Social Division of Security and Sustenance Labour in Finland: From the legacy of the Second World War to defining essential workers

According to the Finnish Emergency Powers Act (2011), a state of emergency may be declared in the event of an armed attack, the threat of such an attack, a threat to the livelihood and economy of the population, a significant disaster or a serious infectious disease. Infectious disease is a recent addition to the list from the early 2010s. The spread of COVID-19 in 2020 is the first time a state of emergency has been invoked in Finland since the Second World War. From the perspectives of the sociology of labour and disaster studies, focus may be directed to the division of labour in society, where different and overlapping forms of work in keep societies going and are subject to political deliberation. Theoretically, this analysis is informed by the notion of a gendered “total social organisation of labour” in society by Miriam Glucksmann (1995; 2000): work is not just wage labour, as it can be done in different kinds of socio-economic relations between persons and persons and institutions. It can be remunerated, unpaid, voluntary, duty-based and/or compelled. Many fields of security labour such as the military, police and private security services are conventionally masculine fields of employment. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many conventionally feminine fields of employment such as health care, comprehensive and early education, child care and social work and low-paid service industry jobs have been of key importance to everyday sustenace and have been labelled as “essential workers”. The gendered division of labour in security and sustenance was pondered on by several committees in Finland after the Second World War focusing on the role of wwomen in national defence. When doing this, the committees produced detailed taxonomies of possible forms of crisis-time labour for women. Up until the 1990s, the rationale was to free male citizens for combat roles, but this also produced detailed descriptions of ‘labour of sustenance’ that keeps society going. The document analysis is brought to the present day and the COVID-19 crisis where the Finnish government created a category of “essential workers” only to find out that it had no official definition and no basis in law. Thus, services such as daycare or schooling could not be restricted on the basis of the jobs or professions of the parents. In this paper, forms and divisions of security and sustenance work are analysed in public documents such as committee repots and legislative documents in the context of Finland from socio-legal perspective, mapping out how and by which criteria security and sustenance labour divided between citizens in different kinds of states of emergency.