The COVID-19 pandemic: Lessons on building more equal and sustainable societies
Open Access
- 25 May 2020
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in The Economic and Labour Relations Review
- Vol. 31 (2), 133-157
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1035304620927107
Abstract
This discussion paper by a group of scholars across the fields of health, economics and labour relations argues that COVID-19 is an unprecedented humanitarian crisis from which there can be no return to the ‘old normal’. The pandemic’s disastrous worldwide health impacts have been exacerbated by, and have compounded, the unsustainability of economic globalisation based on the neoliberal dismantling of state capabilities in favour of markets. Flow-on economic impacts have simultaneously created major supply and demand disruptions, and highlighted the growing within-country inequalities and precarity generated by neoliberal regimes of labour market regulation. Taking an Australian and international perspective, we examine these economic and labour market impacts, paying particular attention to differential impacts on First Nations people, developing countries, women, immigrants and young people. Evaluating policy responses in a political climate of national and international leadership very different from those in which major twentieth century crises were addressed, we argue the need for a national and international conversation to develop a new pathway out of crisis. JEL Codes: E18, HO, I1, J64, J88Keywords
Funding Information
- University of Nottingham
This publication has 18 references indexed in Scilit:
- COVID-19: the gendered impacts of the outbreakThe Lancet, 2020
- A guest-worker state? The declining power and agency of migrant labour in AustraliaThe Economic and Labour Relations Review, 2020
- Digital Infrastructure as a Determinant of Health Equity: An Australian Case Study of the Implementation of the National Broadband NetworkAustralian Journal of Public Administration, 2018
- Employer theft of temporary migrant workers’ wages in Australia: Why has the state failed to act?The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 2018
- Trajectories of Neoliberal TransformationPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,2017
- Regulating work in the gig economy: What are the options?The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 2017
- Women, work and industrial relations in Australia in 2016Journal of Industrial Relations, 2017
- Global InequalityPublished by Harvard University Press ,2016
- Brother, Can You Paradigm?Governance, 2013
- Can the Health-Care System Meet the Challenge of Pandemic Flu? Planning, Ethical, and Workforce ConsiderationsPublic Health Reports, 2007