ABSTRACT
Existing scholarship has examined community outreach workers’ vital role as an essential, effective public health workforce in underserved communities. Less attention has been paid to how such workers have experienced this rhetorically praised yet materially undervalued labour in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on interviews with 43 community outreach workers who facilitated health and well-being services for immigrant communities in California’s Central Valley, we find that the pandemic created a unique ‘community of fate’ among community outreach workers in the region. This community of fate, in turn, exacerbated an existing care penalty rooted in the gendered, racialised and legally stratified nature of their labour. Taking both a micro- and macro-level analytical approach, we argue that the symbolic value of this ‘essential’ labour—often expressed in terms of a calling, vocation or destiny—intensified its material devaluation despite the importance of their work in mitigating pandemic harms.