‘The Faintest Stirring of Hope Became Possible’: Pandemic Postscript

“And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.” The Plague, Albert Camus

Many of the concerns laid out by the authors in our special issue (No 1, Vol. 14), Ethical Conflicts in Social Work Practice: Challenges and Opportunities, have been brought into sharp relief during the COVID19 pandemic. It is our shared hope that social work will lead the way in making this greater urgency as an opening for greater opportunities. This postscript is based on our reflections during these days of crisis. We know that the pandemic is still extracting a heavy human, social and economic toll. Billions of families are still keeping quarantine in their homes. Others, less privileged, are looking for safe places to prevent their families and children from the contagion. Millions of people have been infected and hundreds of thousands of people have died from it. The crisis has placed social workers with other health and welfare professionals at the forefront of the struggle. At the end the crisis will pass and leave its mark on what is to come. Historically, global crises of this magnitude have given humankind an opportunity to examine the truths and values that gave a sense of order and meaning in ordinary times. They were fertile ground for far-reaching, paradigmatic changes. While it is still too early to predict what will come, it is already possible to identify some of the values embedded in the pre-COVID19 social and economic life, to examine how they stand up to the epidemic and to start setting the ethical foundations for a post-COVID19 Social Work.

Free market hegemony

Let the market work. The neoliberal political and economic regime prevailing in the world in recent decades has valorised the free market. This hegemonic discourse has given the market a superior status, far beyond the economic sphere. The marketisation of social life has become a dominant and undisputed truth. According to this view, the state’s role is to create free market conditions and eliminate disruptive restrictions such as labour rights, organised labour, and regulatory legislation. The market is seen as a liberating force. Free market conditions alone have the power to unleash the human capabilities inherent in the entrepreneurship of individuals. The free market represents the opportunity for taking on people's personal responsibility for themselves. The glorification of the private enterprise has served a very important purpose: to give high symbolic value to the private initiative of huge private corporations.

How do these truths stand against the epidemic and how have they hindered our fight? What answers does the free market offer us during these times? How has the job market reacted? How does the stock market help combat COVID19? Where are market forces headed? Why are governments - all over the world - suddenly forced to save the markets? Who has benefited and who has lost? This epidemic exemplifies the discourse dimension of the concept of market. Suddenly we understand that the term ‘free market’ is nothing more than an image, an idea, a metaphor, a fiction – itself created and propped up by the state in the form of legal fictions such as private property and liability protection - intended to serve a specific regime.

Reducing the role of the state

Reducing the size of the state was a necessary step in providing room for an important element of the new system: the private initiative. The glorification of the private initiative required the state's austerity as a governing body and supervisor. In many areas, the state has given up its place, becoming an absentee caretaker for private initiative to flourish. The dominance of the free market economy created the need to minimise the state. This process was carried out by the sale and divestment of its national assets and resources. Many countries in the world have transferred crucial national assets and resources to private hands, sometimes for ridiculously low prices. And that, in the name of seeking to reduce public spending.

Reducing state involvement requires deliberate erosion of its legitimacy and weakening of its institutions. The state is no longer a symbol of reason, a manifestation of the general public interest, or a sign of statehood. In the reservoir of social imaginary conceived and ruled by many neoliberal regimes presently managing the global struggle with the new COVID19 the state is portrayed as an archaic, heavyweight, wasteful and exploitative entity. Compared to this flawed image, the free market is portrayed as young, fresh, reliable, nimble and above all efficient. In the neoliberal equation, the strength of the market is indirectly proportional to the size of state. The state has lost its proactive centrality and has voluntarily become a peripheral player in the social arena.

How is the weakened state facing today the epidemic challenges? Clearly, a state weakened by shrinking resources and purposely vilified in terms of public trust cannot match the magnitude of the crisis. The countries facing the epidemic are now seeing the beleaguered and depleted state institutions. This epidemic easily revealed the state’s weakness, creating confusion and exposing its fragmentation and dismembering. The novel COVID19 virus has exposed the naked debility of these governments around the world to deal with the epidemic. The corporations and private entities that filled the public space, in this time of crises, are nowhere to be seen. Instead, we see the hollowed out shells of our public institutions that we have suddenly remembered in our desire for guidance and assistance: defunded research, overtaxed public health and emergency response systems, and a social safety net full of holes. In a new future post-COVID19 era, we must confront those actors who thrived on toxic ideologies that led to such a dangerous erosion of the state capabilities to face this time. These voices which systematically dismantle the state will find it difficult to explain why the neoliberal rationale of free market forces failed to conduct coordinated and responsible national health, social and welfare policies in the face of such emergencies.

Weakening public service

What was the main strategy of neoliberalism to glorify the power of the free market and to subordinate the state to the new regime? The systematic, sustained, long-standing strategy of hurting and mutilating the public services. This process was accomplished by four major processes: massive privatisation of services, worsening of working conditions, neglecting public facilities and the attrition of the service through overloading. There is no need to illustrate any of them. It was enough to enter every hospital, every emergency room, and every welfare department in many places around the world.

How does this truth stand the test of the pandemic? We face the pandemic with a weakened, damaged and robbed service. And who is almost alone today with the epidemic?: The doctors, interns, nurses, lab workers, social workers, teachers and other public servants, who have been beaten down, vilified, and maltreated over the last decades.

Social rights erosion

Welfare reform was a major means of eroding the welfare state. While reforms took different shape in different countries, there was a shared presumption that the welfare world as we ‘know it’ would end, as Bill Clinton said in 1996 when he led workfare reform. Predicating social rights on labour market participation was a neo-liberal mantra. The denial of social rights has become a banner of the new social regime. Social security networks have been institutionally and ideologically shaken. This process was justified by the dissemination and further public internalisation of the public image of welfare recipients as undeserving, fraudulent or lazy people fleeing from the job market. The stiffening of social rights criteria, the core of welfare reforms, drastically reduced the number of beneficiaries. It has helped to create a cheap workforce for an abusive job market comprised of expendable, low-wage jobs largely devoid of minimum work-related benefits and protections. It has deepened social gaps and exposed vulnerable populations to miserable living conditions and widespread uncertainty. How does this truth stand up to the epidemic test? It is revealed as a failure and a fallacy. Now more than ever the world needs a social security system capable of ensuring adequate living conditions, even in times of severe crisis.

The faintest Hope

Global crises have always been a window of opportunity for new hope. What hope does this crisis hold for us? The crisis reveals the centrality and importance of the state, of a robust and proud public service and comprehensive and generous social rights and social security net for the strength and health, and solidarity of society. It will also encourage and generate social forces at the national and international level that will work to restore the prestige, status and resources that come to the public services that governments have taken away. The crisis that exposed the nationalist seclusion that characterises the era will clarify the need for international movements and organisations that care about the health and well-being of humanity and the earth.

Faced with the divisive global neoliberal discourse that encouraged the wall of separation, the virus has revealed the need for global and regional dialogue, solidarity and cooperation across nation, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and more. After the epidemic, no one could argue that the truths of the pre-COVID world may remained as unchallenged axioms because the new COVID19virus has lethally undermined the ideological foundations of the neoliberal regime one by one. It also shows that interdependence is better in a time of crisis than individualism; that a vision of public good can motivate us to help others and stem the virus whereas the neo-liberal focus on individual profit is not a driving force to meet public needs but rather to exit the state and barricade the lucky few inside their castles to wait it out. It also has planted the seeds of hope for change. As Albert Camus stated ‘once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended’.

What would it take?

By now many of us have read numerous postings on how inequality, racism, and other forms of oppression that are the result of a neoliberal welfare state have been further exposed and exacerbated by the recent pandemic. If, as Camus suggests, there is a glimmer of hope that we may learn and emerge from this pandemic a better society, we must not squander this opportunity. What might this take? And how might this map onto our profession?

1. Including more voices (or, Self-determination and Client-centered Practice): We have to expand the voices that we heed. This includes the most fundamental thinking about what we mean by ‘better’. What has become clear, is that better for a small minority may not be better in the long run. The balance between individual and collective notions of better seems to produce more suffering in the long run, because visions of the good- like wealth- do not in fact trickle down. Only if we expand our notion of who gets to determine what is better will there be the possibility of a different outcome. If not, we may risk simply exchanging some lucky few for another lucky few, rather than a greater collective.

2. Taking Advantage of Hindsight (or, Comparative Policy Research): One way of thinking about history is learning the lessons of hindsight. We have long debated the relative risks and benefits of democracies, socialisation, authoritarianism, and the balance of power between the local, national, and global. The global nature of this pandemic provides us with many opportunities to make comparisons, without the ethical conundrum of artificial experiments. What kind of health systems, government regimes, policies, concentrations of power and decision-making led to different results for economies, population health, (in)equality, social solidarity and marginalization? Who benefitted and who lost? Using what measures? In order to forge a different future path, we must know how to examine and learn from our path.

3. Looking at the Interplay between Individual Actions and Structural Opportunities and Constraints (or a real Person-in-Environment Perspective): Too often neoliberalism deflects our attention from the structural by focusing on fixing individuals held responsible for their own plight. In times of crisis, just as it was during the Great Depression in the US, it becomes clear that placing responsibility in the hands of individuals to fight systemic problems is unfair and ineffective. If individuals are not the source of the problem, then individuals cannot fully fix or mitigate the problem. Sometimes we only see this from the other side of the telescope: so it may only be when individual solutions fail to fix problems that we recognise that the source may be elsewhere. We must therefore shed light on the huge disparities in the impact of COVID19. For example University of Toronto School of Social Work Dean Dexter Voisin explained that, for racialized minorities and other vulnerable communities, COVID19 is a ‘crisis within a crisis’ (The Center for Research & Innovation for Black Survivors of Homicide Victims 2020). In order to change this, we must understand that vulnerability is (re)created through inequalities, such as limited access to healthcare, spatial and housing inequality, and limited opportunities to shelter the storm by staying home. The huge workforce of low wage and contingent workers- likely including contingent social services providers (Hyde 2020), are particularly vulnerable within bureaucracies that care little for the workers or the people they serve (Wilson 2020). Reducing inequalities through fair pay, workplace protections (including sick leave), and personal protective equipment therefore means reducing vulnerabilities.

4. Rethinking Valorisation and Value (or, Valuing Social Workers and the Larger Network of Care Providers): It is very often said that crises are a test. We have heard many declarative statements and claims about which people are most likely to serve their families, communities, and society. These are claims often made by those running for office, policymakers seeking to persuade, and those who seek to retain power. We now have the ability to see in fact which individuals and groups actually performed better in their service to others. We can also see which groups were served by those claiming to act in the public interest and what motivated them. Was it altruism? Money? Professional responsibility? Service? The answers to these questions (raised by Attrash-Najjar and Strier 2020; McMillan 2020) not only can help us keep our public representatives accountable, but it can also teach us what character traits, values, and aspirations we seek to cultivate and reward as a society. This should serve as a guide to us as social work educators, gatekeepers, and leaders who can shape the socialisation and reward structures of the profession. Similarly, it can guide us in our advocacy and policy reform efforts to demand respect, better pay and working conditions, and a larger voice to those who perform what we have come to describe as ‘essential services’. These include not only the health workers who risked their lives and took time away from their own families to care for others, but those who shopped, cleaned, and delivered for others.

5. Speaking Truth to Power (or, Fulfilling our Mission of Seeking Social Justice): Heather McCabe (2020) sounds a call to arms for all social workers to speak out and share what they see from the front lines. Social workers across the globe are doing just that. Many social workers are first responders in the COVID19 crisis, working in hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, homeless shelters, and food banks. Social workers often work in systems that contribute to inequities and vulnerabilities, and may find themselves confronting difficult ethical concerns, mediating between under-resourced systems and the clients they serve (Anasti; Campbell, Dalke & Toews; McCarthy, Imboden, Shdaimah & Forrester). Such concerns are heightened by scarcity of resources and growing need. This is the time to demand immediate assistance to address the ravages of the pandemic as it continues to unfold. In our need to respond to the emergency, we must also recognise that this crisis has long-term implications and to recognise the opportunity to address precisely what has made people vulnerable.

Social workers bear witness. We have the knowledge and skills to describe, quantify, and remedy through research and interventions and to prepare others through education and outreach. As supervisors and frontline workers, if we have the ability to recognise concerns (Fenton 2020) and the power to push for (more) ethical practices (Juujärvi, Kallunki, and Luostari 2020), change may be possible. Social workers must also draw from their skills in organising creatively and advocating for individuals, families and communities in the agency, local, state, and global arenas. We need to demand concrete relief measures and better policies now and for the future.

This pandemic will eventually end. Social work must ask itself: have we heeded the stirrings of hope to join and lead in the struggle to bring about the fundamental changes that the pandemic has revealed are necessary? Since this fight will not end with the pandemic, where will we stand moving forward?