Slow Death and Key Workers: The Ordinary Crisis of Waste Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article focuses on the experiences of waste workers in Glasgow at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, to explore how the ordinary workings of the UK waste industry are pushing bodies and infrastructures to the point of collapse. Drawing on in-depth interviews with waste workers, and in conversation with Lauren Berlant's concepts of ‘slow death’ and the ‘crisis ordinary’, this article makes two key contributions. First, it reveals that waste workers are enduring conditions that are marked by chronic exhaustion, debilitation and poverty. Second, it argues that this experience of ‘slow death’ was not created by the ‘COVID crisis’ but by the ‘crisis ordinary’: the normal workings of neoliberalism that stretch workers beyond their limits in ways that are simultaneously egregious yet entirely ordinary. During the emergence of the pandemic, being designated a ‘key worker’ was not a cause for protection or compensation, but, rather, placed already marginalised bodies at greater exposure to risk, exploitation and exhaustion. Although the pandemic exacerbated long-standing challenges, it also brought them into sharper focus, creating spaces for resistance. Waste workers confronted slow death through radical acts of refusal, mobilising for labour justice during COP26, making their ‘ordinary’ crisis appear disordinary. This article situates these acts of refusal within a broader geographical framework, contributing to understandings of crisis as an ongoing process, deeply intertwined with the ordinary functions of neoliberal capitalism. The complex infrastructures that sustain our economic, political and biological lives—including the waste sector—depend on workers for whom ‘slow death’ has become a pervasive and commonplace crisis. By foregrounding the lived experiences of key workers, we can begin to make the ordinary crisis of neoliberalism feel disordinary, and confront the widespread ‘state of acceptance’ that has allowed slow death to persist for so many.