From worker representation to the representation of work: Mobilisation, contestation and struggle over employee contribution during the pandemic in the United Kingdom

This paper aims to stimulate debate within the employment involvement participation, and worker representation, discussions. We use the work of cleaning in the UK as our main example. This work was perceived as ‘essential’ during the Covid19 pandemic, and ‘valued’ in the social perception and the nationalist discourse of solidarity and sacrifice. Yet there was a particular set of political interventions that contested the need for rewarding such a contribution by individualising it and reframing it politically. The main argument we propose is that there is a greater need in discussions on employee participation and worker representation to focus on how the social and economic contribution of certain groups of workers is politically represented and contested, and not just their voice in formal or informal terms. Debates on participation and representation are beginning to move in this direction of widening the remit of the way the value of work is outlined and the article aims to build on this by focusing on such tensions around the representation of value at the political level and at key national moments of crisis in terms of the state and related actors.