[Excerpt] Pandemic conditions may be a relatively new development for these workers, but the abhorrent quality of frontline healthcare jobs is not. While ‘job quality’ remains a subjective and elusive construct, we can all imagine a ‘high-quality’ bundle of economic, sociological and psychological attributes—generous or at least sufficient pay and benefits, job security and opportunities for advancement, a modicum of discretion over and interest in one’s work, and perhaps some control over one’s working time.1 2 We might even hope that over time, technological advances including smartphones and robots could somehow encourage an upward drift in the incidence of all of these sought-after ascriptions. But for decades, technology-centred automation has eroded job quality, making it easier for managers to squeeze wages and ignore poor employment conditions.