In Wayétu Moore's fictional novel, She Would Be King (2018), the author reimagines the birth of Liberia as a homeland for free slaves through a sophisticated marriage of history and magical realism. The book describes a woman named Charlotte, a slave on a Virginia plantation, who died without realising her predicament, and experienced what it was like to be completely invisibilised by society. In sum, repeated discrimination turned Charlotte into a living ghost. Charlotte is an apt allegory for the experience of low-wage migrant women from Southasia and other developing states in the Arab Gulf – where gender, nationality, race and other markers dictate the full extent of a worker's invisibilisation.
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a tragedy, and for the world of work, the implications are daunting. Across global labour markets, once-marginalised workers have been unceremoniously pushed even further to the margins. A March 2020 note from the International Labour Organization (ILO) reads, "Some groups, such as migrant workers and workers in the informal economy, are particularly affected by the economic consequences of the virus. And women, who are over-represented in the public health sector, are particularly exposed." The pandemic has thus laid bare an ugly truth about our current labour systems: that in an era of unprecedented job loss and financial strain on workers, having 4 billion people in the world outside the ambit of social protection is, quite simply, untenable.