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Social work and COVID-​19



Michael Lavalette, Vasilios Ioakimidis and Iain Ferguson

At the start of 2020, when the COVID-​19 pandemic began, a hastily convened meeting between the Social Work Action Network (SWAN) and the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) agreed that the organisations should jointly host a series of webinars tracing the social work response to the crisis. The result was four international webinar meetings that drew thousands of academics and practitioners together to discuss what social work could –​ and should –​ do during the pandemic.

The webinars were structured around two sets of ideas, drawn from aspects of the works of Naomi Klein and Rebecca Solnit.

In Klein’s work, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007), she draws attention to the fact that ‘disasters’ (including earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and monsoons, but also military coups, wars or deep economic recessions) can produce what she terms ‘social shock’. In this situation, people are so focussed on the immediate (saving the lives of their families and those in their communities, meeting people’s basic needs, dealing with the social costs of the disaster) that they lose sight of what can happen to the provision of core public and welfare services.

For large corporations and international capital, however, such disasters –​ and the disorientation they create –​ provides an opportunity. A chance to move in and scoop up all manner of contracts and services which effectively become ‘outsourced’ to private interests. This process she described as the shock doctrine. As she notes:

“Shock doctrine” describes the brute tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock ‒ wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, natural disasters ‒ to push through radical pro-​corporate measures, often called “shock therapy.” … [At its core] … is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. (Klein 2019)

As we confronted the COVID-​19 pandemic, how would the ‘shock doctrine’ play out?

Certainly, from the perspective of the UK there is no doubt that the pandemic has offered ‘an opportunity’ for some to make very significant profits. As Evans et al. note: “State contracts worth over £1bn have been awarded to private companies dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, without offering other firms the chance to bid for the work” (2020). Evans et al. (2020) traced how 177 government contracts were offered outside normal regulatory scrutiny, raising significant questions about transparency and accountability. For example, in May 2020 the private company Serco were given a £300m contract to provide the government’s ‘track and trace’ program for three months. The company had no previous experience, and the contract was awarded by Health Minister, Edward Agar. Astonishingly, Agar previously worked as head of public affairs for Serco! (Bagot 2020).

The British Medical Association published a report in July 2020 into the growth of ‘out sourcing’ during the pandemic. They noted, “Outsourcing [of key NHS functions] has been accelerated under new contingency measures put in place during the pandemic.” Since the start of the pandemic in March they note the government has offered contracts to:

• DHL, Unipart and Movianto to procure, manage logistics of and store PPE.

• Deloitte to manage the logistics of national drive-​in testing centres and super-​labs.

• Serco to run the contact tracing program.

• Palantir and Faculty A.I. to build the COVID-​19 datastore.

• Capita to onboard returning health workers in England. (BMA 2020: p1)

It’s not just health and social care contracts that have been privatised. Under the cover of COVID-​19 other government activities have also been outsourced. Perhaps most notoriously, a contract worth £845,000 was awarded to ‘Public First’ to research public attitudes to government policies. The contract was not put out to tender, but simply awarded to the company. It was later revealed the company’s owner had close personal contacts with Government Minister Michael Gove, and the Prime Minister’s senior advisor Dominic Cummings –​ through their work together as part of the ‘Vote Leave’ campaign (Conn and Geoghegan 2020).

So, at least from the UK, the evidence would tend to support some of Klein’s argument about disaster capitalism and the shock doctrine: as the pandemic spread, as the UK was thrown into turmoil, private interests moved to secure a slice of the government pot.

But alongside Klein’s work the webinars also wanted to look at some of the ideas of Rebecca Solnit. In her book Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (2009) Solnit draws on her research from disaster zones to look at what happens on the ground when disasters strike. Solnit’s work starts by examining the dominant idea of what we might call ‘bourgeois man’ (or woman). That is the notion that we are naturally selfish, self-​focussed and concerned with the ‘survival of the fittest’. If this is true, she surmises, then in times of crisis and in the face of disaster, you might expect a brutal fight for survival to take place as we all struggle to look after our own (and perhaps our family’s) immediate interests at the expense of others.

But Solnit provides case after case from disaster situations where she witnessed not selfish narcissism, but selflessness, public spiritedness, care and support for others and, she suggests, a glimpse of another world and another way of organising and running our societies. In these hellish circumstances, she suggests, we can see a glimpse of ‘paradise’.

As COVID-​19 spread, one of the remarkable things that developed was a flourishing of mutual aid networks, support groups and voluntary organisations, many of them with roots in trade unions, social movements and civil society organisations. The New Local Government Network, for example, note that

The public response to the COVID-​19 pandemic has been a source of much-​needed hope. Thousands of spontaneous, voluntary Mutual Aid groups have emerged to support the most vulnerable people in our society. They are supplying food and medicine, connecting with those who are lonely, and organising community resources. In many cases these groups have been able to help people far more rapidly and flexibly than traditional public services. (Tiratelli and Kaye 2020)

The growth of such spontaneous mutual aid projects certainly questioned any lingering idea that ‘there is no such thing as society’ (as Margaret Thatcher once claimed). In some iterations the mutual aid networks saw themselves as consciously working outside the increasingly commodified care market, they saw themselves as coming together to support people, meet their needs and challenge divisive discourses in communities. In this sense, as Solnit suggests, they offer a glimpse of another world where need and supporting people are the priorities of society.

But we shouldn’t over glamorise. Mutual aid projects can also, easily, fit with pro-​marketisation agendas. Local government community mutual aid support groups can be seen, by some, as an alternative to state provision –​ when in reality it is states that have the resources (financial and otherwise) to support communities in need.

The picture, then, can be complex and contradictory!

The webinars set out to explore these themes and the current volume refocuses on many of the issues discussed.

The book is divided in to three sections. Part I sets out the background context to the crisis. Our basic argument is that, from a social work perspective, the crisis has four elements. First, the ecological –​ the consequences of the ‘metabolic rift’, the expansion of industrial agricultural practices, the displacement of farmers from the land has created the conditions where human contact with wild animals becomes ‘normalised’ and the conditions for zoonosis to take place. Second, the epidemiological aspect –​ the consequences of austerity and growing inequality have produced weakened and vulnerable communities more susceptible to the disease. Third, the ideological aspect –​ the years of austerity, privatisation and marketisation have left social care and public health systems catastrophically weakened. Finally, there is the political aspect –​ in those societies suffering most there is the promotion of individual (rather than public and collective) responses, the prioritisation of the economy over public health concerns, indecisive and confused political decision making.

These four elements create the terrain upon which social work agencies and social work practitioners have had to act. Part II looks at the responses of social workers across the globe to the pandemic, drawing out good practice and suggesting new ways of renewing and regenerating social work post-​pandemic. The chapters in this part form a series of nation-​state studies of social work responses.

Finally, Part III looks at some key social work issues. The pandemic saw an increase in domestic violence and reinforced many aspects of women’s oppression. The pandemic hit poor and working-​class communities particularly hard, emphasising that inequality kills. The pandemic exposed institutional racism at the heart of many societies as minority communities were more likely to become ill and more likely to suffer the most serious consequences from the virus.

As we reach the mid-​point of 2020 there is no end in sight to the pandemic. The tentative conclusions and suggestions we include here for a ‘different’ social work will, no doubt, be sharpened and clarified in the weeks and months ahead. But we hope the book will help set the terrain of the debate on social work and the pandemic. One thing we are absolutely committed to: there should be no return to ‘(the social work) business as usual’ once this is over: another social work and another world is possible and necessary.