Literature review - Frontline workers in the emergency response stage

The rapid development of the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe has unveiled an acute appreciation of essential workers in the operation and coordination of core societal functioning (e.g., healthcare, critical goods, and critical infrastructure). While citizens actively salute healthcare professionals within the traditional healthcare domains, other non-healthcare frontline workers, who work outside these realms, such as frontline retail workers (FRWs), who directly work with clients and service users, are often given less attention. These essential frontline workers’ public and private roles that present “at risk” with conflicting responsibilities and obligations in the COVID-19 pandemic form a unique individual-work-family triangulation, unfavourably impacting themselves and their families’ wellness. A nuanced understanding of their various challenges within this triangulation remains significantly lacking in research, practice, and policy decision-making. This gap in understanding not only jeopardizes the development of evidence-based strategies meant to improve the emergency response plans at individual, family, institutional, and societal levels, but also threatens the promotion of social justice, social cohesion, and community social development, as well as the achievement of community resilience and sustainability.

Focusing on FRWs, the unexpected, under-protected, and undervalued COVID heroes across Canada, this project aims to promote research, practice, and decision-making in the fields of hazards and disaster research and social work, by comprehensively measuring the FRWs’ individual-work-family challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project will contribute to literature in these two and related disciplines by collecting time-sensitive data on FRWs’ individual-work-family challenges during COVID-19. The evidence-based knowledge will enable the retail and relevant industry sectors to improve their emergency response plans and will inform existing and potential political interventions, better serving vulnerable essential workers so that they can fulfill their private and public obligations in the current and prospective emergency scenarios.