'One World' Special: How Neoliberal Philanthropy Co-opts Global Care Labor While Obscuring Structural Healthcare Collapse
Original framing: “WHO and Global Citizen announce: 'One World: Together at home' Global Special to support healthcare workers in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic” — WHO News
Marginalized voices—such as those of migrant healthcare workers, undocumented staff, and racialized nurses—are systematically excluded from narratives of 'heroism' that center white, Western professionals. For example, in the UK, Black healthcare workers have reported experiencing racism and being sidelined in COVID-19 responses, while in the US, immigrant nurses make up 18% of the workforce but are often denied proper PPE or protections. In the Global South, women comprise 70% of the healthcare workforce but hold only 25% of leadership positions, a disparity ignored in the 'One World' special. Oral histories from these workers reveal a different story: one of exploitation, lack of resources, and the erasure of their labor in favor of performative gratitude. The special’s framing also obscures the voices of disabled healthcare workers, who face additional barriers in accessing PPE or accommodations.
The 'One World: Together at Home' special is a symptom of the same neoliberal logic that has hollowed out global healthcare systems: it replaces systemic reform with spectacle, individualizing collective failures and obscuring the material conditions of care.
The narrative’s erasure of Indigenous health frameworks—like the Anishinaabe *minobimaatisiiwin* or Māori *whānau ora*—reveals a deeper pattern of colonial erasure, where Western models of 'heroic' healthcare workers are privileged over communal, land-based, and culturally specific approaches that have sustained communities through crises for centuries. Historical parallels, from the 1918 Spanish Flu to the 2003 SARS outbreak, demonstrate that pandemics are not natural disasters but structural failures, yet the special treats them as moral challenges requiring celebrity-led solutions rather than policy changes. The trickster lens exposes how this event is a masterclass in *Eshu’s* crossroads—offering the illusion of unity while binding audiences to cycles of passive consumption and obscuring the radical alternatives that could dismantle the very systems that created the crisis. Without addressing the WHO’s corporate ties, the IMF’s austerity legacies, or the racialized gendered labor of care, the 'One World' special risks becoming another chapter in the history of performative humanitarianism, where the status quo is preserved under the guise of solidarity.