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Iain Ferguson

28 April 2020 was International Workers Memorial Day (IWM). It’s an annual event organised by trade unions to commemorate the many thousands of workers who have died unnecessarily and too young as a result of government or employer negligence, through industrial accidents or through avoidable industrial diseases like asbestosis.

In 2020, IWM Day was a bit different. For this year we observed a minute’s silence for all the frontline workers –​ health workers, care workers, bus drivers, shop workers and social workers –​ who have lost their lives due to COVID-​19. It was not, however, as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson tried to suggest, a “day of national unity”. For many of these frontline workers will have died as a direct or indirect result of his government’s failure to prepare adequately for the crisis or to provide adequate personal protective equipment.

The slogan of International Workers Memorial Day is ‘Remember the dead, fight for the living’. We should remember the dead and one role of social work is to help people deal with the pain of loss. But in this short contribution I want to look at what kind of role social work might play in ‘fighting for the living’ in the face of this crisis.

In Part II of this book, contributors from Greece, Chile, South Africa and elsewhere report on the new and imaginative ways that social workers are developing practice to keep in touch with service users during the crisis, to reduce social isolation and protect mental health. There have also been accounts of social workers making links with the new mutual aid organisations that are springing up everywhere. These are important and positive developments.

But we have also heard another less positive side to this picture, because many social workers have reported that in their agencies it’s ‘business as usual’. That rather than responding in new and creative ways to this wholly unprecedented situation, there is still the same management preoccupation with meeting budgets and targets, the same emphasis on monitoring, surveillance and risk rather than on working with service users to help them meet their needs and address their difficulties. Others still have talked about social work being ‘invisible’ in the current crisis.

This situation is not the fault of individual workers or even of individual managers. Rather it reflects the dominance of a market-​driven ideology which emerged in the 1990s, sometimes called New Public Management, sometimes managerialism. From this period, significant transformations took place in health and social work services. In the Global South, it involved so-​called Structural Adjustment Programmes, imposed by the International Monetary Fund and requiring the wholesale privatisation of health and social care services. In the West it was about creating a social work practice more suited to the needs of the market, with direct work outsourced to voluntary or private agencies. It was based on a very individualised practice –​ out went community social work –​ and one which saw social work not as an ethical profession rooted in relationships and social justice but rather as a neutral, technical occupation. And it has resulted in increased bureaucracy, with social workers often spending more time in front of computers than with their clients, located in offices or call centres which are far removed from the communities they serve.

That model –​ what we now call ‘neoliberal social work’ –​ is a million miles away from what many of us would recognise as good social work practice. And it has meant, I would argue, that social work’s contribution during this crisis has been much less than it could be.

But it doesn’t have to be like this.

It was to challenge that model that some of us called a meeting in Glasgow in 2004 called ‘I didn’t come into social work for this’. That meeting led in 2006 to a 300-​strong conference in Liverpool which set up the Social Work Action Network –​ SWAN. We argued against managerialism and the market in social work and for a social work practice based on more collective approaches, one that learned from the experience of service users and other social movements and rejected the idea that social work could be politically neutral.

Since then, SWAN have held well-​attended annual conferences where workers, students, practitioners and –​ crucially –​ service users have discussed and debated how we can develop new forms of practice.

We have been involved in numerous campaigns –​ to defend asylum-​seekers and fight racism, to challenge the scapegoating of social workers and in defence services against cuts and closures.

The success of SWAN and the renewed interest in radical social work also led in 2013 to a new theoretical journal, Critical and Radical Social Work, which now has a global readership.

And it’s that global development I now want to turn to. Because, as we found very quickly, it is not just social workers in Britain who have been challenging neoliberalism and neoliberal social work. The past decade has seen the emergence of an international radical social work current, sometimes linked to SWAN, sometimes not (Ferguson, Ioakimidis and Lavalette 2018).

So, for example, in 2011 social workers in the New Approach group in Hungary played an active –​ and courageous ‒ role in challenging the criminalisation of homeless people by their right-​wing government.

In Spain in 2015, in what IFSW General Secretary Rory Truell rightly called ‘the best example of social work led social-​action in the world right now’, social workers in the Orange Tide took to the streets in their bright orange T-​shirts along with service users and social movements to protest against evictions and against the impact of austerity on poor people.

At the height of the refugee crisis, our colleagues in Greek SWAN played an important role in helping support refugees arriving on the Greek islands fleeing war and persecution, while EU governments were prepared to allow them to drown in the Mediterranean.

And finally, our fantastic social work colleagues in Hong Kong have been actively involved in the pro-​democracy movement there and last year helped organise a progressive social welfare conference which brought together social workers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea. Now more than ever they need our support as the Chinese government cracks down on human rights activists.

So, in conclusion, what is the relevance of this new movement to the coronavirus crisis?

First, across the world we’ve seen the growth, on a massive scale of mutual aid, of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people volunteering to help isolated or vulnerable neighbours and communities –​ and in some cases that’s led to the emergence of what Michael Lavalette (Lavalette 2011) has called ‘popular social work’ –​ new, creative forms of practice being developed during the crisis. One of the most inspiring of these was reported in an article the London Review of Books (Wispelwey and Al-​Orzza 2020). In the absence of any support from the Israeli government or the international community, Palestinians in camps have resorted to community-​based responses to protect themselves. In Aida and Azza refugee camps in Bethlehem, young refugees, trained as community health workers (CHWs) to fight the diabetes epidemic, have now organised themselves in response to COVID-​19. They promote social distancing, the early detection of cases and contact tracing, and help with patient testing and care when symptoms develop. Working under the occupation, the CHWs in Aida and Azza have produced a video and pamphlets detailing ways to minimise the risk of contracting COVID-​19. They call their patients daily and arrange for the safe delivery of life-​saving diabetes medication. As the writers comment:

These young refugees are demonstrating the ingenuity and steadfastness that has kept Palestinian dreams of a better future alive for decades, despite constant setbacks and a crushing military occupation. (Wispelwey and Al-​Orzza 2020)

In the same way, the emergence of mutual aid on a mass scale opens up possibilities everywhere to look again at developing new forms of community social work.

Second, the way in which ordinary people and frontline workers have responded to this crisis –​ in such stark contrast to their governments who have been criminally unprepared and often more concerned with getting the economy moving than with protecting people’s lives –​ highlights a core value which you will seldom find in social work textbooks but which I would argue should be the core social work value: namely, solidarity.

And my final point is this. This year began with all of us desperately worried about global warming. Now we have the coronavirus crisis. And already our rulers are talking of decades of austerity when this crisis is over. Truly, capitalism is the system that keeps on giving.

So yes, we need to fight for another social work. But I want to end by arguing that as social workers, now more than ever, we need to be part of the wider struggle for a different world, a world based not on the relentless drive for profit but one based on the needs of humanity, our planet and all living things on it.