This book addresses the impact of Covid-19 on employment relations and provides a reconstruction and a critical assessment of the measures enacted worldwide to tackle the economic and social crisis triggered by the global health emergency. The pandemic has been a booster of critical issues that for years have been silently shaping society and the labor market and so it can represent an opportunity to relaunch a critical analysis on the future of work. Beginning from this assumption, this book collects contributions from different disciplines, including law, economics and organization theory. It covers topics such as the measures enacted to protect workers’ health and cushion the labour, the new inequalities that emerged during the pandemic and the strategies to construct a sustainable and human-centred development in the post pandemic scenario. It is highly relevant to scholars and students of organisation studies, resilience, the labour market and labour law.

Considering the organisations that have borne the impact of the changes and the challenges to the health sector, Responsible Management of Shifts in Work Modes – Values for a Post Pandemic Future, Volume 1 unpacks what responsible management means, explores future adaptions to heighten responsibility and proffers recommendations.

This book examines teachers’ work in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, where educators grappled with a worldwide virus that profoundly affected teaching and learning. This difficult situation allowed educators and researchers to reflect critically on the enduring labor experiences that persist through this uncertain period, some of them rooted in conditions prevalent long before the pandemic hit. Written from a perspective that cuts across labor studies and education, the book explains how cultural and legally inscribed expectations of teachers have been remarkably impermeable over time. In particular, the volume focuses on the educational transformations that have taken place worldwide since the pandemic occurred, including reduced educational resources, labor strife, and contradictory governmental directives. As the book articulates, these changes affect some of the most persistent educational topics, including student achievement, student health, and teacher satisfaction.

This book explores two unique studies of women’s economic behaviour during Australia’s COVID-19 crisis. The first describes the care ‘frontline’ in the feminised labor sectors of healthcare and education, identifying extreme workload pressures, deteriorating conditions, and a shockingly high incidence of workplace bullying: including women targeting other women workers. The author argues workplace cultures are almost inevitable in Australia’s advanced neoliberal economy, where a patri-colonial legacy continues to devalue and under-resource women’s work. In contrast, a second study of voluntary care provisioning taking place in ‘hyperlocal digital sharing networks’ over the same period identifies very different economic behaviours. Here, women – and occasionally men – instead engage in ‘care-full’ labors of gifting, collective provisioning, and hive mind problem-solving, that align with the gift economy models seen in degrowth theory. This book will interest scholars in gender studies, sociology, and economics, particularly those interested in care work, the gift economy, and women’s labor.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a critical juncture in the development of the welfare state affirming its importance for its citizens’ economic, health and wellbeing, and safety, especially for its most vulnerable populations. It demonstrated that the crisis preparedness that is crucial for an effective protection of its citizens, the ultimate purpose of the welfare state, unquestionably exceeds the narrow horizon of a corporatised welfare industry with its singular focus on the maximisation of profit for the elites and cost containment for the government. Social workers need to engage with the contradictions and tensions that spring from underfunded welfare services and engage in the political struggle over a well-resourced welfare state. Contributors to this book take on this challenge. By tracing the various contradictions of the pandemic, the contributors reflect on new ways of thinking about welfare by exploring what to keep, what to challenge and what to change. By highlighting important challenges for a social justice-focused response as well as exploring the many challenges exposed by the pandemic facing social work for the coming decades, contributors critically outline pathways in social work that might contribute to the shaping of a less cruel and more capable welfare state. Using case-studies from Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, Italy, Slovenia, Estonia, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Canada, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, China and the United States, the book features 19 chapters by leading experts. This book will be of interest to all social work scholars, students and practitioners, as well as those working in social policy and health more broadly.

As the world grapples with the complex impacts of COVID-19, this book provides an urgent critical exploration of how Social Work can and should respond to this global crisis. The book considers the ecological, epidemiological, ideological and political conditions which gave rise to the pandemic, before examining the ways that social work has responded in different nations across the Global North and Global South. This series of nation studies examine good practices and suggest new ways to renew and regenerate social work moving on from COVID-19. Contributors also reflect on the key themes that have emerged, including a rise in domestic violence and the ways that the pandemic has disproportionately affected those in working class and minority communities, exacerbating existing inequalities.

This book develops an examination and critique of human extinction as a result of the ‘next pandemic’ and turns attention towards the role of pandemic catastrophe in the renegotiation of what it means to be human. Nested in debates in anthropology, philosophy, social theory and global health, the book argues that fear of and fascination with the ‘next pandemic’ stem not so much from an anticipation of a biological extinction of the human species, as from an expectation of the loss of mastery over human/non-humanl relations. Christos Lynteris employs the notion of the ‘pandemic imaginary’ in order to understand the way in which pandemic-borne human extinction refashions our understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The book challenges us to think how cosmological, aesthetic, ontological and political aspects of pandemic catastrophe are intertwined. The chapters examine the vital entanglement of epidemiological studies, popular culture, modes of scientific visualisation, and pandemic preparedness campaigns. This volume will be relevant for scholars and advanced students of anthropology as well as global health, and for many others interested in catastrophe, the ‘end of the world’ and the (post)apocalyptic.

The work environment can be considered one of the main determining factors that can influence the mental health of workers, especially as it regards the structural and organizational conditions to which the worker is subjected. This work environment has positive effects when work provides satisfaction and well-being or negative effects provoked by situations of stress, inadequate working patterns and schedules, possible situations of abuse and/or harassment, etc., which may contribute to the appearance of alterations in the mental health of the worker.

Responsible Management of Shifts in Work Modes – Values for Post Pandemic Sustainability, Volume 2 explores ethical leadership, people management, resilience, and the management of consequences for business and healthcare systems.