Everyone loves a hero. Whether it’s a pilot doing an emergency landing on the Hudson or Rosie the Riveter galvanizing the war effort, we can’t get enough of them. Employers have joined the bandwagon, lauding as heroes everyone from on-call plumbers to rural family doctors to customer-service reps and retail workers to humanitarian workers. And Nike recently launched a shoe line targeted for — yes, you guessed it — “everyday heroes.”
Why Calling Your Workers Heroes Can Backfire
New research examines how Instacart workers reacted to the sudden moralization of their jobs in 2020.
February 01, 2024
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Summary.
At the height of pandemic-era lockdowns, the term “hero” was used to describe full-time workers including frontline health workers, bus drivers, supermarket cashiers, and other workers who had to appear at work in-person. In 2020, Instacart launched a “Household Heroes” campaign to recruit 300,000 workers to the platform. While moralizing work like this might seem to have benefits for workers and the company, interviews with Instacart workers shed light on the mixed feelings many workers held about the label. The authors share these findings on how the label might backfire and identify three groups from the interviews: Skippers, Stallers, and Strugglers.