Current Sociology, Ahead of Print.
The impact of shocks and crises on workers and workers’ crisis coping strategies are issues of global concern and have generated a rich literature on resilience and sustainable livelihoods. Drawing on insights from social reproduction theory and biographical-narrative research, we draw lessons for the resilience literature from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on workers in a high-outmigration area of Eastern Europe. The area had some of the highest mortality and lowest vaccination rates in the European Union and is heavily dependent on remittances from work in German, Italian, and British agriculture, construction, and cleaning and care services. We use biographical interviews to show how respondents’ coping capacity builds on previous experiences of crisis and on social relationships and care arrangements at work and home, which are both sources of support and vulnerability; and we discuss why young workers in sectors deemed ‘essential’ during the pandemic were particularly vulnerable. By showing how care arrangements translate into both support and pressure, our findings speak to global debates about resilience and its costs for workers in high migration areas and beyond.