his late 30s, where he stayed until the pandemic.
[I: please tell me your life, from the beginning until now] . . . [You want me to] say what? That I’ve been in jail, that I’ve been through a lot of trouble? . . . I come from a family with nine children. Four brothers and five sisters. Big family at home. Poor people. . . . We didn’t really go to school. We mostly worked. And that was it . . . When I was 14, I worked at [Black Sea port . . . ] In ‘88-‘89, I worked in collective farms around the country. In the country here at home. The borders weren’t open for us to leave the country. . . . After the [1989] revolution I got married, I stayed around, I did military service. I stayed in the country for a while, got married; then went to prison for a few years. I was married. I came home, I stayed some more, I went to work in Germany, that’s it . . . I saw it was hard there [in prison], I said it wasn’t for me. The woman [wife, also present during the interview] stayed home, she was pregnant. When I came home, I found the girl . . . one year and eight months old. And I said . . . I put my hand, I worked, I quit drinking, I quit . . . I worked, I minded my own business and, well . . . hard (Marian, agricultural worker, July 2023).
The same respondent narrates his subsequent work experience through the filter of family ethos, giving the agricultural work of a seasonal laborer meaning and moral guidance: I was there [at one employer in Germany] for about six seasons, and they were very serious. [The employer assigned] me to a team of men, only men. I lifted the solar caps, I lifted the solar beads, I lifted the asparagus. He sent me there; there was a guy there. When he saw me [he said]: ‘Hey, [Marian], you came to control me.’ They were drinking, . . . playing music, drinking . . . ‘I left six children in Romania and my wife at home to come and earn a few bucks, I didn’t come to keep an eye on you, I came to work. . . . You think I’m a bum? I’m here to make my time work and I have no business with you’. And I didn’t have any business with anybody. That’s how I taught the kids, too. To mind their own business, to work. Work whatever they give you to work (Marian, agricultural worker, July 2023).
Thus, a pattern in the interviews is that the workers’ response to the pandemic depended on their previous responses to earlier crises, particularly the negotiation of care obligations reached previously. When the pandemic reached the fieldwork area, elderly interviewed workers and the corresponding multigenerational families had developed arrangements to lower financial stress and shock over previous crises. They consist of workers negotiating the support they received from other household members with family obligations – the costs of paying for their children’s schools, repaying credits for housing, and so on. These arrangements drove the decision to undergo change, such as migration. This means that arrangements with other family members for interviewed workers did not simply constitute a source of ‘support’; rather, they meant obligations and an ethos of care after those left behind.
For instance, two interviewed public sector workers–a teacher and a social worker–had left their professional fields a decade before the pandemic to work in Italy; one of them, to become a domestic informal carer in Southern Italy, recalls how she left her home community, with nothing to support her from home, leaving her teenage children with their father, and not knowing anyone in her new city (and barely capable of understanding Italian). She justified the personal risk she went through by recalling the need to repay bank debt that she had taken to support her children during school and that she could not finance anymore due to the austerity cuts following the Financial Crisis, as a social worker working with children with disabilities: Because of financial problems, I had to . . . look for something else. Because I had bank repayments and I wasn’t covering the children at school, [daughter] was going to university in [distant, more expensive city], there were greater financial needs, and I couldn’t cope, and I chose to leave [to Italy]. And I stayed for four and a half years and after that. . . another eight months or so. . . it was in a moment of desperation. Think about it! I didn’t know the language, I didn’t know where I was going. I was so desperate, I said I’d just do anything . . . [as long as I] don’t end up doing the sidewalk, otherwise . . . anything, I would have endured anything. But I ended up with a good family. Somehow, God took care of me (Maria, social worker, July 2023).
The migration of one household member re-shuffled the task division within the household, with men, siblings, elderly, or teenage children left behind to care for the very young and old. Some households involved as many as three generations in such arrangements – the interviewees, their parents, and their children; in Elena’s case (see below), the elderly mother had moved first and had faced the brunt of precarious and dangerous experiences in the late 1990s–early 2000s, when working in Germany was illegal for most Eastern Europeans (including Ukrainian citizens such as Elena and her mother; in the meantime, both had acquired EU/Romanian citizenship). Once settled in Germany and able to intermediate domestic work hours, other – younger – relatives and neighbors followed in the elder mother’s footsteps, leaving male family members to engage with the children in care and agricultural work. Elena – who had worked as a primary school teacher in Ukraine – talked with a sense of fulfilled duty and dignity, ignoring the loss of pension rights entailed in her decision to migrate and work informally. She expected her children to care for her in their households once too old to work.
In the quote below, we asked Elena to narrate her story of labor migration to Germany, but she narrated her story through her mother’s story; she did not emphasize how her kin supported her or her mother, but how her mother supported them (Elena, her brother, her children) and ‘sacrificed herself’ by having numerous negative experiences – from precarious work to repeated deportation back to Ukraine.
[I: How did you choose Germany for work?] Because my mother went to Germany many years ago. Well, with housing and with work [she moved there]. It’s not so easy to come to a foreign country, to stand on the street and here . . . So it turned out that you had to go to someone, at least at first, for housing. . . . Very, very hard. It was the late ‘90s, [when] she left. Back then, the police were catching everybody, [they caught] some on the street, some [they recognized] by how they looked and walked around . . . how you spoke . . . She was deported home twice, then she went back again, [even] without [speaking the] language. [She] lived somehow with somebody, . . . running away from the police at night. . . . At first, she was handing out advertising leaflets. . . . And then, the woman she came with was deported and had cleaning jobs already. And she went in her place (Elena, informal cleaning worker, July 2023).
The limits to accessing previous crisis experiences
Accessing previous crisis experiences as a biographical resource worked less for younger respondents seen as ‘essential’ workers and compelled to work during the pandemic for financial reasons. The care obligations vis-à-vis families conflicted with the professional dedication to beneficiaries and having to earn money. This led to a perception of an ‘unprecedented’ crisis: respondents emphasized their commitment to beneficiaries or their families’ roles as anchors in their lives, easing the challenge of working under pandemic conditions; but fearing that they could accidentally infect relatives brought insecurity intensified by neighbors and others seeing ‘essential’ workers as potentially infectious. Thus, several interviewed ‘essential’ workers experienced the pandemic as new and intimidating. To quote from an interview with a 32-year-old social worker who underwent a trajectory of suffering, sparked by the conflict between having to work – being at the beginning of her career and therefore having a very low income – and the guilt she felt vis-à-vis her family: I was the only one in the whole town hall who worked, and I came into contact with the public, being at the cashier’s desk, it was the only department open, because you can’t close it, even though with the public, it was the mask, the plexiglass, the disinfection at the entrance, the doormat disinfection. The fear was the same because . . . I feared taking home the disease . . . My grandfather has bronchial asthma, my husband has diabetes, my father has diabetes, my mother has a form of obesity . . . Well, and I didn’t escape. I didn’t. Which deepened my state of anxiety and grinding and guilt, that I couldn’t . . . I had to come to work, that I needed money and then . . . I had to go back, I couldn’t stay home. . . . My husband during that period didn’t work at all, at all. Before, he worked in [public] transport but didn’t work at all during [the pandemic]. We preferred him to be on unpaid leave because he exposed himself to too much risk. . . . I wish this was the year I could wipe out the 32 I have . . . For me, it was a trauma. I only escaped with a psychologist, going to the psychologist, to the confessor. It was the only way I could get over it. And it came to the height of depression when my father made a nasty form . . . I told you, if I look at the pandemic year objectively I would think it was a manipulation. Basically, that moment . . . we were too scared. The media got us into a state where we didn’t . . . we didn’t know what tomorrow would be like . . . People were radically changed in the pandemic. Me working here with the public, and not just with the Roma, working with people with disabilities, with assistance . . . everybody says the same thing: ‘After the pandemic, everyone got worse. Everyone for themselves. There’s no more talking, no more stories. No. We run away from each other’ (Ania, social worker, July 2023).
As Ania in the excerpt above, most interviewed workers expressed criticism of authorities and media, feeling that ‘elites’ or ‘mass media’ had ‘manipulated’ them during the pandemic. As they became, in public perception, responsible for enforcing government policies, interviewed ‘essential’ workers often felt alienated and isolated, left alone despite the official recognition of their societal contribution. They filtered job-related experiences through the care arrangements in their families, leading some respondents, as Ania, to resent their ‘frontline’ involvement. Alya, for instance, recalls her decision to step down as school principal 2 years after the pandemic’s start: I didn’t want the job anymore, but they kept insisting. I don’t want it anymore. We have only one child, we wished for one for so long, we waited for it for so long, I went through so much, and now I neglect her because I’m in the school from early morning until late in the evening, and then one hour later I get a report dated the day before, with the expectation that I return it the next day, and then you neglect your family, you neglect what matters most for you . . . and then my mother fell ill with cancer, and it was me that had to take care of her, and then I said no, I need some rest, someone else should come and replace me (Alya, teacher, July 2023).
Discussion and conclusion
This article explored the relevance of social arrangements and obligations in the household and workplace and biographical-relational resources for livelihood resilience. Noting the criticism from SRT of the SLA, our study contributes to the latter by showing how such social arrangements translate into biographical resources that help workers to cope with crises. The pandemic did not operate in a biographical void but in an (fieldwork) area marked by repeated previous crises, ranging from intense labor shedding in the 1990s, wage cuts at the beginning of the 2010s, and ensuing migration patterns. Most interviewed households had developed practices, arrangements, and corresponding convictions (ethos) to reduce the monetary burden on their households in previous crises, constituting biographical resources in the following crises.
One implication of our approach is to consider the limits or ambivalence of resources in coping and resilience (see also Alheit, 1995, 2010; Hanrahan, 2015: 384). The focus on resources for resilience (in the SL framework conceptualized as forms of capital) goes together with approaching such resources as unproblematic once individuals have them (e.g., Jones and Tanner, 2015; Quandt, 2018; Tanner et al., 2015). Our research suggests that it is in the nature of these resources (since consisting of care arrangements) to both support and pressure individuals; having a resource does not simply translate into more coping or resilience, but (in our research) depends on where people were in their life trajectories (“younger” vs. more crisis-experienced individuals) and on the expectations authorities created around certain professions (“essential” workers). Symbolic appraisal as “essential” often backfired for younger interviewed “essential” workers. They experienced conflicting professional obligations, strengthened via the essentiality discourse and the personal obligation to protect their families from infection. We regard this line of work highlighting vulnerability as important as the resilience focus; it speaks to the broader literature concerned with the vulnerability of workers during the pandemic (e.g., Mezzadri, 2022; Pandey et al., 2021) by showing how being “essential” does not reduce vulnerability (see also Pandey et al., 2021).
Finally, we see it as an important direction for future work to show how individual resilience relates to structural patterns (see also Dagdeviren and Donahue, 2019). Individual actions of coping (such as deciding to migrate) build on social relations as the gendered task divisions within households that in turn reflect broader structural patterns, for instance, the faster destruction of jobs in ‘light’ – and feminized – industries during crises, sending women faster into unemployment. Thus, far from a ‘heroic’ perspective that celebrates individual solutions to crises, our approach argues for research on resilience that seeks to uncover the links between individual coping and societal or structural factors and the fragile social constitution of resilience and the resources that underpin it.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We thank the ENDURE project team for their support and extend our special gratitude to Adam Mrozowicki, Mateusz Karolak, Könül Jafarova, Emina Bužinkić, Nina Čolović, Susan Rottmann, Soner Barthoma, and Christian Fröhlich for their invaluable comments, guidance, and methodological feedback.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is based on research funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, grant number 495747738) for the project ENDURE: Inequalities, Community Resilience, and New Governance Modalities in a Post-Pandemic World. ENDURE is a consortium of nine universities, coordinated by Mihai Varga and Soner Barthoma (both at the Freie Universitat Berlin), and funded by the Trans-Atlantic Platform (T-AP); T-AP unites humanities and social science research funders across South America, North America, and Europe. Funding for ENDURE was awarded through T-AP’s 2021 Recovery, Renewal, and Resilience Call. For more information, visit 
.