Previous articleNext article FreeThere and Back Again: A Commentary on Social Welfare Policy in the Wake of 2020Jennifer Romich and Maria Y. RodriguezJennifer RomichUniversity of Washington Search for more articles by this author and Maria Y. RodriguezUniversity at Buffalo (SUNY) Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTwo catastrophes shaped economic and social life in 2020. The quick-moving COVID-19 pandemic severely wounded economies and social institutions. In the United States, workplace shutdowns disrupted earnings for many workers as unemployment quadrupled over 2 months, with the official unemployment rate rising from 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.7% in April 2020 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). At the same time, police killings of Black Americans brought public outrage and widespread awareness of America’s enduring racism. This second catastrophe—hundreds of years in the making—has held back our collective well-being, with harms falling most heavily on Black and Indigenous communities (McGhee, 2019).In this commentary, we draw on social welfare scholarship to offer thoughts on the current moment, focusing on the economic recession that began in February 2020. How vulnerable were Americans to the pandemic’s economic effects? What policy steps improved, failed to improve, or worsened the situation? And—most crucially—how should we move forward?In the U.S. context, questions about the economy are often questions about the intersections of race and class. The most striking effects of the pandemic lie at the same intersection. Many of the institutions shaping the response to COVID-19 also shape—and are shaped by—the American social policies critiqued by critical race theorists and the Black Lives Matter movement as upholding white supremacy (Kolivoski et al., 2014; McCoy, 2020).Despite its limitations, social welfare policy scholarship provides insight into how we could address the current moment and build a more equitable future. Social welfare scholarship is principally concerned with naming the systemic chasms in our society and investigating inclusive ways to fill them. For example, the Grand Challenges for Social Work have attempted to provide a frame with which to understand the most pressing social issues while arguing for social policy as a key mechanism for change (Padilla & Fong, 2016). Our field emphasizes organized communal strategies, typically in the form of government programs and actions, in contrast with individualist solutions that rely on markets to allocate resources via interactions between buyers and sellers. Indeed, the social work profession originated in direct response to the market failures of the industrial revolution, with foundational work of the time documenting the disparate conditions of that era’s essential workers. For example, the papers and maps of the residents of Hull House (1895) chronicled the living and working conditions among laborers on Chicago’s near west side, including crowded tenements, sweatshops without fire escapes, and workers deformed from long hours of hunched labor. These findings served as the basis for some social policy reforms we still enjoy today, including child labor laws and public sanitation regulations.The insights of early social work leaders were not without key omissions, as contributions of Black social workers and other marginalized voices were ignored or suppressed (Carlton-LaNey, 1999; Fredriksen-Goldsen et al., 2009). The dominant views of social work’s founders and subsequent generations have consistently reflected able-bodied, cisgender, white, heterosexual, patriarchal values regarding who is allowed to navigate systems, on what terms, and ultimately who deserves the full slate of rights in the United States. This has been seen at many points in our history, including in the early rhetoric conflating racialized immigrants’ living conditions with moral failings (Park & Kemp, 2006), the exclusion of Black and other workers of color from the Social Security Act (Rodems & Schaefer, 2016; Stoetz, 2016), the forced removal of children from Native families (Evans-Campbell & Campbell, 2011), and the policing of women’s sexuality as a condition of cash assistance (Gordon, 1994; Kunzel, 1993). The challenges of the current moment demand that we do better by recentering populations who are most marginalized in our conversations and investigations (Herrenkohl et al., 2020).Prepandemic Systemic VulnerabilitiesAlthough the mass unemployment and economic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic were perhaps unforeseen, their effects are exacerbated by longstanding and racialized disparities in economic and policy structures (described in Henly et al., 2018). Inequalities in worker pay, health-related benefits, and workplace power hastened the spread of the virus as low-paid workers and those without health insurance or paid time off had to work despite risks to themselves and others. Pandemic-related shutdowns exposed society’s reliance on historically disparaged or underrecognized forms of labor. For example, workers were quickly sorted into “essential” or nonessential categories, the latter working safely from their homes while the former ensured that food was available and stores remained stocked, that hospitals were cleaned, and that the workers doing these tasks could take transit to work. Importantly, Black workers disproportionately hold front-line jobs that expose them to greater health risks. Although just under 12% of all workers are Black, Black workers constitute 26% of public transit workers and 17.5% of health care workers (Gould & Wilson, 2020). Workers along every step of the food supply chain—also predominantly workers of color, including Latinx immigrants—took on new importance without gaining adequate protections at work (Farmworker Justice, 2020). These workers include agricultural laborers, slaughterhouse and meat plant workers, truckers, warehouse workers, and grocery store employees. The pandemic heightened the dangers of these roles and also exposed the conditions of the settings in which this work is carried out.Extreme racialized wealth inequality also hindered capacity to withstand economic disruption. Prepandemic, over a third of U.S. households could not cover an unexpected $400 expense (Federal Reserve Board of Governors, 2019). When the pandemic interrupted jobs, it caused immediate hardship for families without savings to buffer the lost income. Further, which Americans do—or do not—have savings reflects racialized policies. Wealth inequality is baked into the history of the United States—a country built on Native land with the forced labor of enslaved Africans (Darity & Mullen, 2020; Walters, 2019). Over the past several decades, America’s wealth—cash savings, property, and business ownership—has become increasingly concentrated. Half of Americans collectively own less than 2% of all wealth in the United States, and in the past 30 years, the share of wealth held by the least wealthy half of Americans has decreased from 3.6% in 1990 to 1.8% in 2020 (Federal Reserve Board of Governors, 2020). Yet, American political forces align against redistributive measures, often because such measures are seen as disproportionately benefiting people of color (Quadagno, 1994).These historic forces manifested immediate hardships when the pandemic hit. For instance, food insecurity rose sharply during the pandemic’s early months, with an estimated one in three families with children at risk of not having enough to eat (Schanzenbach & Tomeh, 2020). Spending dropped most dramatically in Black households (Ganong et al., 2020) as inequities in housing markets and policies further destabilized foundations. The longstanding home mortgage interest deduction has made homeownership the greatest vehicle of wealth creation in the country, with real estate comprising a household’s most valuable asset (McCabe, 2016). The 2008 foreclosure crisis served as a hard-learned lesson on the economic impact of homeownership. The foreclosure crisis disproportionately impacted communities of color (Aalbers, 2009; Brueckner et al., 2012; Hall et al., 2015), and policy interventions failed to prevent the racially/ethnically biased predatory lending practices that precipitated it (Collins et al., 2013; Rodriguez, 2020). Approximately 19.4% of Latinx and 12.7% of Black homeowners nationally experienced foreclosure between 2007 and 2015 (Mikhitarian, 2019), a devastating share considering that 73.1% and 61.8% of Latinx and Black household wealth, respectively, was tied to real estate.Meanwhile, renters were faced with dramatic increases in market-rate prices when production of affordable units decreased and housing prices increased. As a result, renters were at high risk of homelessness when faced with a life or income shock (Curtis et al., 2013). Although the pandemic has lessened demand for rentals, the cost of rent has dropped only about $5 per month nationally between March and June 2020 (Zillow Research, 2020). People of color comprise a disproportionate share of renters, who are more likely than homeowners to face increasing housing costs and less likely to have wealth to weather any income shock. As a result, Black and Latinx households are more likely to double-up and live with two or more families in the same housing unit (Pilkauskas et al., 2014). These housing market inequities have poignant pandemic-era implications, as was seen for instance in COVID-19 spread due to overcrowded housing conditions (Jones & Grigsby-Toussaint, 2020; Neal & McCargo, 2020).Immediate ResponsesThe early federal pandemic response—the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and the Economic Security (CARES) Act (2020) and the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA, 2020)—contained several major expansions of inclusions and rights, including some efforts long supported by economic justice advocates. First, Pandemic Unemployment Assistance extended unemployment protection to some groups of workers previously excluded from the Unemployment Insurance system. Newly eligible groups included part-time and gig workers, such as rideshare and delivery drivers who work on major app platforms. Overall, an estimated 11 million workers received benefits only due to the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance expansions (Stone, 2020). Recipients of Unemployment Insurance benefits—long seen as inadequate, particularly in southern states (Chang, 2020)—received a temporary $600 per week increase through a related measure, although Congress allowed this benefit to expire after the initial 4 months. Importantly, these benefits were not extended to undocumented workers, though they comprise large portions of the workforce in the agricultural, food, and service sectors. For instance, close to half of hired crop farmworkers in the U.S. lack legal authorization (U.S. Department of Agriculture, 2020).Second, the FFCRA included the United States’ first federal paid family leave and sick leave provisions. Workers who got sick or were required or advised to quarantine qualified for 2 weeks of paid medical leave. Parents or other caregivers could also qualify for up to 12 weeks of expanded leave to care for children whose school or childcare was unavailable for pandemic-related reasons. Unfortunately, these acts excluded some small employers as well as employers with more than 500 employees, a compromise influenced by concerns over cost as well as lobbying by major employer groups. Nevertheless, paid leave is important for preventing material hardship (Ybarra et al., 2019), and even temporary paid leave represents a major step forward for a country that heretofore largely relied on employers voluntarily granting workers leave. Permitting employers to decide which employees receive leave favors higher-status workers and disproportionately leaves workers of color—who can least afford to not work—without paid time off for illness or caregiving (Gould & Wilson, 2020).Third, the CARES Act also added protections to stabilize housing, albeit temporarily and without reducing debt. As of late November 2020, about 1 in 5 households paying rent and one in 10 homeowners paying mortgages were behind in payments (author calculations based on U.S. Census Bureau, 2020). For homeowners, the CARES Act temporarily banned foreclosure proceedings. However, homeowners must pay back the sum total of missed payments at some point during the life of the loan—with interest. For renters, the CARES Act placed a moratorium on evictions in federally subsidized rental housing, and various states and localities levied their own moratoriums beyond these, but rent is still due. Further, although federal housing tenants may be eligible for rent reductions, market-rate renters have no such programs available. As a whole, eviction moratoriums and mortgage forbearances reflect a policy consensus that market rules have to be changed in order to preserve people’s rights to remain in housing. These policy measures temporarily bolster the power of renters and borrowers relative to more powerful landlords and lenders. However, if policymakers allow these measures to expire, renters and homeowners will need to pay rent and mortgage arrears or face eventual eviction/foreclosure.This Era Can Yield Big ReformsCan we sustain and further expand these emergency efforts? Progressive Era labor standards and the Social Security Act of 1935 emerged in response to the economic fallout of the Great Depression. Will the current era yield a new—and even more inclusive—social contract? There is no roadmap out of a 21st century pandemic. We do not yet know what the economy will look like at the point in which a vaccine or other development limits the medical risk of COVID-19, nor do we know precisely when that will be. Although we do not yet know the endgame for the current pandemic, history suggests that the threat of COVID-19 will fade long before the enduring effects of systemic racism recede (McCoy, 2020).In a context of pandemic-related uncertainty and failure to meaningfully address racism, we believe that policy prescriptions should address both the economic and social effects of the pandemic and structural racism. The aftermath of 2020 is a time for imagining and building a more sound and just foundation for our country. Social workers and social welfare researchers should promote innovative policy solutions, advance methodologies to center the needs and circumstances of marginalized populations, and—most crucially—continue to ask the questions that define our field’s work: Who has power, who is left out, and through what mechanisms? How can we build more inclusive structures? These questions should guide both scholarship and practice.Times of crisis can move policy quickly, and solutions once considered fringe might gain political traction. Social work should support Black Americans’ long-ignored call for asset-based reparations (Darity & Mullen, 2020), which could both eliminate the racial wealth gap and spur overall economic growth. We should also continue to explore ideas such as a federal jobs guarantee (Paul et al., 2018), comprehensive child allowances (Shaefer et al., 2018), and universal basic income (Caputo & Lewis, 2016). Following targeted universal design principles (powell et al., 2019) could make such tools both antirecessionary and antiracist. Targeted universalist design calls for a combination of universal goals (e.g., all households have adequate income for basic needs) and population-specific methods (e.g., payments based in part on historic harms) for reaching those goals.Social work should also use more innovative methods to examine social problems and solutions. For example, expanding our use of social media data to access lived-experience narratives inaccessible with traditional data acquisition mechanisms (Rodriguez & Storer, 2020) could lead to better, more scalable interventions. Social work scholars and practitioners, particularly those invested in implementing interventions at scale, would do well to avail themselves of the many advances in computational research methods. These methods allow for the use of vast amounts of unsolicited data, which—when adhering to a high standard of ethical social science research conduct—can advance analysis toward causal claims (Egami et al., 2018). Similarly, communicating research in new ways can help influence decisionmakers. For instance, evaluators of a Stockton, CA, guaranteed income experiment combined participatory action research methods with an online dashboard to display qualitative and quantitative findings that community members deemed important (Martin-West et al., 2019; Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, 2019).Specific solutions and methods are secondary to policy goals, however, and a strength of our field rests in critical policy analysis. One set of questions concerns rights and limits within markets. Will America maintain its prioritization of market solutions as it did with the turn toward neoliberalism in the later decades of the 20th century (Abramovitz, 2012), prioritizing the needs of financial institutions and organized corporate interests over grassroots well-being? Or, will new efforts reset the balance of power within the market, tilting future policies toward enforcing and expanding the rights of those with less power? Our field can analyze how proposed changes to market regulations affect those at the lower rungs of capitalist ladders, including low-paid workers, caregivers, renters, and borrowers. At the same time, we should examine the nature, structure, and effectiveness of collectivist policy responses, ongoing and new. How are federal, state, and local programs and policies changing, and what are the implications of these changes for individual and community well-being?Finally, we should specifically question how well these rules and policies work for those who are marginalized on the basis of their age, gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, immigration status, class, or intersections of these identities. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2020) wrote about this in her reflection on the intersectional Black feminist theory of the Combahee River Collective of the 1970s, titled “Until Black Women are Free, None of Us will be Free.” As Taylor asserted, systems that fail the marginalized will reinforce division and inequality for everyone. Together, demands for collective responses, increasing the influence of the less powerful, and designing policies for full inclusion will move our postpandemic world toward a richer conceptualization of justice in which systems are designed to work for those furthest from full material and social inclusion.AcknowledgmentsThe authors would like to acknowledge Hamdi Abdi and the employees at the University of Buffalo Early Childhood Research Center for their labor during the preparation of this manuscript.NotesJennifer Romich, PhD, is a professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work.Maria Y. 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