Neoliberal Opportunism in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Dedication

This Special Section is dedicated to A. H. (Tony) Winefield (1937–2020), Director of the definitive longitudinal (1980–1989) quantitative investigation of the psychological impact of youth unemployment.

The COVID-19 Pandemic

At the time of last updating this editorial (November 16, 2021), the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Centre had recorded 5,106,887 deaths directly attributable to COVID-19 and 253,861,192 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/). These numbers are widely agreed to be underestimates because the sum of likely under-reporting. Simultaneously, Reuters reported 253,576,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally and 5,354,000 deaths caused globally by the new coronavirus (https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/). COVID-19-related deaths and cases are for once without exaggeration truly global in spread having occurred in 215 countries and territories across six continents (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093256/novel-coronavirus-2019ncov-deaths-worldwide-by-country/).

As the SARS-CoV-2 is still aggressively spreading, morphing into new variants, and reoccurring where it has previously occurred, and the deaths and case numbers are remorselessly rising in many countries, the global COVID-19 pandemic is, or at least was at the time of writing, still very much with us rather than in the past.

Global Changes in the “World of Work”

According to Executive Summary of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) World Employment and Social Outlook Trends 2020 Flagship Report (ILO, 2020a; https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_734479.pdf) released January 20, 2020, last accessed October 8, 2021, published before the COVID-19 pandemic was an issue, even in 2019, there were “188 million unemployed across the world” (p. 2) with another 165 million people underemployed (in employment but wanting to work more paid hours) and another 120 million people not employed but not classified as unemployed either who “could potentially enter employment in the near future” (p. 2). The ILO 2020 flagship report summarized, “More than 470 million people worldwide lack adequate access to paid work as such or are being denied the opportunity to work the desired number of hours” (p. 2). Moreover, according to the ILO flagship report, “many of the 3.3 billion employed worldwide in 2019” were “in jobs that are informal, offer low pay and provide little or no access to social protection and rights at work” (p. 3). The ILO 2020 flagship report claimed that 1.4 billion workers in low- and middle-income countries were working under vulnerable conditions and that even in high-income countries, increasing numbers of workers were working under poor working conditions on insecure contracts with low earnings. It continued by claiming that in 2019, more than 630 million workers worldwide were earning “less than US$3.20 per day in purchasing power parity terms” (p. 3) and the number of working poor was predicted to increase during 2020–21. Underemployment and gender-related and age-related labor market inequalities were also flagged up as already problematic in 2019.

Unemployment, unemployment (overt and hidden), underemployment, insecure, precarious, low-paid employment, and labor market inequalities were extensive, increasing, and deeply problematic before the COVID-19 pandemic which was not, and could not be, discursively positioned as responsible for them. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, Schrecker and Bambra (2015) wrote of neoliberal epidemics claiming that “neoliberal politics have made us sick” (p. viii). Neoliberalism is, of course, as Fassin (2018) observed an ambiguous euphemism for capitalism “which is now barely even mentioned by name” (p. 2), noting that within the frame of reference of classical critical social theory, such as that associated with Theodor Adorno, capitalism is positioned “not only as unequal relations of production, but also as a degraded mode of existence” (Fassin, 2018; p. 2). Neoliberal capitalism was responsible for unemployment (overt and covert), underemployment, insecure, precarious, low-paid employment, and labor market inequalities before the COVID-19 pandemic and there is no reason to believe neoliberal capitalism would not be at least as responsible for them during the pandemic too.

The closing of international, state, and other internal borders, the introduction of quarantine, prohibition of unnecessary travel, stay-at-home and work-at-home orders, and closure of nonessential businesses, discursively positioned by politicians and policy makers as intended to slow the spread of the virus by flattening the curve or by eliminating the virus, have also led to forced closures of businesses, reduced demand, reduced hours of employment, and increased unemployment.

On April 29, 2020, ILO (2020b) reported, “The latest ILO data on the labour market impact of the COVID-19 pandemic reveals the devastating effect on hundreds of millions of enterprises worldwide.” The report continues that the ILO expected a “sharp decline in working hours globally …. equivalent to 305 million full-time jobs” due to “the prolongation and extension of lockdown measures.” In addition, the ILO (2020c) claimed the income of informal workers had reduced by 60% in the first month of the economic crisis created by the pandemic and that almost 1.6 billion informal economy workers had “suffered massive damage to their capacity to earn a living … due to lockdown measures and/or because they work in the hardest-hit sectors.”

The reduction in global working hours in 2020 reported by the ILO was composed of both unemployment and reduced working hours for employed people. According to the ILO, there were “global employment losses in 2020 of 114 million jobs relative to 2019” (ILO, 2021a; p. 2). However, global unemployment increased only by 33 million!

The definition of unemployment specified by ILO is used by most countries including Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) members and the Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat) to identify and count unemployed people. It operationalizes the number of unemployed people through the use of a survey in which only those people are discursively positioned as unemployed who are without a (paid) job, have actively sought employment in the survey reference period, and are available to start employment in the following 2 weeks (or are out of work but have found a job and are waiting to start it within the following 2 weeks). Crucially, if a person fails to show evidence of active job search, they are not counted as unemployed.

According to the ILO definition, a person is also regarded as employed – so not recorded as unemployed – if they are on a zero hours employment contract; insecurely employed in the gig economy, employed for only 1 hour per week; participating in an activation program as a condition of State financial support, and so on.

OECD, Eurostat, and unemployment figures of most governments based upon them should always be regarded as massively underestimating the number of people who are not employed, want to be employed, and understand themselves to be unemployed. Note that failure to engage in active job search might occur in any time period for a variety of reasons, including the belief that there are no vacancies to search for, belief that one is unlikely to be employed due to discriminatory hiring practices even if one found a job vacancy, poor personal health/well-being, and discouragement following repeated rebuffs after job applications. However, in the wake of the pandemic, we also can observe that following health advice to socially distance makes active job search difficult, especially those who use social and kinship networks to find jobs; that active job search during government stipulated and policed lockdowns is almost impossible to do; and that active job search when lockdowns are lifted but potential employing organizations are still closed due to policy measures or not taking on staff due to low product or service demand is pointless. As Pultz et al. (2021) report in this special section, even the Danish Minister of Employment admitted that it was only fair to suspend job search and interview obligations during the COVID-19 pandemic, if only temporarily, “since the lockdown was ‘obviously making it harder to find a job.’”

In January 2021, the ILO (2021a) reported that 8.8% of global working hours were lost in 2020, compared with the last quarter of 2019, “equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs” (p. 1), four times the number of working hours lost during the Global Financial Crisis of 2009.

In late September 2021, in a press release (ILO, 2021c), the ILO reported that “The impact of the pandemic on the world of work, among other factors, increased the number of extremely poor by between 119 and 224 million people – the first increase in poverty in over 21 years,” while noting that the “wealth of billionaires increased by over US$ 3.9 trillion between March and December 2020.”

Global Changes in the “Personal Lives”

The scale of COVID-19 cases and deaths is shocking in itself. However, the astronomical scale and toxic nature of the wider public health disaster unfolding during the COVID-19 disaster is even more alarming, given (a) that unemployment, underemployment, insecure, precarious, casual employment, and employment-related poverty in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, affecting people across the board but disproportionately adversely affecting women, migrant, casual and marginal workers, are astronomical in scale and (b) that there has long been widespread international agreement that unemployment (Eisenberg & Lazarsfeld, 1938; Feather, 1990; Fryer & Payne, 1986; Jahoda, 1982; Jahoda et al., 1972; Warr, 1987; Winefield et al., 1993), precarious employment (Standing, 2011), poverty (Townsend, 1979), inequality (Wilkinson, 1996), and neoliberalism (Schrecker & Bambra, 2015) are responsible in some sense for even wider scale of misery, morbidity, and mortality.

The Frames of Reference Brought by the Guest Editors to This Special Section

While each of the diverse contributors to this Special Section, based variously in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Denmark, the United States, and Scotland, brought their own particular expertise, frames of reference, and interpretative repertoires to the construction of their contributions, the Special Section exhibits distinctive collective commitments to activism or applied critical theory, or both.

The collective commitments characterizing this Special Section are, in part, a function of the frames of reference brought to the Special Section by the Guest Editors which structured the call for papers and guided editorial decisions which shaped the Special Section.

Although the Guest Editors are in agreement that involuntary unemployment in particular and labor market processes more generally are “responsible,” in some sense, for individual misery, morbidity, and mortality and family, community, and broader social problems (Fryer, 2019a; Fryer et al., 2020) and although they agree that intervention to address what is responsible is urgently needed, the Guest Editors' resistance to and rejection of dominant mainstream discourses and practices regarding how such responsibility should be understood and what the implications are for effective, socially just, intervention, also structured the call for papers and guided editorial decisions which shaped the Special Section.

More specifically, the call for papers was worked up and issued jointly by Cathy McCormack and David Fryer.

Cathy is an author, broadcaster, film maker, popular educator, and most importantly, in connection with this Special Section, a seasoned community activist, who has been engaged at the intersection of housing justice, poverty, inequality, and community health, since the early 1980s. Cathy coined the term “war without bullets” to describe the assault on her community via material disadvantage, poverty, inequality, and unemployment. Cathy's dawning experience of this was in the form of ill-designed and built public housing blighted by cold, damp, and fungal spore infestation, which seriously adversely affected the health of her own children and of many other children in her community. Cathy's requests for improvement to the housing stock were met by victim blaming positioning of the cause of dampness. Cathy rejected proffered pharmacological fixes for her distress and committed herself instead to community activism to protect her community. In solidarity with other tenants and health-researcher-allies, Cathy and her community participated in pioneering tenant-led research linking the community's ill-designed and maintained cold, damp, moldy housing with physical and mental illness of children and adults. This was successfully used in court to defend cases for compensation, repair, and rehousing; was taken up by the Minister of State for Housing in Scotland, the Scottish Grand Committee in the UK Parliament; and, eventually, formed the basis of a successful application for European and Scottish funding which allowed the tenants in Cathy's community to commission interdisciplinary teams – working under the control of tenants – to design, build, and install thermal retrofit in existing housing, which simultaneously promoted community health, reduced community poverty, and reduced carbon dioxide emission responsible for toxic climate change (Jones & McCormack, 2016; Lloyd et al., 2008; Martin & McCormack, 1999; McCormack, 1988, 1993, 2009, 2011a, 2011b, 2013).

David has been engaged with knowledge-work at the intersection of (un)employment, the psy-complex, and community since the early 1980s. David has carried out and published mainstream positivist quantitative research (e.g. Fryer & McKenna, 1988; Fryer & Warr, 1984), mainstream qualitative research (e.g. Fryer & McKenna, 1987; Fryer & Payne, 1984), integrative reviews of the literature (e.g. Fryer, 2014, 2019a; Fryer & Payne, 1986; Fryer & Stambe, 2015), popularized Marie Jahoda's work (Fryer, 1986a, 1987), subjected Marie Jahoda's work to critique (Fryer, 1986b, 1986c), and offered an alternative approach (agency restriction; Fryer, 1986b; Fryer & Payne, 1986). Winefield et al. (1993; p. 22) summarized agency restriction as follows: “Agency theory stresses the proactive and enterprising aspect of human nature, as well as people's desire and ability to plan for themselves.” More recently, David has critiqued and rejected mainstream modernist approaches and is increasingly associated with a post-Foucauldian frame of reference in which unemployment and the immiserated unemployed subject are discursively positioned as simultaneously constituted as two faces of one phenomenon, manifestations of neoliberal social violence necessary to constitute neoliberal labor market subjects which function optimally in the interests of capital (Fryer, in press, 1985, 2019a; Fryer & Stambe, 2015, 2014a, 2014b; Fryer et al., 2020).

David and Cathy have been working together intermittently since the 1980s (e.g. Fryer, 2019b; Fryer & McCormack, 2011, 2013).

Together, Cathy and David brought to the Special Section commitments to making the war without bullets more evident and resisting it and rejecting individualistic victim blaming intervention and prevention in favor of collective political resistance and rejection of problematic mainstream acritical approaches. They specifically invited contributions from community activists, critical social theorists, emancipatory disability researchers, ethnographers of the modern subject, feminists, governmentality researchers, Marxists, psychoanalysts, and queer theorists as well as more mainstream positivist researchers from all relevant social science disciplines.

Cathy and David specifically flagged up submissions which explicitly address interconnections between global changes in the “world of work” and “personal lives” in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and how such interconnections should be understood; practical implications of their approach will be especially welcomed. “World of work” and “personal lives” were intentionally placed in scare quotes to indicate that everyday assumption about them need not be taken for granted, reflecting important contemporary work by ethnographers of the modern subject like Biehl et al. (2007) into “the ways in which inner processes are reshaped amid economic and political reforms, violence and social suffering,” “personal lives” are “undone and remade,” and how “capital accumulation and governance occur(s) through the remaking of culture as well as the inner transformations of the human subject” (Biehl et al., 2007, p. 5).

The Contributions to This Special Section

The three contributions to this Special Section each make particular and wider points important within the authors' frame of reference, but below we draw attention to the aspects of the contributions particularly relevant to this Special Section.

In Transformative Collaborations: How a Motherscholar Research Collective Survived and Thrived During COVID-19, The Motherscholar Collective, Colleen C. Myles-Baltzly, Helen K. Ho, Ivanna Richardson, Jennifer Greene-Rooks, Katharina A. Azim, Kathryn E. Frazier, Maggie Campbell-Obaid, Meike Eilert, and Stacey R. Lim outline the context within which a “radical feminist,” collaborative research collective was formed by academic mothers with young children (Motherscholar Collective et al., 2021). This context was one in which the COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities for neoliberalized university managers and academic staff to make existing gender-based inequities in the workforce even worse by creating the conditions under which women were disproportionately purged from the paid workforce and by the COVID-19 pandemic being used as a pretext to deploy policies and practices which exacerbated inequalities between academic women and academic mothers, inequalities already evident before COVID-19 pandemic, but exacerbated during it. The authors then describe how an unfunded, multidisciplinary, nonhierarchical, nonhomogeneous, radical feminist, collaborative research collective was formed by academic mothers with young children (“motherscholars”) to investigate the reactionary use of the COVID-19 pandemic to negatively affect the world of work and personal lives of academic mothers with young children and to proactively tackle disabling constraints faced by mothers in academia. The Motherscholar Collective was diverse in terms of disciplinary specialization, career stage, age, and, while mostly white and heterosexual, did also include motherscholars of color, motherscholars with disabilities, LGBTQ+ -identifying motherscholars, and single motherscholars. Research done by the collective supported claims that membership of and participation in the Collective validated and empowered members' personal lives and professional world of work, maximized “harmonious integration of their professional and personal identities” (Motherscholar Collective, et al., 2021, p. 208), and restored rich and sustainable personal lives. The researchers thus contributed to the development of an innovative, effective, progressive intervention in relation to reactionary implications of changes in the world of work for personal lives for motherscholars in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as called for in the Guest Editors' Call for papers.

In Academic activism in the wake of a pandemic: A collective self-reflection from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Luke Oldfield, RituParna Roy, Aimee Simpson, Apriel Jolliffe Simpson, and Leon A. Salter describe the resistance of casualized academic activists to opportunistic neoliberalized university management restructuring, deceptively discursively positioned by higher education institution (HEI) managers as socially responsible, innovative policy and practice in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Oldfield et al., 2021). In particular, the researchers document how far they could, despite diminished solidarity among “early career” and tenured academics, challenge the increasingly exploitative nature of precarious academic work by, themselves, taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst for mobilization of discontent and resistance among the academic precariat. Crucially, the researchers illuminated how the pandemic was utilized to accelerate and intensify the exploitation of precarious workers. In line with the Call for papers, the researchers drew on a range of transdisciplinary critical resources, including Foucauldian and Lacanian theory, and engaged methodologically in critically informed ways using a collective self-reflective method, collaborative auto-ethnography, to develop and deploy an effective progressive intervention in relation to opportunistic reactionary changes made by neoliberalized university management in the world of work and personal lives of early career academics, aka casualized staff, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Planning for a Job: The Trying Experience of Unemployment During the Covid-19 Crisis in Denmark, Sabina Pultz, Magnus Paulsen Hansen, and Helene Jepson report the results of investigating a “natural experiment” which afforded them an opportunity to illuminate both implications for the experience of unemployed people and “the workings of activation policies” during periods in Denmark during the COVID-19 pandemic when “activation and conditionality in the employment system” was temporarily partially or entirely suspended (Pultz et al., 2021). Labor market activation policies and instruments are summarized by Pultz et al. (2021, p. 228), Hansen, and Jepson as “concerned with how to govern the behaviour of the unemployed through economic incentives, individual action plans, job search obligations, interviews, activation courses, etc., and if needed, through coercive measures of control and sanctioning…legitimised and permeated by a moral economy” to “create a certain kind of subject” (“subjectification”). Their work is, to some extent, then, in the tradition of Foucault's work on governmentality (Foucault, 2007). Like Fryer (1986b), they approach the unemployed as actively engaging in a composite and versatile environment: “Our study points out the agency and reflexive competences” of the unemployed. Like Fryer (2019a), the authors reject assumptions of causal relationships between reified categories of “employment” and “mental health” and are instead concerned with answering questions about the constitution of the unemployed subject.

Global Changes in the “World of Work” and “Personal Lives” in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Integrating and Projecting From Special Section

Crises are often discursively positioned as “apolitical,” “natural” events, but crises are largely, socially constituted, and so re-constitutable and serve the interest of particular interest groups. The COVID-19 pandemic, with its associated severity of illness and death, is often presented as an apolitical biomedical crisis – an inevitable result of a novel virus encountering bodies without resistance to it. However, the COVID-19 pandemic is arguably at least as politically and ideologically as it is biomedically constituted. Neoliberal capitalist governments have deployed policies which have created and exacerbated mass, and growing, poverty, widened material and health inequalities, terminally disinvested in and run-down health and social services, ruthlessly – if sometimes stealthily – privatized the levers of public health and illness in the name of the free market, and enthusiastically adopted and implemented neoliberal capitalist austerity policies (Fryer & Stambe, 2014b; Schrecker & Bambra, 2015). The above are central to the political and ideological constitution of the pandemic crisis.

Politicians – from the Australian Prime Minister (https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/are-we-really-all-in-this-together-prime-minister-20210908-p58pqi.html) to the President of the United States – have claimed, “We are all in this together” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-rally-biden-pledges-to-unite-the-country-were-all-in-this-together/2019/05/18/49bcd71e-78dc-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html). However, some are clearly more in this than others. It is clear that misery, morbidity, and mortality associated with COVID-19 are socially, and so politically, structured. To give but one example, there are marked racial disparities in both confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths in all regions of the United States, with higher rates of both among African Americans. Coughlin et al. (2020), the researchers responsible for these findings, suggest that a variety of pre-existing factors are likely to underpin such disparities, including poverty due to low-wage jobs and/or unemployment, lack of health insurance, lack of paid sick leave, employment requiring continual interaction with the public which cannot be done from isolation at home, substandard housing, overcrowded neighborhoods, pre-existing chronic diseases that increase the risk of COVID-19 mortality, and so on. Moreover, the ILO (2021a) note there are “massive job losses” in some sectors and jobs' growth in other sectors; uneven provision of income support across the workforce; and “job destruction has disproportionately affected low-paid and low-skilled jobs;” and these three factors are likely to lead to “still greater inequality in the coming years” (p. 2).

The deleterious labor market experience and mental health crisis is even more clearly a socially constituted rather than natural crisis. For example, although in the executive summary of World Employment and Social Outlook: The role of digital labour platforms in transforming the world of work, the International Labour Organisation (ILO, 2021b) claims that: “since March 2020, the COVID‐19 pandemic has led to an increase in remote-working arrangements”, the increase in specific forms of remote working owes at least as much to employers acting in their own interests as it does to the pandemic. The ILO notes that digital labor platforms have facilitated employers' access to a global pool of diversely skilled employees from around the world and more profitable organizational performance, not least because many remote employees are recruited from the nondeveloped world and paid less than local employees from the developed world. Moreover, ILO (2021b) also notes that the rise in digital labor platforms has revealed threats to employees' “regularity of work and income, working conditions, social protection, skills utilization, freedom of association … and the right to collective bargaining” (p. 2) as well as to surveillance, observing “digital labour platforms tend to unilaterally shape the governance architecture within the platform … this form of governance allows platforms to exercise considerable control over platform workers' freedom to work” (p. 4).

Motherscholar Collective et al. (2021) reveal how the COVID-19 pandemic had provided opportunities for existing gender-based inequities in the workforce to be made even worse, resulting in academic mothers being disproportionately marginalized within or purged from the paid workforce and as a cover to exacerbate inequalities between academic women and academic mothers, inequalities already evident before COVID-19 pandemic.

Oldfield et al. (2021) reveal how reactionary restructuring further damaging the, already damaged, interest of casual academic workers was opportunistically discursively repositioned by neoliberalized management as socially responsible, innovative, policy and practice in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and attempted to divide and conquer by practices which functioned to undermine solidarity between early career and tenured academics.

Pultz et al. (2021) empirically and theoretically interrogate how activation policies and instruments are deployed to conduct the conduct of the unemployed, drawing on Foucault's work on governmentality and subjectification and rejecting assumptions of causal relationships between reified categories of employment and mental health.

Whereas classic neoliberalism is widely regarded as a political rationality inscribing deregulation and absolute nonintervention, as Foucault recognized, contemporary “neoliberal governmental intervention is no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than in any other system. It has to intervene on society as such, in its fabric and depth” (Foucault, 2008, p. 145). This neoliberal intervention includes the establishment and maintenance of apparatuses that re-subjectify the neoliberal labor market subject as “unemployed,” “underemployed,” and “precariously employed” socially and historically produced subjects. A network of interconnected socially constituted elements, a network whose primary function is to control inflation, reduce wage costs, discipline those in work, etc., simultaneously constitutes the contemporary neoliberal labor market subject in such ways as to (re)produce the immiserated, compliant, human means of production required by capitalist employers, shareholders, and government within the contemporary version of neoliberal capitalism, while simultaneously constituting the material want, relative poverty, stigma, bureaucratic violence, and so on, actively constituted to be central to the lived experience of the neoliberal labor market subject.

Employment in neoliberal as in classic capitalist societies is a means through which wealth in the form of surplus value is extracted by owners of the means of production from the labor of others, who only own, so can only sell, their capacity to labor. Neoliberalism, like classic capitalism, requires the creation and maintenance of a reserve army of labor to discipline the employed, restrain wage demands, undermine calls for improved working conditions, control inflation, and so on.

To ensure members of the reserve army of unemployed labor remain active competitors for poorly paid jobs under poor working conditions, they must be continuously (re)constituted as the compliant, human means of production. As Althusser asserted, capitalism requires “the reproduction of labour power … not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of the established order” (Althusser, 1971, pp. 127–128): compliant docile workers and would-be workers who govern themselves in the interests of capitalism. While mass unemployment, both overt and covert, and associated active labour market interventions can be expected to persist for the foreseeable future, the constitution of the neoliberal labor market subject willing to tolerate precarious, insecure, temporary, part-time, poverty-stricken employment, unprotected by trades unions, while competing for less toxic employment, may soon remove the neoliberal need for mass activated unemployment to discipline the employed workforce.