Cooking, cleaning, and caring

COVID-19, essential labour, and the experiences of immigrant and migrant women in Nova Scotia

A detailed look at the how migrant and immigrant women in low-wage essential sectors in Nova Scotia experienced the COVID-19 pandemic

Executive summary

Relative to many other provincial jurisdictions in Canada, Nova Scotia fared well during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic¹. Credited to strict public health restrictions and a general tendency amongst Nova Scotians to adhere to COVID-19 rules and regulations, the province was among a few jurisdictions that saw lower rates of infections and fewer deaths than elsewhere in the country². Many of these restrictions focused on limiting mobility and social contact, including non-essential travel, closing non-essential businesses, and reducing in-person retail hours for services that came to be designated as essential, such as grocery stores and pharmacies and health care services which continued with protocols in place to reduce COVID-19 transmission³. Nova Scotia’s impressive early efforts to limit infection, translated into job losses, increased unemployment and underemployment, a lack of childcare, a significant increase in housing insecurity and scarcity of affordable housing,⁴ and a crisis in a health care system already experiencing a primary health crisis.⁵

In this report, we explore the employment experiences of immigrant and migrant women in the sectors that came to be recognized as “essential” during the three waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report is based on a study of women working in essential sectors in Nova Scotia during the pandemic. The study aimed to understand the underlying links between “essential work” and “survival jobs”-short-term (under)employment intended to ensure the survival of immigrants upon arrival in the country or resettlement. Concentrated in feminized sectors—such as care, food provisioning, and sanitation—in the context of Covid-19, many of these “survival jobs”, largely in response to political pressure, were re-designated as “essential”. This shift, however, has largely been rhetorical with only nominal, ad hoc, and temporary improvements made to working conditions and wages. Consequently, the feminized and devalued character of these labour sectors, long abandoned to the logic and imperatives of neoliberal capitalism buckled under the threat of the pandemic, has persisted. Our findings reveal that public services remain under-resourced, and labour markets have made already vulnerable service users, service providers, and workers even more vulnerable⁶. They highlight the contributions that immigrant and migrant women make to the socio-economic health and well-being of Nova Scotians. They also reveal their experiences of employment precarity and stratification by immigrant status, and the link between employment precarity in essential sectors and mental health—a social and political determinant of health.

Drawing on 27 in-depth, qualitative interviews with migrant and immigrant women working in essential sectors in Nova Scotia, we detail the conditions and contributions of their labour, both waged and unwaged, during and after the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our use of “essential” refers to those sectors necessary for the immediate continuation of life: in sum, food provision, cleaning and sanitation, and care. These sectors are historically feminized, low-waged, and lack formal protections. In other words, essential as it is used in this study is more narrowly defined than the official⁷ uses of the term, which include information technology services and financial services. Our participants often had credentials that might make them eligible for employment in these sectors, but given their status as migrant women, were typically excluded from them.

What emerges from our data is the tremendous and manifold work undertaken by migrant and immigrant women between 2020 and 2023, but also in the pandemic shutdown’s aftermath, which has seen the cost of living in Nova Scotia skyrocket⁸. As a result, even as these sectors have “returned to normal” or, in the case of food retail, have exceeded pre-pandemic profits⁹, the migrant and immigrant women whose labour ensures not only the reproduction of Canadian families, but the viability and profitability of these sectors, continue to struggle. This is particularly the case for those in our study unable to exit low-waged work.

Our interviews point to several experiences commonly shared by migrant and immigrant women workers employed in Nova Scotia’s low-wage essential sectors. We offer these insights chronologically, corresponding to before, during, and following the most acute periods of the COVID-19 pandemic. Like many newcomers, the women participating in our study migrated in search of new opportunities and security for themselves and their families. Most continued to support their family in their country of origin. Many of them held credentials that should have, in principle, enabled them to access more secure, better-paid employment. Instead, de-skilling and re-skilling emerges as a common feature and requirement of their employment in Nova Scotia, during and after the height of the pandemic. At the same time, there is also considerable variation among the migrant and immigrant women we interviewed. We found that these differences correspond to individual migration trajectories, suggesting that specific immigration pathways and programs, often reflecting specific histories of migration in countries of origin and labour market needs in Canada, influence the employment experiences and economic outcomes of migrant and immigrant women.

Before the pandemic, these women experienced barriers to and challenges in employment. Finding work was difficult, and once it was secured, many confronted racism, exclusion, and exploitation. These worsened during the pandemic. Illustrating this, our study offers four features of employment in essential sectors experienced by migrant and immigrant women during the pandemic. These are: decreased earnings and opportunities for employment; increased workload; being responsibilized for enforcing public health regulations; and increased emotional and affective labour. Often experienced concurrently, these features generated considerable stress for those we interviewed. In turn, we elaborate on the relationship between these stressors and the emotional and mental health and well-being of our participants, as they understood it. The feelings of stress and anxiety experienced by the women tended to be compounded by the realities of migrant family life, and for some, the profound precarity and vulnerability associated with temporary immigration status¹⁰. Given the timing when we interviewed women working in essential sectors, we believe, much of this stress and anxiety persists in the aftermath of COVID, if in a somewhat modified form. This is because, while the work of managing and surviving COVID has ended in principle, the fundamental condition of their labour has remained consistent.

From these findings, our study makes six key observations. These are:

1. the pandemic reinforced existing stratification in labour markets, wherein newcomer immigrant and migrant, women, and racialized people are represented in greater numbers in service and retail work;
2. the vulnerability already prevalent in feminized, essential sectors is compounded by the immigration process and intensified by temporary legal status;
3. the conditions present in essential sectors worsened at the height of the pandemic, such that the burden migrant women carried—already vital for the reproduction of Canadian families, society, and economy—increased;
4. the challenges already associated with migrant family life and securing permanent immigration increased;
5. taken together, these conditions or features of work during COVID-19 generated considerable stress and anxiety, culminating in a decrease in overall well-being and mental health;
6. despite the official end of the COVID-19 pandemic, migrant women and in turn, their families struggle to recover from the financial and emotional strain they experienced during the pandemic.

The work experiences of our participants reflect a pervasive devaluing of reproductive labour in Nova Scotia, as elsewhere¹¹. Conditioned by the perspective that cooking, cleaning, and caring are unskilled, these labour markets are feminized, low-waged, and lack formal protections. Faced now with a crisis of affordability, the women in our study are unable to recover from the pandemic, and yet, their labour emerges once again as vital to how we, as a society, can move forward. In what follows, we parse out the narratives and experiences of our study participants. In so doing, we query and seek to better understand why labour recognized as essential continues to be undervalued, and why the immigrant and migrant women so central to its realization struggle to meet their own needs and those of their families. What is revealed through our interviews with migrant and immigrant women in Nova Scotia is the intensification of those conditions that perpetuate disadvantage, relegating women to low-waged sectors, and a heightening of physical, mental, and emotional vulnerabilities, as the work they performed became riskier and more dangerous.

The pandemic demonstrated that previously unthinkable policies could be implemented federally and provincially. In turn we consider a range of policy interventions to redress the challenges faced by immigrant women in the province, and to re-frame the approach to essential work and what it means to “survive” it. More precisely, we recommend:

• a wholesale re-orientation to immigration, that would provide permanent residency to all workers and migrants, regardless of skills, training, or financial resources, enabling access to the full range of social services and supports. This would require a re-working of all labour recruitment schemes, as well as international student programs. Immigrants and newcomers must be regarded as more than the sum of their economic potential and capacity, or exploitability.
• The development and implementation of anti-racist approaches to credential recognition and labour market inclusion, as well as new ways of regulating labour standards and wages, particularly in sectors where low wages and high profits have become the norm. In turn, we need to re-evaluate what constitutes “skilled” or “highly skilled” labour.
• Finally, we need to adjust our understanding of the inherent value (or lack thereof) of reproductive labour in essential sectors. This work—caring, food provisioning, and cleaning—is skilled, and it is fundamental. Absent such an understanding, pandemic recovery now and in the future will always fail those who, in moments of acute need, ensured our shared survival.