key: cord-0055454-cicu9hvw
authors: Deakin, Simon; Novitz, Tonia
title: Covid-19, Labour Law, and the Renewal of the Social State
date: 2020-12-04
journal: nan
DOI: 10.1093/indlaw/dwaa028
sha: aacb147edd789e3f2e8657fe2cda14e5d9a8e641
doc_id: 55454
cord_uid: cicu9hvw

nan

hospitals could be built but not effectively staffed. 8 Untried (if 'innovative') high-tech solutions to contact tracing were preferred over the communitybased 'find, test, trace, isolate and support' systems recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). 9 The prospect of mass unemployment was only averted by a job retention scheme modelled on mainland European practice, but without the conditions imposed elsewhere regarding protection of jobs. 10 That scheme was in the course of being run down and replaced by a flawed alternative at the very moment when, predictably, seasonal conditions led to a resurgence of infections; it subsequently had to be revived. 11 There were successes. The country's adaptable and well-funded science base was among the first in the world to identify effective treatments 12 and trial experimental vaccines. 13 The resilience of the National Health Service was once again demonstrated, along with the overriding importance of treating healthcare as a public good. 14 Community-level compliance with social distancing norms remained high, refuting predictions of 'pandemic fatigue' . 15 But as the country entered an unpredictable 'second wave' in the autumn of 2020, hard questions about the nature and direction of its management of the emergency could not be avoided.

In their paper 'Covid-19 and the Failure of Labour Law', Keith Ewing and John Hendy demonstrate British labour law's systematic failure to protect workers against the social, economic and psychological effects of the December 2020 Editorial 495 crisis. The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, apparently 'generous' , was in practice 'law without rights': managerial prerogative was left unchallenged and social dialogue marginalised. It did nothing to prevent employers resorting to large-scale redundancies and 'fire and re-hire' policies in an attempt to assert control during a period of weakness for organised labour. Sick pay schemes were inadequate to cope with rising demand and gaps emerged in the support provided for the large 'self-employed' , but in practice economically vulnerable, workforce. Health and safety laws failed to address the pressures being placed on the millions still working in health, transport and distribution. These findings, disturbing as they are for anyone concerned about labour law as a discipline and practice, should be no cause for surprise: they describe the predictable result of a governing ideology in which safety at work became 'red tape' , employment rights a 'burden on business' , and social security a 'dependency culture' .

Simon Deakin and Gaofeng Meng's paper 'The Governance of Covid-19' makes a number of points about the management of the emergency by states and international organisations. The first is that pandemics are not random events: on the contrary, they are the foreseeable result of trends in human behaviour which include the increasingly global movement of goods and persons and extreme exploitation of the natural environment. Second, the measures taken to address the spread of the disease in those countries which have so far been able to control it were, in principle, well understood. Community-based test and trace systems were not just well known in Britain, but in some cases originated here; one of them, which later became the basis for the worldwide eradication of smallpox, is even known as the 'Leicester model' . Third, the nature of the measures taken in the city of Wuhan in the early weeks of the epidemic there have been consistently misunderstood and misrepresented outside China. The holistic 'all-ofgovernment, all-of-society' approach adopted by Chinese authorities mirrored that previously recommended by the WHO for the management of disease: build community-level support for control measures while using the powers of the state to direct resources and personnel to the most vulnerable groups. China does not pretend to be a rule of law state along Western lines. But seeking to explain China's approach in terms of its party-state model of governance is as dangerous for the West as pointing to its 'Confucian' culture is uninformative. Democracies around the world and countries of many different cultures have succeeded in limiting the spread of disease through measures which should have been familiar to British policy makers, since their predecessors invented them. And the thread running through the history of disease control in this country was, until recently, its close integration with the solidaristic management of risk which characterises a welfare or social state.

In 2020, a landmark text for understanding the roots of the European welfare state, François Ewald's L'État Providence, 16 was published in a new English translation as The Birth of Solidarity. 17 Is it too soon to see in the Covid-19 emergency the seeds of a much needed rebirth of solidarity? The history of labour and social security law is not a uniform progress to a predestined end. It has been cyclical and recursive, with many deviations and retreats. The emergency has put in stark relief the need for a social state which contemporary governance theories, and the practices they informed, had allowed to fall into neglect. It has also exposed brutal inequalities, connected to gender, age and ethnicity, 18 which have been enabled by narrow definitions of employment status and other limitations of UK labour law. 19 Now is the time, we suggest, for scholarship and research to be devoted to understanding the conditions and opportunities for the renewal of the social state. In that spirit, we encourage submissions across the wide range of fields and disciplines with which this Journal of 'Industrial Law' has, since its inception, been associated.

Dexamethasone Proves First Life-Saving Drug', BBC News

February should have been used to expand coronavirus testing capacity, ensure the distribution of WHO-approved PPE, and establish training programmes and guidelines to protect NHS staff

COVID-19 and the NHS: a "National

The Concept of "Fatigue" in Tackling Covid-19

The Birth of Solidarity: The History of the French Welfare State

and Public Health England, Disparities in the Risk and Outcomes of COVID-19

A Labour Market Divided: Covid-19 and Employment Regulation

UK, email: Tonia.Novitz@bristol.ac.uk. Simon Deakin and Tonia Novitz are members of the Editorial Committee of the ILJ and joint editors of this December 2020 Special Issue on Covid-19. All URLs were accessed on