COVID19: can we rebuild our society based on care?

In just two weeks Northern Ireland, like the rest of the world, has changed beyond measure. Covid-19 has laid bare the systemic flaws in how our society is run. It is also revealing some fundamental truths about who we are.

As the scale of the coronavirus pandemic dawned on us, the more privileged among us rushed out of our offices and set up remote work stations in our comfortable homes. Meanwhile, through a sense of duty, financial necessity or both, others among us ran towards the frontlines instead. Notice who those heroes and heroines are: the retail assistants, the waste collectors, the domestic workers, the community nurses, the carers, from all across our divided community.

When we look around us, what do we see in ourselves and our fellow humans? Alongside our fear, anxiety and uncertainty for the future, the inherent human qualities of solidarity and community are on display, too. These qualities are the bedrock upon which our notions of human rights are built, and codified in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 just three years after the end of the Second World War. Its legally minded drafters may have only clumsily captured our origin story of love and dignity, but it can still be seen threaded through the text. As an activist pointed out to me recently, what does the exhortation that human beings “act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” in UDHR Article 1 refer to, if it is not human solidarity and community?

All week, I’ve found myself thinking of a poem I studied in secondary school. In Dulce et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen turns his ire on those who drive the young towards war with the use of: “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.” (Translation: It is a sweet and beautiful thing to die for your country)

The past 14 days have revealed just how many old lies are use by those in power to sow division and spread immiseration in our societies. The people who have always accepted the narrative that those who rely on Northern Ireland’s social safety net are lazy, have suddenly found they need that safety net themselves as jobs are whipped away from underneath them. The lie that our low-paid workers are “unskilled’ and therefore expendable has been exposed, too, as cleaners, shop assistants and nurses are called on to keep our country running. And the knee-jerk fatalism that told us that Northern Ireland would never amount to more than a ‘‘them and us” tug-of-war society of divided communities has been swept aside by a virus that recognises no religion, no tongue, no political history, no borders.

But if we are to ensure that our newfound solidarity and “caring society” is more than just fine words and social media memes, we must address the fact that in Northern Ireland, as everywhere else in the world, the work of providing care for others has been devalued, disrespected and chronically underpaid. Traditionally carried out by women, it is seen not as “real” work, but as an extension of women’s natural drives – an act of love or duty that somehow excuses the low pay and poor conditions that go along with it. Yet care is, as Ai-Jen Poo says, and as in these coronavirus days we are finding we have to admit, “the work that makes all other work possible”.

My former boss, the late Inez McCormack, was a renowned trade unionist and human rights activist. She worked to organise low-paid women workers in Northern Ireland, mainly cleaners and domestic staff in the Royal, City and Mater hospitals in Belfast. She spoke often of how their work was the fundamental building block of medical care – the provision of hygienic conditions that allowed for successful surgeries, prevented infection and ensured smooth recoveries. Yet these cleaners appeared to be so invisible to the top brass of the hospital staff that on occasion they physically tripped over them. Those in charge literally did not see the women whose work made hospitals’ work possible.

But we see them now. The last week has brought frantic calls by employment agencies looking to fill vacancies in the supply chain: more care workers, more retail assistants, more cleaners. The bitter irony of a call for people willing to put their lives at risk to perform the most important jobs in the country, all for a wage of £8.66 an hour, could not be starker.

So what would it take for us to build a post-Covid19 society based on care?

First, we need an understanding of why care work is undervalued, and the structures that perpetuate it: the patriarchal system on which the State is built; the tax system that relentlessly collects contributions from ordinary workers and yet lets billionaires off scot-free; the welfare system that perpetuates the notion that childcare is women’s work. We need to look inside ourselves, and truthfully re-examine the assumptions we hold about what constitutes valuable work. For those of us who are social justice activists, we must take a close look at our own organisations, which all too often reproduce the practices of the white dominant culture that rewards displays of ideological purity and charismatic leadership over the collective. And we must take a long, hard look at our political leaders, in Northern Ireland and around the world, and remember how much they have much to gain from keeping us divided.

The coronavirus pandemic has brought changes to how we live our daily lives that even a fortnight ago would have seemed unthinkable. Suddenly, much bigger and longer-term changes seem possible. But vested power is already regrouping, as the banks continue to make vast profits, and as our leaders talk of getting the economy “back to normal”.

But we have seen the old lies crumble and systems change overnight. Things cannot remain the same. We must carry the kind of hope that feminist scholar and activist Rebecca Solnit describes Hope in the Dark as the hope of “broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act”. We must make the connections swiftly, and act swiftly, too, but with a renewed sense of the value of care: in our society, in our workplaces and for each other.

The views expressed in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Atlantic Fellows for Social and Economic Equity programme, the International Inequalities Institute, or the London School of Economics and Political Science.