Covid, Crisis, Care, and Change?

Antonia Kupfer Constanze Stutz (eds.)

# Covid, Crisis, Care, and Change?

International Gender Perspectives on Re/Production, State and Feminist Transitions

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### Table of Contents

#### **Part III: (Transnational) State Regulations**

#### Continuity, not Change: The unequal Catastrophe of the Covid-19 Pandemic: An Introduction

#### *Antonia Kupfer and Constanze Stutz*

The global outbreak of the novel Sars-CoV-2 virus in 2020 pushed a highly contagious disease between people and the world. Social contacts became threatening and possibly infectious. After some hesitation, states all over the world reacted with similar measures of social distancing, lockdowns of their citizens at home and shutdowns of the service sector. As a man-made rather than a natural catastrophe, whose origins are closely connected to capitalist extractivist expansion, the Covid-19 pandemic reached every corner of the world (Wallace 2021). Eva Illouz wrote about the first months of the crisis: 'Being locked in during the Corona crisis was not only associated with the loss of the public world, but also with the loss of the world itself' (Illouz 2020, translation C.S.).

While social-economic crises are a significant characteristic of democratic capitalism (see e.g. Streeck 2014), this one felt different as it exposed many people's fundamental vulnerabilities. Additionally, the impacts hit close to home as the crisis directly affected the everyday world of the middle classes in Europe, North America, Australia and elsewhere. Consequently, for democratic-capitalistic societies of the Global North, the routine externalization of the devastating effects of global capitalistic expansion – i.e. the concentration or shifting of these effects *out of sight*, particularly among poor and racialized groups, and *elsewhere*, especially in the Global South – was not as easy to manage as it had been for decades. Daily routines changed for almost everyone at the same time, and yet not at the same scale. Globally and along the lines of gender, age, 'race' and ability, the omnipresent metaphor of Covid-19 as a magnifying glass for pre-existing social inequalities was often used to critically expose whose vulnerability counts and whose does not. Following this, social scientists pointed to the already cognitively known, but seldom affectively recognized, fact that democratic-capitalistic societies differentiate between worthy and worthless lives (e.g. Lessenich 2020a).

Tying in with scientific findings regarding how social, political and economic structures shape our everyday world, in the summer of 2020 we started working on the call for a conference entitled 'Covid, Crisis, Care and Change?' which would focus on scientific findings regarding peoples' power and ability to resist, shape and create the structures that form their everyday worlds (e.g. Bourdieu 1972). Thus, despite all ambivalences, we believed that there lay a potential for fundamental social change through the Covid-19 crisis. We saw evidence for this in widespread public discussions of the vast and unmistakable social inequality present across the globe, which took place to an extent unthinkable a couple of months earlier. The crisis-ridden times opened up leeway for reflection by intellectuals (e.g. Rosa 2020) on how society should be set up and how we could rebuild a more sustainable world; though none of these reflections in fact went beyond the ancient traditions of *Buen Vivir* and others. Left-wing thinkers loudly discussed the Covid-19 pandemic as a 'window of opportunity for a new solidarity' (Institut für Gesellschaftsanalyse 2020: 11).

These hopes for change, for a fundamental societal shift, were partially grounded in the shared perception that the all-powerful TINA – *there is no alternative* – doctrine of neoliberal governance had crumbled, while simultaneously the importance of key professions and jobs in the health and food sectors became apparent even beyond feminist analysis (e.g. Dörre 2020a). In addition, the fundamental dependence on structures supporting the reproduction of society, in particular childcare, to set free the (female) workforce could no longer be neglected or taken for granted by elected officials. A new consciousness regarding the importance of reproduction, and our dependency on one another as well as on essential and key (or in German-speaking countries, systemrelevant) occupations for the maintenance of life (see Grenz/Günster in this volume) brought about hopes for an increase not only in the recognition and value given to these occupations, but also in their remuneration (Institut für Gesellschaftsanalyse 2020).

Even the transnational feminist strike movement followed the narrative of crisis as a chance in their broadly received *Transnational Feminist Manifesto to Emerge from the Pandemic Together and Change the System*, wherein they stated:

We call on everyone who rejects the patriarchal, exploitative, colonial, and racist violence to mobilize and join together to enrich and strengthen the global feminist struggle, because if we unite we can not only emerge from the pandemic, but we can change everything (Transnational Feminists 2020).

In such feminist approaches, hopes for a fundamental societal shift and a longterm social transformation were tied into traditional material feminist knowledge by pointing to how the pandemic dynamic is revealing the fundamental contradiction between profit-making and life-making that lies at the core of capitalism (Marxist Feminist Collective 2020). Once tangible, a window of opportunity could emerge to transform the capitalist relation between production and reproduction, which subordinates people's lives to the accumulation of profit. As feminist scholars and activists placed their hopes in emerging social struggles and strikes about social reproduction for life-making in contrast to profit-making (Arruzza 2020), they renewed a historically wellknown link between crisis and (hopes for) social change.

### 1 Theoretical perspective: Gramsci's distinction between organic and conjunctural crises

To examine times of crisis and social change through social and cultural analysis, it is necessary to qualify the crisis at hand and with that the chances for change. In fact, the question of how to define social change altogether is a founding and fundamental sociological issue (e.g. Popitz 2010 [1957/58]) and has been addressed by classic theorists such as Marx, Durkheim and Parsons on a more macro-sociological level, and by Simmel, Mead and Homans on a more micro-sociological level. While targeting different levels of society and starting from different conceptions of human beings and epistemes (for an overview, see Strasser/Randall 1979), at the core of the question of social change is the tension between the two mutually constituting and yet distinct phenomena of continuity and dynamism.

For our purpose of examining the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, we have selected Antonio Gramsci's (1991) focus on crisis as a motor of change. Gramsci's concept serves our purpose, because the level of society he was targeting corresponds with the level of the current Covid-19 pandemic.1 According to Randall and Strasser (1979: 227, translation A.K.):

most types of sociological theories of social change traditionally aimed to grasp the reasons for large-scale social upheaval [gesellschaftliche Umwälzungen] and to describe the most important processes of transformation. In recent decades (…), social scientists receded from "grand theories" and targeted the description of singular processes in which change manifested at small and large scales.

This change of emphasis went along with a stronger inclusion of the effects of societal conditions on groups and individuals, and additionally a stronger focus on the contribution of individuals to the initiation of change (see ibid.) – a description we assign Gramsci's concept to. Further criteria for selecting Gramsci's approach are that we share his conception of human beings as not determined by economic structures, and his general episteme of finding ways to fight fascism and proceed towards a society with common ownership. In recent research, Gramsci's concept has, for instance, been applied to interpret the significance of the 2007/8 financial crisis (e.g. Scherrer 2011).

Gramsci distinguished between crises of different scales. He argued that conjunctural crises can be processed and controlled through minor adjustments in the exercise of power, and can be analysed by criticizing policy in detail, on a daily basis, linked to small groups of leaders and the immediate people in power. Organic crises, on the other hand, are profound upheavals. They require

1 Dörre (2020) also utilizes Gramsci's concept, without saying so explicitly, by qualifying the Covid-19 pandemic as an organic change.

'societal-historical critique' addressing large groups beyond the immediate responsible and leading personnel (see Gramsci 1996: 1556). In organic crises, the social connection between the means of production and way of life,2 of the economy and politics itself, also falls into crisis: 'The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born: in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear' (Gramsci 1991: 354).

Following Gramsci,

The mistake many commit in political-historical analyses consists in missing the correct relation between the organic and the conjunctural: as a result, either one depicts causes as acting directly, which are actually acting indirectly, or one asserts that the direct causes are the only acting causes; in the one case, there is an excess of "economism" or doctrinaire pedantry, in the other, an excess of "ideologism"; in the one case, the mechanical causes are overestimated, in the other the "voluntaristic" and individual element is emphasized (Gramsci 1996: 1557, translation A.K.).

Gramsci indicates that the distinction between organic and conjunctural motions needs to be applied to different types of situations if analyses of power relations are to take place. On top of this, Gramsci conceptualizes organic and conjunctural crises not as distinct categories, but dialectically. Though as he admits, 'To determine precisely the dialectic between the two types of movement and thus of the research is difficult' (ibid.). In our analysis, we argue mainly that the abundance of recent and current changes are not powerful enough to be qualified as indirect causes, and thus cannot lead to an organic change. Our arguments are backed with empirical data to the extent that it is already available.

The solution to an organic crisis depends on whether a renewal of leadership can succeed in modernizing capitalism as a whole, or whether forces are formed for an emancipatory transformation (Becker et al. 2013). While it seemed at first as if the pandemic could bring about an organic crisis, the indepth analysis presented in the chapters collected in this edited volume shows that democratic-capitalist industrialized countries have (so far) succeeded in dealing with the crisis with known means. However, some crises take decades to unfold, and we are currently unable to know how long the Covid-19 pandemic will endure. Additionally, a definition of its length would require and include clear measures and the establishment of criteria – themselves subject to societal analysis and thus dispute. Therefore, with this collection of chapters and our own analysis, we offer a preliminary contribution to the ongoing multifaceted and global discussion on the societal significance of the Covid-19 pandemic.

2 A phenomenon that was discussed in the years shortly before the emergence of Covid-19, through reference to Polanyi's *The Great Transformation* published in 1944 (see e.g. the 2019 regional congress of the German Sociological Association).

#### Continuity, not Change

In the following, we will examine and develop our argument first for the area of production and labour, then with a focus on the health sector, characterized as it is by largely low-paid care work, followed by an analysis of the area of reproduction and unpaid care work. In all three parts, we place a special focus on state regulations through the lens of Gramsci's categories of organic and conjunctural crises. Though we begin with a global perspective, we will then mainly make our arguments with reference to Germany, due to the accessibility of sources – though several of our observations are also true for other countries.

#### 2 No organic change in the area of production, service and labour

State regulations in the area of production, service and labour could be sorted into those that restrict capitalist market mechanisms on the one hand and those that support such mechanisms on the other. During the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, we can observe both at the same time, at the national and international level. Restrictive state regulations that shut down production operations and halted various services evoked hopes for change, as outlined above. While writing this introduction, a global corporate tax of a maximum of 15% was issued by the G20 (OECD 2021). Since the G20's formation in 1999 as a response to several economic crises, the 19 alternating governments of the wealthiest nations in the world, plus the EU, have never before ruled for such a strong restriction to capitalist market mechanisms. While the ruling evoked strong critique of being far too small to trigger an organic change, we might nevertheless observe indirect effects in the future that could induce some change. As a snapshot in time, we detect slight change in the power relations between the national and the corporate level on a global scale.

Across Europe, the closure of national borders in response to the pandemic, which impeded the commute of carers, harvest hands, contractors, craftsmen and workmen from Eastern European countries to work in private households and care homes, in agriculture, the meat industry and in construction, resulted in the (temporary) shutdown of many exploitative businesses in Western European countries. But already the second area of state restrictions, those consisting of shutdowns of mainly small enterprises and public organizations and institutions in the leisure and service sector, such as restaurants, cafés, pubs, shops, hairdressers, nail care and massage studios, theatres, cinemas and sports grounds, as well as public administration services such as the administration offices for citizens, was regarded with ambivalence: physical distancing was necessary to keep infections low, but was ineffective as long as people travelled in packed buses and underground trains to and from workplaces in shop floors, open-plan offices, and storehouses etc., which remained in operation. This distinction made clear that the state's priority was to keep businesses running while putting people's needs for leisure, culture and socializing last. Later on in the unfolding pandemic, as infection numbers maintained high levels, a juridical act in Germany (SARS-COV-2 Arbeitsschutzverordnung) mandating working from home wherever possible was issued for a limited time; at the time of writing this text, it has currently been prolonged. Mandatory home office was and still is fought by many employers, even though it saves costs for office rents, among other benefits. Many employees without care responsibilities for others enjoy working at home, while others simply survive by doing so, balancing working and taking care of their children or sick and elderly relatives at the same time.

We now turn to the second type of state regulation that we introduced above: regulations *supporting* production, services and labour. Worldwide, large sums of tax money and future debt have passed through legislation. For example, in spring 2021, the Biden administration passed the 'American Rescue Plan' consisting of US\$350 billion in emergency funding, of which parts are for economic relief and are directed to the assistance of small businesses. After weeks of discussion, the EU passed the €750 billion 'NextGenerationEU' program, a seven-year instrument for recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic (EU 2021). China had already started before the pandemic to systematically support its public and private economy with significant investment programs (such as its global infrastructure 'Belt and Road Initiative' adopted in 2013, aimed at enlarging China's income, influence and recognition worldwide). For many countries, creating their own supply chains is one of the central aims – an important lesson learned from the pandemic. In Germany, large sums of money in the form of subventions have gone to large corporations both outside (e.g. €9 billion to the German airline Lufthansa) and within the health sector.

Another area of state financial support is the public money going into the development of vaccines. The pharmaceutical industry is an area where states' interrelation with and dependency on companies becomes highly visible. Governments have spent large amounts of public funds on the development of vaccines.3 Private companies were the main recipients of pubic research and development (R&D) investments.4 The US was the first country to carry out the government purchase of Covid-19 vaccines, realized in the second quarter of

3 According to the Global Health Centre (2021), the US is on top, having spent US\$2,289 million in 2020, followed by Germany with US\$1,507 million, the United Kingdom with US\$500 million and the EU with US\$327 million.

4 Janssen (owned by Johnson & Johnson) received U\$1,028 million in public funding, followed by Moderna with US\$955 million, BioNTech/Pfizer with US\$800 million, and CureVac with US\$726 million.

2020, while the EU started in the third quarter of 2020 and realized more in the fourth quarter of the year through multilateral purchases (EU 2021).

After several developed vaccines were approved extraordinarily quickly, both the Pfizer-BioNTech and AstraZeneca vaccines experienced delays in delivery. Although it had been agreed upon and paid for in advance that vaccine production companies would start production before receiving clearance from the European Medicines Agency (EMA), they did not. A fierce discussion involving accusations and responsibilities erupted, accompanied by the opacity5 of contracts between governments, multilateral organizations and private companies. Governments' dependency on companies became obvious, and in the public media the image of slow and foolish politicians prevailed over images of unable and/or profit-greedy companies, with the European Commission president apologizing for having been too confident about receiving the ordered vaccines.6

Furthermore, no concerted efforts were made to ensure that the vaccines would be affordable and accessible the world over. During a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in January 2020, the EU, UK and US denied the request of less wealthy countries to release the patents on the vaccines, at least temporarily. Instead, we are witnessing a rise in 'vaccine nationalism' (Rutschman 2021: 183). In May 2021, China, Russia and the US declared their support for patent waivers, though the European Commission and the UK are still holding back (Nature 2021).

Turning from the global economy to employment figures, we observe that 'Globally and across all regions and country income groups, women have been affected by employment loss to a greater extent than men' (ILO 2021: 9). In 2020, the global employment loss for women was 5% and for men 3.9% (ibid.); this greater burden of job loss among women is despite the fact that the overall rate of male employment exceeds the overall rate of female employment. In contrast to previous economic recessions, the European Parliament has used the term '*she*-cession' to grasp the enormous economic impact of the pandemic on women, because

the governmental measures to halt the pandemic have had the most indirect impact on the economic sectors in which women tend to be overrepresented – i.e. gastronomy, hospitality, retail, care, domestic work (European Parliament 2021: 10).

5 Although AstraZeneca agreed at the end of January 2021 to publish its contract with the European Commission, large parts have been blacked out.

6 A lawsuit initiated by the European Commission against AstraZeneca was finally settled in September 2021, with a stricter formulation regarding vaccine delivery commitments as well as a regulation on rebates in case of delays; though it is yet to be seen whether this will lead to any significant change.

'Indirect impact' here refers to lockdowns in these areas to prevent the spread of the virus. While this policy measure is comprehensible, it is important to note its gendered impact.

In light of the documented gender inequality in employment – the gender pay gap was at 18% in Germany in 2020 (Statistisches Bundesamt 2021a) – the often-praised German short-time work allowances require closer examination. Without doubt, this Keynesian measure saved millions of employees from redundancy. It was especially effective as it kicked in as soon as a minimum of 10 per cent of a company's workforce were affected by the lack of work (Bundesregierung 2020). The largest share of short-time work allowances was thus handed out to the catering and hotel industry. Instead of collecting negative working hours first, the short-time work allowances can be received immediately. Contract workers are also eligible for these short-time work allowances. The employers' share of social insurance contributions through shorttime work allowances are fully reimbursed by the Federal Employment Agency, and thus redistributed to the taxpayer. Short-time work allowances are, however, only paid to companies that employ employees with social security, thus so-called 'mini-jobbers', who can only earn up to €450 per month (and are thus exempt from tax and social security contributions), are excluded. In 2019, 61% of mini-jobbers were women (WSI 2021).

The ease with which the government coalition of conservatives and social democrats dismissed its prior policy of austerity to prevent further debt evoked hopes for policy change. According to Dräger (2021), state debts could remain low in times of economic growth given that interest rates remained relatively low; at the time of writing, interest rates are even negative, so that Germany may benefit from its debts. Large-scale state financial support in pandemic times is also being targeted with more urgency to induce and participate in economic green growth to promote a reduction in CO2 emissions (Krebs 2021). However, some federal German states are already starting to cut their budgets and activists demanding 'system change not climate change' accuse government policies of green washing.

In sum, it is comprehensible that in pandemic times, personal services such as haircutting, nail care and massage studios, as well as cafés, restaurants and pubs, will be shut down, as these are locations where people come into direct physical contact or get quite close to each other. Theatres, music venues, cinemas and museums were closed in order to decrease the locations of contact in general. But governments refrained from lockdowns of large corporations and companies in the production sector, despite these being locations of contact. Volkswagen, one of the major corporations in Germany's car industry, sent its employees on short-time work allowance for only about a couple of months (March to June 2020) during the first wave of the pandemic in Europe. Significantly, this was due to interruptions in the supply chain, mainly concerning microchips from China, and *not* in order to prevent infections. During the

#### Continuity, not Change

course of the pandemic, a couple of further periods of short-time work allowances at Volkswagen followed, but only for a few days, and again because of interruptions in supply chains. The decrease in delivered cars in 2020 was 15.2% compared to 2019 (Volkswagen 2021). At the end of 2020, however, an increase in car buying due to the reduction of value added tax as an incentive for consumption took place.

Volkswagen is just one example of many and serves to illustrate that there have been almost no state regulations restricting production and labour in industrial sectors in order to prevent the spread of Covid-19 and protect employees. Corporations suffered only from a lack of demand, and interruptions in production and supply chains, but not from any governmental restrictions, thus no organic change could be detected. In Italy and the US, at least some workers resisted by refusing to show up for work due to the risks of catching the virus (Arruza 2020), though there were no strikes of significance in Germany. 7

By keeping the majority of companies open during the pandemic, the German government demonstrated its priority of keeping the economy running, while accepting the risk of infections at workplaces (see also Plomien/Scheele/Sproll in this volume). Only in cases where infections were obviously spread in large numbers at workplaces, such as in the meat industry, were companies shut down for a short time, and mainly migrant workers from Eastern Europe were forced to quarantine in extremely sordid and crowded flats (Friedrichsen 2020; Wagner 2020). This policy could be qualified in terms of a continuity of worker exploitation – and thus classified as conjunctural crisis management.

In the face of the third Covid-19 wave in Germany, about a year after the initial outbreak of the virus, a discussion took place about whether to close all companies that are not essential for survival for about three weeks in order to break the wave and get infections down to a manageable number. A campaign known as 'ZeroCovid', which began in December 2020 in the UK, was spread to other countries in Europe by medical scientists, campaigners, trade unionists, political figures, academics and writers, and several organizations like the Feminist Strike Collective (Feministisches Streikkollektiv) Frankfurt am Main and the Federal Association of Green-Alternative University Groups (Bundesverband grün-alternativer Hochschulgruppen), who signed a petition demanding that the German government pay people to take a break in order to get the number of infections down. The campaign included the demand for a solidarity contribution paid by those with high assets and income, high-earning companies and levied on financial transactions, to cover the costs for those

7 In Germany, only a few protests have been expressed against this policy: a few workers from Amazon, one of the corporations that has benefitted most from the pandemic, went on strike after large numbers of workers tested positive for Covid-19 (CNBC 2020). These were small and short-lasting strikes, however, which did not lead to any change.

with no income. However, supporters of the ZeroCovid strategy were unsuccessful in convincing the government to take such action.

#### 3 Conjunctural crisis management in the care economy

The care economy belongs to the service sector. However, since its function is arguably of greater importance than other services – in terms of providing care for people who are unable to sell their labour – we briefly examine this special area of the economy in a separate section before going on to the area of reproduction.

According to Philipp Ther (2014), neoliberalism has been the determining economic ideology in democratic-capitalistic countries for the last 40 years. As a consequence, the health care sector in Germany has been largely privatized and currently functions following the logic of profit (Dittmar/Glassner 2017). In order to reduce costs, cuts in staff are common. Until 2003, hospitals in Germany received funding according to the number of days patients stayed, independent of their needs and treatments. Since 2003, payment changed to cover the costs of treatments. Categorization in diagnosis-related groups (DRGs) occurs following the classification of the illness, the severity of the disease and the performed services (Bundesministerium für Gesundheit 2021). Since 2020, care staff is paid extra, independent of the DRG. As a consequence, patients stay for a shorter time in hospital, sometimes leaving before they have fully recovered. And while intensive care beds increased by 36% during 1991-2018, other hospital beds decreased by 25% during this period (Statistisches Bundesamt 2021b).

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the health care sector became the most visible of the essential sectors (see Hintermayr in this volume). According to numbers published by the European Parliament, '76% of all health care and social care workers are women and 86% of personal care workers in health services are women' (2021: 12). This means that women 'have been systematically exposed to the virus and have dealt with an overall higher risk of contagion' (ibid.) compared to men. At the same time, the health care economy is a sector with traditionally low wages.

A major concern of government policies regarding Covid-19 pandemic management has been to ensure that hospitals do not become over-crowded and that there are sufficient beds in intensive care units for Covid-19 patients. Apart from aiming to be able to take care of Covid-19 patients, government policies have been consistently oriented towards avoiding chaos and upheaval (with its risk of inducing organic change) and averting being forced to turn Continuity, not Change

down patients and practice triage. Taking into account the available number of intensive care beds is still a fixed reference in government politics, and can clearly be categorized as a measure to fix a conjunctural crisis, following the terminology of Gramsci.

Since 19th July 2021, UK prime minister Boris Johnson declared an end to all measures aimed at restricting infections, with the exception of wearing masks on the London Underground. While writing this introduction in the same month, the UK is facing shortages of staff in essential economies such as supermarkets due to millions having to stay in quarantine. It remains to be seen whether this Social Darwinian policy of 'survival of the fittest' will come to a halt when hospitals and elderly care centres are deserted of staff. For the time being, it appears part of Johnson's explicit policy to call on his fellow citizens to reconcile themselves with more Covid-19 deaths. While Segato (2021) asserts that a denial of death is an outcome of the last decade's neoliberal policies, we specifically accuse Johnson of calculating and causing deaths. In Germany, Wolfgang Schäuble, the presiding officer of the German parliament, announced in spring 2020 that the protection of life is not always the priority, initiating a fierce debate. In Brazil (see Plomien/Scheele/Sproll in this volume), people protested repeatedly against their government's policy of rhetorically denying – and thereby increasing – the deadly risks of Covid-19.

### 4 Managing the conjunctural crisis in the area of reproduction and unpaid care work

IPSOS conducted an 18-country poll from 1st to 3rd May 2020 in consultation with UN Women, 'which reveals that women are, indeed, taking on a lot more responsibility for household chores and care of children and family during the pandemic' (UN Women 2020). To our knowledge, in dealing with the pandemic, there is no state that did *not* take advantage of the resource of family when it comes to (child)care. Rather, it was taken for granted that parents would continue to work, even in times of closed childcare centres and schools. How to manage this became a problem at the family level.8 As a result of this

8 At an ad hoc group discussion we facilitated on 24th August 2021, Sylvia Walby reflected on China's practice of offering publicly provided locations for quarantine for people with Covid-19, instead of sending them home to their family and friends. By distinguishing between individuals and households, family and household members were protected and infected individuals were cared for. This is in contrast to the policies of many countries, including Germany, where infected people were sent home, which often led to work and (child)care conflicts – in particular for women/mothers, who bear the greatest share of domestic care responsibilities.

position taken by the state, the general, already-existing contradiction between the organization of production and reproduction in capitalist-patriarchal societies was brought starkly to the surface. Across the 18 countries analysed in the UN Women study, women were 4% more likely than men to strongly agree that their care load had increased during the pandemic. Given that 'previous research revealed that women tend to underestimate the time and energy they allocate to caring for others, while men are inclined to overestimations' (ibid.), this 4% is quite significant.

Without mainly women carrying out unpaid care and reproductive work, such capitalist-patriarchal societies would look very different, since the gendered division of labour is structurally woven into social organization. Following Kohlrausch and Zucco (2020), 54% of women and 12% of men in Germany indicated that they had taken over most of the childcare since the onset of the pandemic.9 This represents a continuation of the unequal distribution of childcare that already existed before the pandemic. The authors argue, however, that even a *retraditionalization*10 of the division of work between men and women could be observed, as only 60% of the sampled couples who had shared childcare equally before the Covid-19 pandemic were still practicing equal childcare arrangements during the pandemic. This share dropped to 48% among couples with a household income of less than 2000 Euros.

In November 2020, when data was collected again, 66% of the interviewed women with a child or children and in partnerships stated that they had taken on the greatest share of childcare (Hans Böckler Stiftung 2020). Furthermore, it is important to highlight that an increase in childcare responsibilities leads to a reduction of paid labour activities. Panel data from February to April 2020 from the US Current Population Survey revealed that mothers with young children had reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers (Collins et al. 2020). In Germany, 27.1% of interviewed women had reduced their paid labour time, while this was 16.3% for the interviewed men (Hans Böckler Stiftung 2020). This unequal share is mainly a consequence of unequal wages among men and women, in which women earn less than men and couples decide that the partner with less income should reduce their working hours in order to maintain a higher overall household income.

Other studies also indicate that a larger share of women took on childcare responsibilities during the pandemic compared to men. For example, a study from the University of Mannheim which collected data on a daily basis found that in the first week of lockdown in March 2020, 49% of women took on care

9 Data was collected in April 2020 among 7,677 people in paid work via computer-based online interviews. The sample was built with quota following age, gender, federal state and education.

10 Dölling (2003) criticizes the use of the term *retraditionalization* as it conveys the illusion that there have been times in which childcare and household work have been divided equally among mothers and fathers.

responsibilities alone compared to 26.5% of men (Möhring et al. 2020). In the second week, women's share increased to 52% and men's went down to 24%. In a study conducted by researchers at the German Institute of Economy (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaft, DIW), reproductive work is differentiated into childcare and household labour. Compared to 2019, during May to July 2020 the share of household labour that was done almost exclusively by women increased by 8% and for childcare by 16% (Jessen et al. 2021).

In a persistent patriarchy (see Walby 1989; Cyba 2010), as one could describe German society, these numbers might not be surprising; they are in line with the dominant gendered division of labour. On the other hand, since more women than men are employed in essential jobs (Zoch et al. 2021) that cannot be abandoned, even in pandemic times, this could have been an opportunity for a larger share of men to take over childcare responsibilities. But it would appear that men are unwilling to take care of their children to a significant extent, and the German government is not increasing wages in essential jobs to cover family living costs. Thus, we can observe that the conjunctural crisis in unpaid reproductive and caring work (Dück 2018) is, even under pandemic conditions, still largely managed as an additional workload by women.

As Gundula Ludwig argues in this anthology, the state deploys gendered care politics successfully as a political strategy of crisis management. Similar research findings were presented at a conference we held on 19th March 2021 by Eman Nahhas and Khwala Zoabi on female Arab students in Israel.11 Strikingly, a year after the start of the pandemic in Germany, hundreds of jobs had been categorized as *essential* (see Grenz/Günster in this volume); a sign of how the government prioritizes maintaining as close to a normal economy as possible, over the reduction of infection numbers.

#### 5 Conclusion

Despite initial appearances and hopes, democratic-capitalist industrialized countries and their patriarchal structures have not been gravely undermined by the Covid-19 pandemic. However, there are changes happening, probably the largest in the ways in which state regulations in the Global North have in a few areas – mainly in the production and paid work sector – departed somewhat from a purely neoliberal agenda and have taken a slight shift in a more Keynesian direction (as Walby 2020 argues), influencing markets and capitalism to a certain, albeit small, degree. Following Gramsci's distinction between crises

11 See: https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/phil/iso/mak/covidcrisiscarechange (accessed 11.10.2021).

of different ranges, we argue that while global social inequalities have increased and deepened during the Covid-19 pandemic, democratic-capitalist industrialized countries have (so far) succeeded in dealing with the crisis through established modes of regulation: individual responsibility for social reproduction and the deployment of gendered care politics as a political strategy for crisis management (Lessenich 2020a; Ludwig in this volume).

As modified state regulations were able to stabilize the connection between the way of production and living, the Covid-19 crisis does not seem to condense into what Gramsci described as an organic crisis. However, even as a conjunctural crisis for democratic-capitalist industrialized countries, the Covid-19 pandemic is embedded in the crisis dynamics of the last decade, which could be grasped with Arruza's (2014) term *living totality of social relations*, among which not only are gender, class, 'race', sexual orientation, citizenship and religion important, but also societal relations to nature (Kupfer forthcoming, following Carolyn Merchant). Or it could be framed as an *economic-ecological pincer crisis* (Dörre 2020, following Rosa Luxemburg), and as such can only be analysed globally*.*

Global social inequalities, as we have shown above, have increased during the Covid-19 pandemic. After the virus had spread around the globe and sparked initial hopes for systemic change, it soon became clear that people already facing hardships, such as those living in overcrowded and/or shanty housing and working informal jobs, were much more affected than those living in large flats and houses with a secure income. Already-difficult living conditions thus became even harder (Al-Ali 2020). And while the economies of already-wealthy nations in the Global North have begun to recover steadily12 and concerns raised at the beginning of the pandemic have partly vanished, there are currently more people suffering from lack of nutrition worldwide than before the Covid-19 pandemic.

At the organizational level, economic recovery in the Global North is taking place mainly in large companies operating in the gig economy, such as Google and Amazon (Karen Weise 2021). The pandemic requirement of social distancing and the avoidance of physical contact served their business model perfectly. Looking ahead, their mode of production and its contribution to the flexibilization of work is likely to spread and will eventually push out small and middle-sized companies. Other corporations outside the IT sector have also benefited in recent times, such as Mercedes Benz, which profited from a boom in combustor sales from China. And while migrant workers in the meat

12 In its April 2021 prognosis, the IMF states that 'adaption to pandemic life has enabled the global economy to do well despite subdued overall mobility, leading to a stronger-than-anticipated rebound, on average, across regions' (IMF 2021: xiii). State fiscal support to help boost domestic economic recovery in the US and the EU is also contributing to this positive economic outlook. The IMF projects a growth of 6% in 2021 and 4.4% in 2022 (IMF 2021). China had already returned to its pre-Covid-19 GDP in 2020. Nevertheless, according to Gopinath, Director of Research at the IMF, growth will take place mainly in wealthy countries.

industry did gain slightly better working conditions through the prohibition of contract to produce a work (Werkvertrag), other precarious workers such as food deliverers are facing increased competition and pressure.

In the care economy in Germany, especially the health care sector, no major increase in public funding or staffing has yet taken place. This is even more incomprehensible given several warnings that pandemics similar to Covid-19 are likely to increase in the future due to destruction of the natural environment (McNeely 2021).13

At the individual level, we can see exhaustion, individualization and reduced possibilities for politicization. Stephan Lessenich (2013) argues that through the entrenching of individual responsibility as part of neoliberal governance, crisis management in times of Covid-19 has simply worked within the well-known boundaries, while the structural causes of the crisis have been neglected. Decades of neoliberal policies have led to an internalization of the norms of self-entrepreneurship (Voß/Pongratz 1989), whereby employees and workers pursue the achievement of performance standards without demanding adequate working conditions (Menz 2021). Data on sick leave show that numbers actually decreased during the pandemic (AOK BV 2020), which is in part due to people working while sick in home office (Zeit Online 2020).

In summer 2021, while writing this introduction, in many wealthy countries there is an abundance of vaccine supplies, while the majority of countries in the world are still being denied significant access. In wealthy nations, citizens are being offered incentives to take part in vaccination programs, as the overall vaccination rates remain relatively low despite widespread availability. Furthermore, studies on vaccination hesitancy have detected several social inequalities along the intersections of gender, 'race', formal educational degree and partisan preference regarding confidence, complacency and circumspection (for the US, see Liu/Miao Li 2021; for a study looking at eight countries, see Stojanovic et al. 2021).

For real change to be achieved, collective effort is needed. Yet this is impeded by the specificity of the pandemic response mandating the avoidance of social contact. Instead, the desire to get back to 'normality' and life as it was before the pandemic seems to prevail and matches public policies. As we look back to the initial feminist hopes for fundamental societal change and longterm social transformation, through the stark revelation of the key contradiction between profit-making and life-making at the core of capitalism*, a possi-*

13 In 2021, however, the German cabinet of conservatives and social democrats did pass a budget of several million Euros for research into how hospitals and other care institutions can, in the following years, deal more efficiently and effectively with probable future pandemics, aiming at adjustments to, instead of the avoidance of, future catastrophes – a pattern that one can also observe in the way in which the German government is dealing with incidents related to climate change.

*ble progressive outcome of these crisis dynamics* will largely depend on political and social struggle and whether social forces are formed for an emancipatory transformation. Politicizing the structural causes of the Covid-19 pandemic, and their mediation with ecological and economic crises of the present day, seems to be a possible compass through the interregnum, where 'the old is dying and the new cannot be born' (Gramsci 1991: 276). Not least due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is crucial to take stock again of *The Human Condition* (Arendt 1958) from a global feminist perspective.

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Zoch, Gundula et al. (2021): Who Cares When Care Closes? Care-Arrangements and Parental Working Conditions During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Germany. In: European Societies 23, sup1, pp. 576–588.

**Antonia Kupfer** is Professor of Macrosociology at Technical University Dresden, Germany. Her current research focuses on work appropriation in lowwage sector in a comparative perspective, on social analysis in disruptive times out of a gender perspective and on the relation of social inequality and climate change.

**Constanze Stutz** is a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Sociology, Technical University Dresden. Her research interests are Feminist Theory, Gender and Queer Studies as well as Social movement and transformation research. Currently, she is working on her doctoral dissertation in which she analyses concepts of gender, emancipation and work in the biographical narratives of the German post-reunification generation.

### Part I: The Sphere of Production, Labour and Professions

### Ambivalent (In)Visibility: Commercial Cleaning Work during the Covid-19 Crisis in Austria

*Karin Sardadvar*

#### 1 Introduction: Cleaning as essential work

In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, some jobs became publicly highlighted as 'essential' or 'key' work. In German-speaking countries, this discourse focuses on the so-called 'system-relevant' work (see also Grenz/Günster and Dudley in this volume). Even if the terms differ, they basically refer to jobs that are indispensable for basic human needs and the functioning of society. Among them are jobs in care and medicine, schools and teaching, and critical infrastructure such as public transport and waste disposal.

Cleaning is another of these system-relevant professions. Cleaning work is necessary for the functioning of a society and its economy. Living in a clean home, working in a clean factory, and keeping hospitals sanitary and grocery stores and storehouses tidy are matters of well-being and life quality, but also of basic hygiene, health, and safety. Like other reproductive work, cleaning is essential for making productive work possible in the first place (Becker-Schmidt/Krüger 2009).

Moreover, cleaning work is closely linked to activities that fight the pandemic more directly. This is the case, for example, when workers clean rooms where Covid-positive people have been staying, when they disinfect rooms and surfaces in order to help prevent infections, and when they work on sites connected to managing and fighting the pandemic, such as hospitals and doctors' offices.

What, then, does the new attention to key work in the context of the pandemic mean for cleaning work? What does it imply for the working conditions of cleaners during the pandemic and in the future? How is the cleaning sector faring in the crisis? In this paper, I will take a closer look at these questions. The objective is to shed light on work in a sector that often remains invisible (Sardadvar 2019) and has particularly bad employment conditions (see section 2 in this paper), and to see how the pandemic has affected it.

I start by summarizing typical employment conditions in the cleaning sector, showing that cleaning work is particularly bad off among key jobs. I continue by conceptualizing cleaning as invisible work, drawing on theoretical frameworks of dirty, hidden, and invisible work. After that, I describe the data and methods of my empirical research. Then I turn to my empirical findings on the state of the commercial cleaning sector in Austria and the challenges that have been brought on by the crisis, pointing to several impacts on everyday work tasks and appreciation. In conclusion, I will argue that the contradictory implications of the crisis can be described as ambivalent (in)visibility.

### 2 Context: Employment conditions in essential jobs and the cleaning sector

Before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the cleaning sector already stood out negatively in terms of employment and working conditions. Among other things, comparing it to other sectors at the European level, the cleaning sector is characterized by a large proportion of fixed-term contracts and part-time employment, has one of the lowest wages, is linked to health and safety risks, and scores low on future prospects and job quality (Eurofound 2014). The working times are fragmented and unfavourable, including involuntary parttime, work at unsocial hours, and split shifts (see also EFCI 2014).

International stocktaking illustrates that the consequences of outsourcing and neoliberal politics in the sector are globally extensive (Aguiar/Herod 2006). In fact, scholars have pointed to the 'disconcerting pioneering role' (Gather et al. 2005: 209, translation K.S.) of the cleaning sector with regard to both flexibilization and precarization. Cleaning work that has been outsourced to the private sector is particularly affected and prone to being made invisible (see Hochschild 2016; Gather et al. 2005; Aguiar/Herod 2006). Most of these findings at the EU level are reflected in the Austrian context (Sardadvar 2019). Furthermore, there are pronounced social inequalities *within* the sector with regard to gender, class, ethnicity, disability, and their intersections (Schürmann 2013; Abbasian/Hellgren 2012; Sardadvar et al. 2015; Sardadvar 2016).

In a comparison among essential jobs, cleaning also fares particularly badly. This is documented by topical data published for Austria in the crisis year 2020 (Schönherr/Zandonella 2020; Statistik Austria 2020), which I present here in more detail. About one million people in Austria can be regarded as working in a key job. At the same time, eight out of eleven jobs classified as essential have higher shares of women than men. Women's shares are particularly high in childcare (88%), retail (86%), and cleaning (83%). Shares of migrants vary between sectors, with the highest in cleaning, where 29% have migrant backgrounds (Schönherr/Zandonella 2020). Of all part-time workers in key jobs, 88% are women. Part-time work, including involuntary part-time, is particularly widespread among cleaners. Moreover, cleaners are among the two groups of people in essential jobs that are most often atypically employed (the other group are physicians, who often have fixed-term contracts) (Schönherr/Zandonella 2020).

#### Ambivalent (In)Visibility

The 'services to buildings sector'1 in Austria, which includes commercial cleaning services, is among the ten economic sectors in the country with the lowest gross wages per hour (Statistik Austria 2017). Cleaners also earn the least when compared to all other essential jobs (EUR 12,900 per year).2 Meanwhile, women working in the sector earn even less than men (EUR 12,700 vs. 15,200) (Statistik Austria 2020). Seventy-six per cent of cleaners say they can hardly or cannot make ends meet on their income. Many also think that they will not be able to live on their pensions (Schönherr/Zandonella 2020).

Among essential jobs, cleaners are also the group most heavily exposed to physical demands at work. In addition, they are in the highly affected when it comes to psycho-social demands (including stress and time pressure). Cleaners also score particularly low with regard to satisfaction with their situation: only 53% are satisfied with their social position, 57% with their rights as workers, and 56% with their social security (Schönherr/Zandonella 2020).

Most of these negative employment and working conditions are typical for essential jobs (Statistik Austria 2020). However, it is remarkable how poorly work in the commercial cleaning sector fares, even just in comparison with other key jobs. This makes it highly important to investigate what has been happening to work in the cleaning sector in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, when cleaning became even more important for societal health and safety.

#### 3 Theoretical perspective: Cleaning as invisible work

In the formal and informal sectors, different kinds of cleaning work take place: unpaid domestic work, informally performed but paid cleaning work in households, paid cleaning work in the commercial cleaning sector, and platformmediated cleaning work in private households. All of these areas have been affected by the pandemic. In this contribution, I refer mainly to paid cleaning work done in the formal, private-sector cleaning industry, with a focus on office cleaning. One thing that all of these kinds of cleaning work have in common, however, is that the work is, in different senses and to different extents, dirty, hidden, and invisible.

'Dirty work' is a concept originally described by sociologist Everett Hughes (1951). What characterizes dirty work is that the stigma of the activity

1 This refers to the Austrian sector 'Gebäudebetreuung*'*, sector no. N81 in the Austrian nomenclature of economic activities classification (ÖNACE).

2 The comparison included (ordered by wage, descending): physicians, police officers, secondary school teachers, members of the regular armed forces, primary school teachers, non-academic nurses, kindergarten educators, care assistants, non-academic skilled workers in social care, waste disposal workers, salespersons, child minders, and cleaners.

is transferred onto the person who does it. There are physical, social, and moral types of dirty work (see Deery et al. 2019).  Cleaning work can mainly be seen as dirty work in the sense that it is work linked to bad smells and dirty things and surroundings, but being dirty work, there is also a social taint linked to it, which lowers its esteem (see also Soni-Sinha/Yates 2013).

'Hidden work' is conceptualized by Noon and Blyton (1997: 187) in contrast to 'formal' or 'visible' work, which they define as work sectors where the goods and services produced are included in official statistics, where the workers receive a wage, and where this wage is subject to tax. They name two main forms of hidden work. The first is concealed work, which is actively kept out of sight because it involves illegal or stigmatized activities (e.g. deviant or nondeclared work). The second is unrecognized work, referring primarily to unpaid domestic work and voluntary work.

The categorization of hidden work (see also Crain et al. 2016) is taken up and refined in the work of Hatton (2017), who provides a differentiated concept of invisible work*.* She suggests looking at three intersecting mechanisms that make work invisible: socio-cultural, socio-legal, and socio-spatial mechanisms of invisibility. The first category, socio-cultural mechanisms, refers to ideologies of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, ability, and more (Hatton 2017: 338ff.). These can operate at the level of workers' bodies (hidden bodily labour) or at the level of workers' skills (naturalization and devaluation of skills). With regard to cleaning, one can note that there is a gendered devaluation and naturalization of cleaning as a 'female' or 'housewife' skill. The second category, socio-legal mechanisms, refers to making work invisible by excluding it from legal definitions of employment (Hatton 2017: 341). Hatton mentions, among other examples, unpaid interns, working prisoners, and workshops for people with disabilities. Regarding cleaning work, this dimension can be applied to some contexts of unpaid or informally paid domestic work. The third category, socio-spatial mechanisms, is the one that applies most clearly to the problem of invisibility in commercial cleaning work, which is the focus of the present paper. Hatton includes here work that is devalued because it is performed in the domestic sphere or in other non-traditional work sites (Hatton 2017: 343).

In the case of cleaning, the work sites are the customers' premises, and what renders the work invisible is, I argue, among other things, the organization of the working times. This refers mainly to the working times that are typical for the corporate cleaning sector, especially in the important area of office cleaning. In many countries, office cleaners work before and after the operating hours of the customer companies in order not to disturb the employees (EFCI 2014). This renders their work invisible in the sense that the cleaners are not met physically and are not seen doing their jobs (Sardadvar 2019). It is Ambivalent (In)Visibility

this physical, socio-spatial invisibility (Hatton 2017), facilitated by the typical working times in the sector, that further contributes to the work's low esteem (see also Gruszka/Böhm 2020).

#### 4 Empirical research: Context, data, and methods

The research presented here is derived from a sub-project of a larger research project that focuses on working times in the cleaning and care sectors in Austria (the SPLITWORK project).3 In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was decided to include this issue in the study. For this sub-project on cleaning during the Covid-19 pandemic in Austria, I conducted additional qualitative interviews based on two interview methods: formal expert interviews (loosely guided qualitative interviews) and ethnographic interviews (informal interviews conducted during other visits and contacts in the field). The interview partners for the seven expert interviews were a trade union representative, a representative of the cleaning sector's employers' association, a work councillor, two management members of a city's cleaning unit (public sector), one manager of another city's cleaning unit (private sector), and one managing director of a cleaning company.

While the expert interviews were formally organized and took place at specifically appointed times, the ethnographic interviews were conducted on other occasions, such as during workshops, meetings, and events in the field that took place as part of other research and dissemination activities in the sector. The interview partners for these interviews included management members of cleaning companies, trade unionists, work councillors, speakers from the employers' association, speakers from the chamber of labour, and some cleaners working in schools and offices. The research is still in progress and will be continued, especially the parts on cleaners' perceptions. What is presented here represents the initial findings and focuses on the perceptions of the sector stakeholders (both the employer and employee side). Due to lockdowns, most of the interviews were conducted via online communication or phone.

Field access was facilitated by the ongoing qualitative research that is taking place as part of the overarching project, which implied that the research team was in regular contact with sector stakeholders. The sampling was based on existing contacts that could be quickly activated, and on theoretical sampling related to the process of data analysis.

3 The SPLITWORK project, 2018-2022, Austrian Science Fund (FWF): V-598, see: https://bach.wu-wien.ac.at/d/research/projects/3187/#abstract.

All of the expert interviews were recorded and transcribed. For the ethnographic interviews, if they could not be recorded, protocols were written. All data was gathered and interpreted according to the overall grounded theory framework of the general project. In the analysis, which was supported by the software NVivo, different steps of coding in the grounded theory traditions of Strauss and Corbin (1990) and Charmaz (2014) were used. The analysis was an interpretive process starting with open coding, which stays very close to the data, and proceeding to more comparative, abstract, and focused coding. Coding was conducted by the author. Preliminary findings were discussed with peer researchers and with sector experts and stakeholders at several stages.

### 5 Empirical findings: (In)visible work at the frontline

#### **5.1 Cleaning demand and short-time work: The economic situation and the labour market**

Economically, the cleaning sector is not faring badly, despite the Covid-19 crisis. In fact, cuts, stability, or even increases in turnover depend strongly on the kinds of customers that a cleaning or facility management company has. Many schools, restaurants, and hotels, for instance, had to close for some time during the pandemic. This was often linked to decreasing work for cleaning companies. In other areas, however, the need for cleaning services actually increased, for example in hospitals or communal areas in blocks of flats (with people being at home more, which meant that places like stairwells, backyards, elevators etc. became dirty more rapidly).

Interestingly, in some contexts, the demand for cleaning services increased because the people in charge wanted the public or their employees to see cleaning being done – e.g. on public transport or at workplaces. Here, operators and managers wanted to reassure the users of the vehicles or premises by ensuring that they saw that the surfaces, doorknobs, and workspaces were being regularly cleaned and disinfected. This indicates a certain increase in awareness of the importance of cleaning and hygiene in light of the pandemic. This contributed to cleaning work being *seen* more, both in direct ways (staff cleaning handrails in the subways), which thus increased its socio-spatial visibility, and indirect ways (in terms of awareness).

The vast majority of cleaning companies, according to experts' estimations, made use of the Austrian government's short-time work scheme [Kurzarbeit], which allowed companies to keep workers employed with sharply reduced working times supported by public funding (see Bundesministerium für Arbeit

#### Ambivalent (In)Visibility

2021). The scheme was supposed to prevent dismissals, though they could not be completely avoided in the cleaning sector. Some cleaners lost their jobs, while others are still afraid of losing their jobs at the time of writing (September 2021).

#### **5.2 'Wear your mask correctly!': Changes in jobs, tasks, and workplace interactions**

Cleaners have experienced many changes to their work during the pandemic. These include unforeseen changes of tasks, job sites, and working times. Disinfection activities came in as an additional work task, often substituting other cleaning tasks that were less necessary during lockdowns. Shifts in cleaning activities implied that some cleaners had to be deployed in new places. For some, this required high flexibility and having to work in new contexts. For others, this could also involve fears and insecurity, when they had to work in places in which they felt uncomfortable, such as elderly care homes or medical settings. Moreover, cleaners had the same worries as others in the population: could they be infected by colleagues, by clients, by aerosols, by surfaces?

Nevertheless, cleaners kept working. Several interview partners reported that they were afraid that cleaners would just stay at home, call in sick, or quit their jobs at the onset of the crisis, though no one reported that this had actually happened. Some sector experts even thought that in some contexts, cleaners may have considered their work to be more meaningful when its relevance became more acknowledged during the pandemic. Either way, as a rule, cleaners kept doing their job, even under the new and often harder conditions.

At the same time, new problems and conflicts at the micro-level of everyday workplace interactions arose. For instance, at the very beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, communication between customers and cleaning companies sometimes broke down, so that cleaners, arriving at their usual work sites, found themselves in front of closed doors. Moreover, new conflicts in the relationship between company employees and cleaners took place; for instance, the employees of a company telling the cleaners that they were not wearing the right kind of mask or that they should put it on correctly. Such micro-level evidence is an important starting point for further investigation regarding altered interactions between customers and cleaners. In this example, cleaners actually became *more* visible, but by means of negative attention and in a way that made them potentially vulnerable.

#### **5.3 From health and safety issues to new inequalities**

Obviously, the pandemic involved additional health and safety issues for cleaners. For one thing, cleaners are exposed to infection risks. They cannot work from home, they tend to have several customers in one day, and they often use public transport to travel between work sites. For another, they may also have to clean places that were used by people suspected of having a Covid-19 infection, or even with a proven infection, as part of their work.

Not only did disinfection activities represent a change in the cleaners' work tasks, especially at the beginning of the crisis when the risk of surface infection was feared to be high, but disinfection also adds to cleaners' exposure to chemicals that can have adverse effects on the respiratory system (Clausen et al. 2020). In addition, in some phases of the crisis, workers had to wear masks covering their mouths and noses whenever they were not alone, which could make their physical work more strenuous. In the early phase of the pandemic, however, the main problem with regard to safety equipment was that it was not sufficiently available. In fact, access to rubber gloves was still limited in 2021.

Moreover, a range of new issues regarding the question of who is responsible for employees in settings typical for cleaning work arose, particularly in relation to fragmented work such as value chains and outsourcing (see Weil 2014). These new questions include: Who should pay for all the new protective equipment? Who is responsible for cleaners' testing? In whose vaccination programme do cleaners take part (and thus, at which point in time, when vaccines are scarce) – the customer company's, the employer's, the state's?

In terms of the future, meanwhile, employee representatives are, at the moment of writing, worried that vaccination policies might lead to a division into two classes of cleaning workers: those who can work with clients and those who cannot (and will not be able to find work or will have to work in even more isolation than before). This problematic future outlook might further increase invisibility, while at the same time increasing inequality within the workforce along the lines of who is vaccinated and who not.

#### **5.4 Visibility and appreciation**

There is an ambiguity in what has happened to cleaning work during the pandemic. On the one hand, it became slightly more visible at the *discursive level*. Media debates and public discourse on essential jobs focused primarily on the care and retail sectors, but cleaning was sometimes mentioned too.

#### Ambivalent (In)Visibility

At other levels, the pandemic has increased as well as decreased the visibility of cleaning work. Employers wanted their employees to see that buildings were clean and hygienic. Cleaners (publically and privately employed) became physically more visible in settings such as healthcare institutions and public transport. At the same time, with lockdowns and working from home, cleaners also became even less visible in public spaces and workplaces. In offices, the focus of my empirical data, there is now even more reason to keep cleaners away from the rest of staff than before. Thus, existing problems with cleaning as invisible work, especially regarding the dimension of socio-spatial visibility, have worsened.

Another important aspect connected to invisibility is the fact that trade unions and work councillors are in an even more difficult situation than before when it comes to organizing and representing workers, as they now meet cleanersless often. This is another aspect ofsocio-spatial visibility*,* one that is linked to employee voice and representation*.* Organizing workers who are scattered to different workplaces and have fragmented working times was already challenging even before the pandemic, but has been exacerbated since (Soni-Sinha/Yates 2013).

According to a survey conducted in 2020 by employers in Austria, the public recognition of cleaning work increased during the pandemic (Wirtschaftskammer Österreich [WKO] 2020). The Viennese cleaning sectors' employers' association also launched a 'thank you' campaign in 2020, presenting different cleaners and describing their tasks (Landesinnung Wien der Denkmal-, Fassaden- und Gebäudereiniger [Cleaners' professional association of monuments, frontages and buildings in Vienna] 2020). However, two questions have to be asked against the backdrop of such developments: first, is the increased recognition sustainable, i.e. how long will it last; and second, will it have any meaningful consequences for cleaners' working conditions?

So far, there have not been any rewards or improvements for cleaners in response to the higher demands and risks and the slightly increased attention that came with the pandemic. The yearly wage increases negotiated by the social partners (employee and employer representatives for the sector) were not higher in 2021 than usual. There were no bonuses, either, with an exception for publically employed cleaners working in medical settings. There has only been one recommendation by the employers' association to their member companies to give a tax-privileged coronavirus bonus of EUR 100 to their workers for their extraordinary work during the crisis. But to date, private-sector cleaning workers are still not entitled to any material recognition of their 'essential' work.

### 6 Conclusions and outlook: Visibility within invisibility

The pandemic did not only change the labour market situation; it also led to a new distinction between those who can work from home and those who cannot (Schönherr/Zandonella 2020). Essential jobs typically have to be done on-site, often with particularly high exposure to health-related risks. Recent studies have shown that low-wage groups in society have to move around more in their jobs and are thus exposed to higher infection risks, including Covid-19 (see Beirat für gesellschafts-, wirtschafts- und umweltpolitische Alternativen [BEIGEWUM] 2020). The low wages in jobs such as care, retail, and cleaning do not compensate for these increased demands (Schönherr/Zandonella 2020).

As for health and safety issues, there are now new ones added to those that were always present in the sector. Social partners and health and safety authorities could take this moment as an opportunity to discuss both new and prevailing risks linked to cleaning work – including, apart from Covid-19, the risk of injuries, accidents, allergies, and problems with musculoskeletal conditions and respiratory system diseases (Holtgrewe/Sardadvar 2012). Among many other things, these risks lower workers' prospects of staying in employment until retirement (Mayrhuber et al. 2021).

Working from home might also change the nature of office cleaning in the future. There are indications that home office work is here to stay (see Hans-Böckler-Stiftung 2020). For cleaning companies, this means that they might lose contracts (Komarek 2020). For cleaners, it might imply that some will lose their jobs or that they will have to work in an even more isolated way than before. Working from home not only changes homes, it also changes offices for those who go to work there. Carstensen (2021, translation K.S.), illustratively, speaks about 'dark aisles at the workplace' as a possible future development, i.e., empty, quiet and less lively offices with little social exchange and a different atmosphere. If this development continues, cleaners will lose some jobs, or it will be these 'dark aisles' that they will increasingly be working on, even more on their own and less seen by others than before.

Cleaning is, like care work, inevitable work – work that will always have to be done in a society. During the pandemic, it has become even more vital due to the importance of hygiene – but has it received more recognition, or become more visible? I argue that the impacts on visibility are ambiguous. During the pandemic, the cleaning sector has received some more visibility with the new attention being paid to key work. Yet within key work sectors, visibility for cleaning remains low, and the working conditions are still among the worst within key work sectors (Schönherr/Zandonella 2020). While the importance of hygiene has become clearer, and in some contexts cleaning work has been seen more by others, in other contexts, the socio-spatial visibility of Ambivalent (In)Visibility

the work in particular has further decreased against the backdrop of lockdowns and working from home. I thus conclude that the pandemic has brought about ambiguous (in)visibility for the cleaning sector.

There are several reasons for the invisibility of cleaning work. One is its proximity to domestic work, which is done unpaid, mostly by women, in the household, and is linked to low societal and economic recognition (England 2005). However, much of the invisibility of cleaning work also lies in the *organization* of the work. Thus, higher recognition and, as a consequence, improved working conditions in the commercial cleaning sector can be fostered in several parallel ways. For one thing, the Covid-19 crisis, and the reorganization of work linked to it, could be used to consider an expansion of daytime cleaning. Examples from other countries, such as Norway, show that changes towards working times during office hours are possible. Such a change needs strong cooperation between social partners, but also the involvement of customers (Sardadvar 2021). Additionally, the crisis could be an occasion to revaluate work on a broad societal and economic scale. In this regard, the increased attention to cleanliness and hygiene that is connected to the Covid-19 crisis could provide a helpful impulse that can be taken up by social partners, politicians, employers, and customers to improve employment conditions for cleaning work.

#### References

Carstensen, Tanja (2021): Glücklich zu Hause und bei der Arbeit Dunkle Flure? Aktuelle Herausforderungen von Homeoffice und Mobiler Arbeit. Presentation at the virtual conference 'Machtfragen der Digitalisierung', 19 + 20 January 2021. Düsseldorf: Hans-Böckler-Stiftung.

Charmaz, Kathy (2014): Constructing Grounded Theory. London: Sage.

Ambivalent (In)Visibility

**Karin Sardadvar** works as a senior post-doc researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Social Research at the University of Economics and Business in Vienna. She conducts the SPLITWORK project (2018–2022), funded in the Elise Richter Programme of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The project investigates the working-time model of split shifts in the cleaning and the care sectors.

### Who is relevant? And to Which System? The Re/Production of Power Relations during the Debate about 'System-Relevant' Professions from a Discourse Analytical Perspective

*Frauke Grenz and Anne Günster*

### 1 Introduction

In 2020, the term 'system-relevant' was frequently used in the German media and political discourses in connection with the consequences of the global Covid-19 pandemic. From a linguistic point of view, the term encompasses at least two different meanings: work that is 'indispensable for a stable economic and financial system', but also 'relevant for the development of society in general' (Möhrs 2020: 6, translation F.G./A.G.). The first, narrow definition clearly points to the global financial crisis of 2008/2009, where the term system-relevant was used to legitimize the state funding of banks and other financial institutions (ibid.). In contrast, the second definition leaves open what exactly 'the system' is. This second meaning gained attention in early 2020 and led to a public debate about the status and recognition of system-relevant professions during the Covid-19 crisis. Given its history, the term encompasses both a description and a critique of allegedly indispensable professions or institutions. Furthermore, in contrast to its English equivalent 'essential workers', the German term 'system-relevant professions' hints at the safeguarding of a system (and not of the workers themselves) and poses the question of relevance (and therefore irrelevance) of certain professions for the benefit of this unspecified system.

From a discourse analytical perspective, this paper takes a closer look at the debate in the media about the so-called system-relevant professions. The data corpus consists of online publications by the national daily press that contain the keywords 'system-relevant' and 'Corona'/'Covid' from March to September 2020. The documents were analysed with regard to the following research questions: Which discursive possibilities are opened up by the classification 'system-relevant'? How is the term used to tackle power relations and inequalities and demand change? And how is the term discursively transformed to reproduce and stabilize nationalist, heteronormative, and capitalist conditions?

First, we outline our discourse theoretical perspective with special regard to the entanglement of power relations, subject positions, and vulnerability. Second, we delineate our analytical approach with a focus on discursive strategies. Third, the results are presented, sorted into five identified discursive strategies. In conclusion, we summarize the main results and offer some perspectives for further research.

### 2 Discourse theoretical perspective: Power, subjectivation, and vulnerability

In everyday speech we often assume that language merely represents reality. Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, however, have established that discourses are productive. They are 'practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak' (Foucault 1972: 49). Thus, discursive practices are not practices of speaking or writing, but practices that constitute knowledge and truth (Fegter et al. 2015: 14). Discourses determine the constitutive boundaries of what can and cannot be thought, what can and cannot be lived (Villa 2010: 149).

The discursive production of truth is a powerful process. However, Foucault assumes 'that something called Power, with or without a capital letter, which is assumed to exist universally in a concentrated or diffused form, does not exist' (Foucault 1982: 788). Rather,

'[p]ower exists only when it is put into action' (ibid.). Acting subjects are both the effect as well as the carriers of power. From this analytical perspective on the productivity of power relations, subjects and their actions are constituted simultaneously. This means that discursive practices provide the frame of reference within which subjects are perceived and able to speak. According to Foucault's notion of subjectivation, subject positions provide 'the place from which individuals are able to produce statements' (Wrana et al. 2014: 394, translation F.G./A.G.).

Judith Butler extends Foucault's notion of subjectivation by focusing not only on the processes of subject formation with regard to the speaking subject, but also on the subject that is addressed by a statement and thereby recognized. Butler underlines that the recognition of subjects is always framed by discursive orders, but at the same time never fully determined by them: 'Subjection consists precisely in this fundamental dependency on a discourse we never chose but that, paradoxically, initiates and sustains our agency' (Butler 1997: 2). However, Butler emphasises that the recognition of subjects is not only framed by discursive orders and social norms, but that, vice versa, certain practices of recognition or, indeed, certain breakdowns in the practice of recognition mark a site of rupture within the horizon of normativity and implicitly call Who is relevant? And to Which System?

for the institution of new norms, putting into question the givenness of the prevailing normative horizon (Butler 2005: 24). Rendering visible the discursive practices of recognition can thus challenge the social norms that are sustained by these practices.

For Butler, the recognition of subjects is strongly intertwined with the concept of corporeal vulnerability: Butler assumes that 'the body is (…) vulnerable by definition' (Butler 2010: 33; see also Ludwig in this volume). However, this vulnerability as a basic human condition is 'fundamentally dependent on (…) recognition' (Butler 2006: 43). Thus, it becomes subject to biopolitical mechanisms:

Lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe. Certain lives will be highly protected (…). Other lives will not find such fast and furious support and will not even qualify as "grievable" (Butler 2006: 32).

Whose lives matter and whose deaths are grieved (see Butler 2010) depends on the subject positions that individuals are discursively placed in.

### 3 Analytical approach: Identifying discursive strategies in online articles

The goal of our analysis was to work out the different discursive strategies that seized upon the dictum 'system-relevant' in order to either question gendered, racialized, and capitalist power relations or reproduce and stabilize the status quo. The term 'discursive strategies' is not meant to constitute intentional tactics by certain identifiable individuals. With reference to Foucault's *Archaeology of Knowledge* (1972), we rather use the term to describe the discursive practices that we have identified as regulated ways of reproducing or transforming knowledge and truth (Foucault 1972: 64–70).

Discourse analysis is not a research method in itself, but rather a methodological perspective. Thus, in order to work out the discursive strategies, it is necessary to develop an analytical procedure adequate to the research subject (see e.g. Gasteiger/Schneider 2014). We started out by putting together a data corpus of online articles from the national daily press focusing on the two main1 German newspapers *Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung* (FAZ) and

1 In 2020, FAZ and SZ had the second and third highest circulation among the German supraregional daily newspapers (see Schröder 2020; Schröder 2021); the tabloid *Bild* had the highest circulation.

*Süddeutsche Zeitung* (SZ), as well as the written news published by *Tagesschau*, the main German TV news program. We chose exclusively online publications for the data corpus because statistical reports show that in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 there was a significant increase in user numbers of German newspaper websites (see Zeitungsmarktforschung Gesellschaft n.d.). In the data corpus, we included all online publications of FAZ, SZ, and *Tagesschau* that contained the keywords 'Corona' or 'Covid' and 'system-relevant' published between March and September 2020. The final corpus consisted of 217 articles.

Like many discourse analysts, we drew on the process of theoretical sampling and the coding techniques of Grounded Theory Methodology (Strauss/Corbin 1990). However, we modified these techniques with regard to our discourse theoretical perspective. The discourse analytical coding process aims to identify the conditions of statements. The goal is to answer the question, '[H]ow is it that one particular statement appeared rather than another?' (Foucault 1972: 27). The task is to work out the probability or improbability that certain statements occur (Gasteiger/Schneider 2014: 149). Discourse analytical coding therefore focuses mostly on discontinuities, inconsistencies, and vague statements in order to analyse what has been said, but also what has been rendered invisible or unspeakable.

#### 4 Results: Discursive strategies

We identified five main discursive strategies through which gendered, racialized, and capitalist power relations were first challenged and then reproduced during the debate about system relevance: making power relations visible (3.1), recognizing heroes (3.2), demanding and denying change (3.3), securing privileges (3.4), and restoring 'pre-Covid' normalcy (3.5). Although there is a chronological development in these strategies, the strategies also appear simultaneously throughout the data corpus.

#### **4.1 Making power relations visible**

'Maybe this crisis is like a contrast medium that shows what is missing from our societies, what we have recklessly weakened, which inequalities we have tolerated, whom we have denied recognition, and whom adequate pay' (Emcke Who is relevant? And to Which System?

2020).2 Our material shows that through the debate about system-relevant professions, social power relations and their intersectional entanglements between gender, class, and race became visible.

Thus, the Covid-19 crisis serves as a magnifying glass for what feminist research and politics have been criticizing for decades: reproductive and care work is mostly done by women and under precarious conditions (see e.g. Becker-Schmidt 2010; Lutz 2018). In our material, the media addresses the issue that 'in the food retail sector 73 percent of the workers are women, in hospitals 76 percent and in preschools even 92 percent' (Blazekovic/Bös 2020). Unpaid domestic care work is also mostly done by women in their own families. In our data corpus, it is significant that in many depictions of the challenges regarding the so-called work-life-balance, it is exclusively women who are portrayed as being 'caught in the Covid trap' (Bös 2020). Those who try to manage home office work with kids 'do mostly 'home' and little 'office'' (Joachim 2020). It is the subject position 'woman' that is constructed as always already vulnerable to the challenge of balancing family and career. This becomes especially apparent in times of crisis, when it appears to be a self-evident truth that especially women have to put their careers on hold in order to do the system-relevant but often unpaid care and reproductive work (see e.g. Joachim 2020).

However, there are also nationalist power relations that become apparent in our data. It is explicitly stated that (poorly paid) domestic care work is mainly done by migrant women from Eastern Europe (tagesschau 2020a; tagesschau 2020b). Similarly, it becomes apparent that it is migrant workers who ensure the national food supply:' In Germany, about two thirds of the foreign harvest workers are from Romania. (…) German helpers for this strenuous work have not been found for a long time' (Burger/Martens/Steppat 2020). In our material, however, migrant care and harvest workers mainly appear as an anonymous mass. It is the missing *workforce* caused by international travel restrictions during the pandemic that is relevant to the (German) care and food supply system. The individuals, on the other hand, do not seem to matter. The material we analysed does not address the effects that the travel restrictions have on the people whose livelihoods depend on seasonal work in Germany.

2 The analysed material was originally in German. The cited quotes have been translated by the authors.

#### **4.2 Recognizing heroes**

'Right now, we are seeing an incredibly high number of heroes of everyday life' (Hampel/Salavati 2020). This statement by the Secretary of Labour indicates both a higher public visibility of system-relevant professions and an increase in the social recognition of reproductive vocational groups such as nurses and preschool teachers: 'The virus has changed a lot, such as the perspective on certain professions. Suddenly, people are called system-relevant who may have been ridiculed as preschool tinkers or low-paid nurses in hospitals and nursing homes only yesterday (Ludwig 2020).' Therefore, not only do the people working in system-relevant professions become more visible, but unequal social power relations are explicitly addressed by the media, as it becomes apparent that 'the Covid crisis shows that people in the so-called system-relevant professions receive relatively low wages' (Záboji 2020) and 'system-relevant professions clearly gain less prestige' (Bös et al. 2020). Now, it is these system-relevant professions that are being praised for 'keeping society alive and running' (Blasekovic/Bös 2020) at great personal risk: 'In times of crisis, their work is not only essentially relevant to the survival of humans and society. Most of them are also exposed to an extraordinary risk of infection (Bös et al. 2020).' Thus, system-relevant professions receive public recognition as the heroes of the crisis.

#### **4.3 Demanding and denying change**

Some members of the so-called system-relevant professions are using this new moral recognition to demand an improvement in their wages and working conditions. Unions stress how important it is 'that these people receive not only moral but also material appreciation' (Blazekovic/Bös 2020). In an interview, a sales assistant in a drug store says, 'Many have called me a hero, but I don't do this job for free' (tagesschau 2020c). However, it becomes apparent that this is exactly what is expected of the new heroes. The term 'hero' comprises an ambivalent recognition: while calling someone a hero may be a gesture of respect and appreciation, the term also implies a subject position that is constituted by a moral duty to bravely face dangers in order to save society without asking for anything in return. This becomes especially clear as the answers to increased demands for improved wages and working conditions for the 'Covid heroes' are rather reluctant. In the beginning of the crisis, many different reproductive professions were collectively identified as system-relevant. However, the discussion about moral and monetary recognition for system-relevant work goes hand in hand with the reintroduction of known power relations. For Who is relevant? And to Which System?

some system-relevant professions, such as the exclusively non-German harvest workers, even the moral recognition has been short-lived, as they are not mentioned as belonging to the new heroes. Discussions about monetary recognition for others do not include a systematic change of remuneration. Rather, the focus lies, for example, on a possible 'Covid bonus' of up to 1,000 euros, which would be awarded to some system-relevant professions, but not all (see e.g. SZ 22.04.2020).

In some of the articles we analysed, this development of the debate about system-relevant professions is explicitly criticized: 'Maybe the possibility of a fundamental systematic change is wasted since money is distributed but not redistributed' (Anzlinger 2020).

As long as we take for non-negotiable what especially the better-off dramatically glorify as "our freedom, our values, and our lifestyle", it is impossible to bestow adequate appreciation, pay, and working conditions upon the worse-off systemrelevant groups (Schulte von Drach 2020).

However, it is precisely this non-negotiability of the status quo that is discursively reproduced. Through the analysis of our data, we identified two discursive strategies (3.4, 3.5) through which capitalist, heteronormative, and nationalist power relations are reproduced during the debate about system relevance.

#### **4.4 Securing privileges**

As the Covid-19 crisis and the corresponding containment strategies such as (partial) lockdowns go on, the term system-relevant is being used less and less to criticize grievances in the care and supply sector. Rather, the focus increasingly lies on the fact that it is through the term system-relevant that access to certain privileges is regulated. In a first discursive transformation, system-relevant professions are no longer exclusively seen as being performed by people who *have* to work under dire conditions, but rather those who are *allowed* to work despite the availability of short-time work allowances (in German: Kurzarbeit) and forced closures (see e.g. Zoch 2020).

Another example relates to access to childcare. In many German federal states, only those working in system-relevant professions have been entitled to external childcare during the lockdowns. Thus, being allowed to work and having access to childcare have been discursively constructed as privileges of system-relevant groups. In order to secure these privileges, more and more professions have claimed system relevance. The vagueness of the term is being exploited so that it is no longer limited to the care and supply sectors, but also to 'the economic sectors which have to be maintained even in times of crisis' (Süddeutsche Zeitung 2020). The affected professions have claimed that 'banks and businesses are just as important in order to get the system running again after the crisis' (Blazekovic/Bös 2020). In contrast to the mostly precarious and underpaid professions practiced mainly by women and migrant workers that were initially classified as system-relevant, the term is now increasingly being used for relatively secure and well-paid professions that are predominantly practiced by white men (see e.g. Sektion Politik und Geschlecht in der DVPW 2020).

#### **4.5 Restoring 'pre-Covid' normalcy**

In addition, the question about system relevance is subject to a dethematization strategy. Who is system-relevant is declared to be the wrong question. Rather, one should focus on the question of how to return to the 'normal' social conditions that existed before the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus, inequalities and power relations that existed before the pandemic are discursively constructed as the norm to which we should strive to return. The difficulty in defining who is system-relevant is used to reintroduce capitalist logics as unquestionable:

[A]s it is difficult to define which professions are system-relevant (…) [s]upply and demand, qualification and interchangeability are the determining factors for wage formation (Blazekovic/Bös 2020).

Structural inequalities and the nationalist and capitalist exploitation of labour are disguised as the result of individual choices:

Despite the high risk of infection, which has led to at least one case of death of a Romanian temporary worker so far, the work in Germany remains economically attractive for many Romanians. Many certainly know what to expect as a harvest worker or at slaughterhouses in Germany, they are aware of the risks (…) but still they are coming back year after year (Burger/Martens/Steppat 2020).

Thus, by demanding to return to pre-Covid-19 normalcy, the structural inequalities that this normalcy entails are rendered invisible.

# 5 Conclusion

In this study, we analysed the discursive possibilities that were opened up by the classification 'system-relevant' during the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, and were able to identify a discursive transformation with regard to the use and

#### Who is relevant? And to Which System?

meaning of the term system-relevant in press coverage. In the beginning of the pandemic, the classification system-relevant held the utopian potential of questioning the 'system', of changing nationalist, heteronormative, and capitalist structures. The term was used to draw attention to underappreciated women and migrant workers: as precariously employed nurses, preschool teachers, cashiers, sales assistants, and harvest workers, they ensured that the most fundamental human needs for care and food were provided for even in times of crisis. Here, the focus lay on maintaining a care and supply system. Soon, however, the widespread debate about power relations and precarious working conditions seemed to be reduced to the evening applause for the so-called heroes of the crisis, while fundamental and necessary social changes for these heroes were denied. At the same time, we observed that the term system-relevant was increasingly being used to protect existing privileges and maintain the status quo. As the pandemic drew on, use of the term system-relevant was extended to further professions – mostly white German bankers and businessmen – considered relevant to a both nationalist and capitalist system, whose logics are discursively constructed as an incontestable truth, especially in times of crisis.

Notably, not only were social power relations first challenged and then stabilised throughout the debate about system-relevant professions, but furthermore, the debate has contributed to the discursive production of different subject positions, which has meant that certain (groups of) individuals have been recognised as system-relevant subjects while others have not. Drawing on the link between discursive practices, subjectivation, and vulnerability, our findings can be interpreted as discursive regulations regarding whose lives are protected, grieved, or rendered invisible. In our data corpus, for instance, while migrant workers were initially classified as system-relevant, they were ultimately denied a subject position as they mostly appeared as an anonymous mass or as the constitutive outside to the winners of 'the capitalist game'. Their lives do not seem to require increased protection, as their acceptance of underpaid work is framed as an individual choice rather than the result of capitalist exploitation.

Women too are constructed as system-relevant subjects, as they are the ones who do most of the reproductive and care work. However, they are also constructed as being especially vulnerable to the effects of the pandemic, as it is women who are faced with the challenge of balancing care work and career. Thus, while women are predominantly depicted as exhausted and over-worked, men are rendered invisible as vulnerable subjects. Finally, collectively, most system-relevant professionals are called heroes. They are thus placed in an ambivalent subject position that recognises the moral value and the risks of infection that certain professions entail during the pandemic, yet at the same time ascribes vulnerability and establishes a moral duty to accept these risks (see also Hintermayr in this volume; Sektion Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung in der DGfE 2020).

These findings on the subject positions that were discursively produced during the debate about system-relevant professions can only be considered initial reflections. We suggest that further studies take a closer look at the subject positions produced by the public discourse about the pandemic, particularly with regard to the intersectional ties between gender, class, and race and the unequal allocation of vulnerability, (not only) in times of crisis.

# References

Who is relevant? And to Which System?

https://www.faz.net/aktuell/rhein-main/corona-krise-fuehrt-zu-neuerwertschaetzung-von-sozialen-berufen-16931563.html (accessed n.d.).

https://www.dvpw.de/fileadmin/user\_upload/sek\_politik\_und\_geschlecht /Appell\_der\_Sektion\_Politik\_und\_Geschlecht\_in\_der\_DVPW\_ zum\_\_

wissenschafts-\_politischen\_Umgang\_mit\_der\_COVID\_19-Pandemie.pdf (accessed 16.08.2021).

Süddeutsche Zeitung (2020): 450.000 Alleinerziehende arbeiten in systemrelevanten Jobs. 20 April 2020. Süddeutsche Zeitung. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/karriere/arbeit-450-000-alleinerziehendearbeiten-in-systemrelevanten-jobs-dpa.urn-newsml-dpa-com-20090101- 200420-99-756481 (accessed n.d.)

Who is relevant? And to Which System?

**Frauke Grenz** is a researcher and lecturer at the European University of Flensburg. She has studied Educational Science, British and American Studies, Sociology, and Gender Studies in Bielefeld, Florence, and Paris. Her research interests are Gender, Queer and Postcolonial Studies, Discourse Theory and Discourse Analysis, as well as Theories of Subjectivation and Education. Currently, she is working on her doctoral dissertation in which she analyses the antigenderist movement against and general debate about addressing sexual diversity in German schools from a discourse analytical perspective.

**Anne Günster** is a researcher in music education and works as assistant of the university management at the Hochschule for Music and Dance Cologne. She has studied Music, English and Educational Science in Cologne and has worked as a lecturer in Music Education at the University of Hamburg. Her research interests are Singing with special regards to Theories of Subjectivation, Music Education, Discourse Theory and Discourse Analysis. She has recently submitted her dissertation at the University of Hamburg in which she analyses didactic journals with regards to discursive strategies which are aimed at the production and regulation of music teachers and their students as 'singing subjects'.

#### 'Systemic Relevance' for Social Work: More than just a Compliment – Not yet a Proper Law. An Evaluation of Pandemic-Related Legal Changes in Germany

#### *Daria Dudley*

Since March 2020, the term 'systemic relevance' in Germany (equivalent to 'key/essential workers' in English) has become a proper legal term. Within a short period of time, a number of changes to the law were made to define the systemic relevance of certain areas, including social work to some extent. At the same time, an empirical sociological study by Meyer and Buschle made the following provisional statement in April 2020 with regard to social work: 'The corona pandemic (…) has significantly changed the actions and routines of social workers (…). Despite higher demands, however, social recognition remains low' (Buschle/Meyer 2020: 3). The contradiction between these two circumstances is immediately recognizable.

Another prominent feature of social work is the fact that men are still significantly underrepresented. Attention was drawn to this problem already several years ago (Rose/May 2014); since then, the situation has hardly improved. As of 30 June 2020, 83.7% of all employees in Germany in the education and social services sector were women – leaving only 16.3% men (Statista 2021). Though the German Federal Employment Agency has slightly different figures for the year 2020 due to a different classification of the industries, the same problem is illustrated. According to the agency, only 23% of employees in the health and social services sector in 2020 were men; in the education and teaching sector, the figure was 28% (Bundesagentur für Arbeit 2021: 13).

This gender disparity is due to several factors. On the one hand, 'the typical female professions (…) are paid less and appear predestined for part-time work' (Schäfer et al. 2017: 70). The Federal Employment Agency confirms this: in 2020, women earned on average 18% less than men. This so-called unadjusted gender pay gap has various causes, but the decisive reason is that men and women decide for different occupational fields (Bundesagentur für Arbeit 2021). Furthermore, it is notable that in the agency's report, 49% of all women who were subject to social security contributions worked part-time in June 2020; among men, the figure was only 11% (ibid.).

On the other hand, the economic and social recognition of professions in the social arena has not increased for years, 'which is also a reason why the proportion of men taking up studies in social work has gone down in recent years, so that a ratio of 20% men and 80% women in bachelor's degree programs is tending to emerge' (Schäfer et al. 2017: 71). Several older studies show that young men are not very interested in the profession of social work because it is perceived as unattractive due to low salaries, precarious working conditions and, most importantly, a lack of social recognition and prestige (Budde/Willems/Böhm 2009; Böhm/Budde 2014). More recent reports confirm this trend. A comprehensive statistical analysis of higher education institutions in the German state of Hessen, which records statistics for eight different study programs, demonstrates that the proportion of women in the social work degree program remained constant at about 73–75% from 2007/2008 to 2019/2020, and even increased slightly in recent years (Gender and Women's Research Centre of the Hessian Universities 2020). In a report from 2020, the Federal Agency for Civic Education drew on statistics from the Federal Statistical Office since 2002 and came to the following conclusion: although more women overall are studying and the proportion of women studying is rising continuously, the gender-specific choice of courses of study has not changed for years. Thus 'Despite many efforts to inspire (…) men to pursue social professions, the gender divide in the choice of study and training persists in Germany' (Federal Agency for Civic Education 2020).

In light of this, this paper examines whether the introduction of new regulations on the systemic relevance of some professional sectors has actually brought about lasting positive changes for those employed in these sectors. In particular, it is asked whether the relevant amendments to the law were indeed intended to bring about a sustainable improvement in working conditions, which would potentially result in a social upgrading of these occupational fields. It is assumed that such sustainable changes would make it possible to make the field of social work more attractive to potential workers and balance the gender ratio in the future.

Based on this objective, these questions will be addressed in the following order. First, relevant changes in legislation at the EU and federal German level will be carefully examined. Following this, legal amendments at the German state level will be compared. The analysis focuses on the field of social work, where discrepancies in the legislation at the regional level clearly come to light.

Due to the pandemic, the term 'systemic relevance' is widely discussed in Germany, especially in the mass media. In the social sector, numerous statements have been made as to why social work should be considered systemrelevant in Germany.1At the same time, the legal ground for this debate is still very limited. Almost no essays have been written and no legal commentaries have been made on this legal issue. There is, furthermore, currently no case law regarding systemic relevance, as the German courts have not yet had the opportunity to deal with such issues. A legal analysis on systemic relevance for social work therefore has to predominantly be based on the laws themselves and not on secondary literature, which particularly explains the limited number of sources in the reference list of this paper. However, in order to bridge the

1 The German Professional Association for Social Work ('DBSH'), Social work during the Corona pandemic: Who cares?!

'Systemic Relevance' for Social Work

gap between current legal realities and expectations from the field of social work itself, such interdisciplinary papers appear indispensable.

### 1 Support during the pandemic: No regulation at EU level

The EU level does not provide any regulation to classify an area as 'systemicrelevant'. On 30 March 2020, the EU Commission issued 'Guidelines concerning the exercise of the free movement of workers during the COVID-19 outbreak' (EU Commission 2020) for the so-called system-relevant workers,2 where this term is mentioned for the first time. For three reasons, however, it can be assumed that these guidelines have no influence on the position, value, and perception of the concerned professions in the various countries of the EU.

Firstly, the sole purpose of the guidelines was to enable cross-border commuters and seasonal workers to cross EU borders smoothly so that they could get to work without losing time despite border closures due to the pandemic. Secondly, the list of system-relevant occupations mentioned in these guidelines is not exhaustive, and there is no mention of criteria for inclusion. Only some specific examples are listed, which enable analogies. Among others, 'professions in the health sector', 'care professions in the healthcare sector', and 'personnel entrusted with systemically important functions in public institutions, including international organizations' are classed as system-relevant. Social workers and educators are not explicitly mentioned in this list, thus whether a specific social work field falls under the term or not is a matter of interpretation. Thirdly, these guidelines ('Leitlinien') belong to a non-binding secondary law of the EU. They are simply recommendations for national authorities, and are not linked to any EU directive or guidelines ('EU-Richtlinien').

### 2 Federal regulations: Survival instead of change

The changes made in German federal law as a response to the Covid-19 crisis can hardly offer a basis for recognizing social work as system-relevant either. On 27 March 2020, the 'Law for easier access to social security, for the use

2 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/GA/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52020XC0330(03)

and protection of social service providers (…),'3 was passed, also called the Social Protection Package. In this law, Article 2, No. 2 (§ 421c Absatz 2 Satz 2 Sozialgesetzbuch (SGB) Drittes Buch (III)) speaks of offering short-time work allowances4 for 'system-relevant industries and professions'. Unfortunately, neither is system-relevance legally defined, nor is a list of such industries and professions offered.

The abovementioned Social Protection Package only contains, as its name suggests, a number of labour law measures to enable easier access to social security and protections for social service providers. These include time restrictions for performing marginal employment (§ 115 SGB IV), changes to Article 3 on basic security in old age (the so-called social assistance; in German: Sozialhilfe), as well as changes in Article 6 of the Federal Child Benefit Act (in German: Bundeskindergeldgesetz). Primarily, however, these measures were limited to 2020 only, and what is more, apart from the aforementioned change to the crediting of short-time work allowances, they were not specifically aimed at system-relevant industries or occupations.

It should not be overlooked that this law also authorized certain exceptions to legal protections, such as amendments to the Working Hours Act (in German: Arbeitszeitgesetz) in Article 8. According to this, 'in exceptional emergencies, (…) especially in epidemic situations of national scope', temporary exceptions to the Working Hours Act (i.e. longer working hours) could be made, as long as they served to combat the pandemic.

The Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs determined the so-called 'system-relevant sectors' at the end of March 2020 as a part of the directive BSI-KritisV5 (Directive to the Act on the Federal Office for Information Security). However, the sole purpose of both the Act and the Directive is to improve IT security in the so-called 'critical services and infrastructures'. The Act defines critical infrastructures as those 'which are of great importance for the functioning of the community because their failure or impairment would result in considerable supply bottlenecks or threats to public safety' (§ 2 Absatz 10 Satz 2 Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Infaormationstechnik (BSIG)). According to the Directive to the Act, a critical service is one that supplies society in certain sectors, 'the failure or impairment of which would lead to significant supply bottlenecks or endanger public safety' (§ 1 Absatz 3 BSI-KritisV). However, only the health – and not the social – sector is mentioned in the directive (§ 6 BSI-KritisV).

3 In German: Gesetz für den erleichterten Zugang zu sozialer Sicherung und zum Einsatz und zur Absicherung sozialer Dienstleister (…).

4 Short-time work allowances allowed employers to temporarily reduce employees' working hours in part or in full, with the continuation of their wages funded through the Federal Employment Agency.

5 In German: Verordnung zur Bestimmung Kritischer Infrastrukturen nach dem BSI-Gesetz.

'Systemic Relevance' for Social Work

The list of system-relevant industries, presented by the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs on 30 March 2020, is, however, much broader than what the abovementioned Act the Directive cover. This is an exhaustive list, which contains five economic and three social industries, as well as media and state administration. No specific occupations are listed, but rather specific areas of work. In the social area, explicitly mentioned are 'staff who ensure the necessary care in schools, day-care centres, in-patient facilities for child and youth welfare and facilities for people with disabilities'. The health area includes, among others, hospitals and care. However, since the ministerial list is only linked to the Act on the Federal Office for Information Security 'BSIG' and does not pursue any further goals like to secure or increase financing of the listed sectors; it has only symbolic meaning, if any at all. Furthermore, whether certain fields of social work are included in the list remains completely a matter of interpretation, because the industries and areas are only mentioned very broadly.

Only Article 10 of the Social Protection Package (the so-called Social Service Provider Employment Act, SodEG from 27 March 2020) could actually be specifically relevant to the area of social work. However, this law is not aimed at staff but at social service providers, ensuring their financial survival during the pandemic. This includes all social service providers (all inclusion businesses like workshops or care centres for disabled people, care and nursing homes for the elderly people; asylum shelters, hospitals, etc.) – with a few exceptions – who provide social services according to the Social Codes 'SGB'6 or the Residence Act 'AufenthaltsG'7 (§ 2 SodEG) and who are directly (through direct expenditure on infection control ordered by law) or indirectly affected by pandemic-related restrictions. Based on the 'guarantee mandate' of the state, social service providers become eligible for a monthly allowance from the state, after they demonstrate how they apply the legal measures to fight the pandemic, to which extent they have exhausted their own financial capacities and the fact that no further funding is possible.

This regulation remains applicable in 2021; the requirements, however, have been specified in more concrete terms, and the hurdles for application have been set a little higher (ibid.). Nevertheless, it still does not pursue any long-term strategic goals, such as improvement of working conditions in the social sector, and focuses solely on the financial survival of companies during the pandemic period and, in general, on coping with the pandemic in society.

This overview of the legal regulations at the federal level shows that they either have a long-term character and elaborate on systemic relevance, but are not applicable and not intended for the field of social work (such as the 'Act on the Federal Office for Information Security') or are explicitly intended for the social sector and thus also include social work, but do not pursue long-term

7 All social services for foreigners on behalf of the state.

6 All social services on behalf of the state.

strategic goals and are solely meant to cope with the challenges of the pandemic.

A combination of both aspects would be essential. In other words, there is currently no legal regulation specifically for the field of social work that pursues long-term strategic goals such as safeguarding and development.

### 3 Regional regulations: Inconsistent and narrowly focused

In parallel to the state regulations, each federal state in Germany has defined its own list of system-relevant areas. Across the board, these definitions primarily pursue the goal of enabling emergency childcare during lockdowns for people who are employed in system-relevant fields of work. Thus, the regulations in the regional decrees belong to the so-called disaster management law (for more on German disaster management law, see Stober/Eisenmenger 2005). An analysis of the various state pandemic regulations shows, however, that the definitions and criteria outlined differ significantly from one state to another. Some regional decrees (e.g. Baden-Württemberg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saxony-Anhalt, and Schleswig-Holstein) provide a definition of systemic relevance and set criteria, while others (e.g. Berlin, North Rhine-Westphalia, and Saxony) only list specific areas.

For example, Section 19 of the Corona Control Decree of Schleswig-Holstein – as well as the regional decrees of Baden-Württemberg, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia – speak of 'members of critical infrastructures', which builds the bridge to the federal legislation – the abovementioned directive on the Federal Office for Information Security. This federal legislation, however, as stated above, pursues a completely different purpose to the states' goal of pandemic management, namely IT security, and thus it can be assumed that two different groups of people are intended by the term 'members of critical infrastructures'. This assumption cannot be substantiated, however, since there is currently no jurisprudence or legal comments pertaining to this issue. As Eisenmenger (2020) rightly points out, the term 'systemic relevance', which originally comes from the areas of IT security and financial markets, has not yet established itself in disaster management law, even though it was often used in 2020 in connection with the Covid-19 pandemic.

The regional decree of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, as another example, does not provide any generalized definition of systemic relevance, but rather specifically ensures emergency childcare for people 'who work in human medical health and care professions and cannot take advantage of any other 'Systemic Relevance' for Social Work

childcare option'8, though it does not explicitly specify these professions. Section 3 of the regional decree of Saarland speaks of offering childcare and pandemic protections to professions with a 'public interest'. This latter term has been used in German municipal law since around 19389.

If a definition does appear in one of the regional decrees, the privileged occupations are generally defined as ensuring the *general public interest*. Which interest is meant by this, however, cannot be clearly answered. For example, the decree of Lower Saxony does not specify what it considers to be a general public interest. There are, furthermore, certain differences between states when it comes to the specification of a 'general public interest'. For example, Section 6, Paragraph 1, No. 2 of the regional decree of Rhineland-Palatinate specifies that general public interest comprises 'activities to maintain public *security* and *order* of the state and *basic services* for the population' (emphasis added) (§6 Absatz 1 Satz 2 CoBeLVO as amended on 8 May 2020), while the state ordinance in Saxony simply speaks of 'ensuring public safety and order'10.

Since there is no federal agreement regarding which public interests have priority for systemic relevance, it is not surprising that specific lists of systemrelevant occupations or areas differ from region to region. Yet nowhere is social work as such listed specifically; only a few particular areas from the field of social work are covered. In Berlin, for example, these are aid organizations and support staff; in Rhineland-Palatinate only educators; in Saxony they are 'employees of the institutions for counselling in the social and psychosocial areas';11 in Saxony-Anhalt, 'counselling staff for pregnancy conflict counselling, women and child protection and social crisis interventions';12 in Schleswig-Holstein, it is authorities like inpatient youth welfare institutions. The area of social work is to a broad extent covered in Saxony, but at the same time not even mentioned in Rhineland-Palatinate.

Whether it is an open or a conclusive list also differs from region to region. After all, in the vast majority of cases, emergency childcare is tied to other conditions. Both parents (and not just one of them) must meet the conditions for access in Baden-Württemberg, Berlin, and Saxony. In all federal states, the entitlement to emergency childcare does not apply if childcare can be done at home while workers do home office, since flexible working hours are possible. Finally, some regional decrees (e.g. Baden-Württemberg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia) emphasize that the employee must be *indispensable* for regular operations or belong to the so-called *indispensable key personnel*. In addition, to apply for emergency childcare, a certificate from

8 State ordinance of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Reasoning, p. 9.

9 Eisenmerger, 201.

10 State ordinance of Saxony, Annex 1, Overview of sectors entitled to emergency care.

11 Ibid.

12 § 14 para. 3 No. 4 State ordinance of Saxony-Anhalt,

the employer usually has to be presented. In practice, therefore, it is de facto left to the employer to decide whether a specific employee is 'indispensable', and even whether the particular area of employment is considered to be system-relevant.

In response to such inconsistencies in definitions and criteria, Eisenmenger (2020) made an attempt to establish some criteria. He analysed various regulations on systemic relevance at the regional, federal, and EU levels and came to the conclusion that even though the regulations are inconsistent, criteria such as 'maintaining public safety and order' as well as 'services of a public interest, especially critical infrastructure' prevail. These criteria are, furthermore, in line with the German constitution (ibid.: 204). Eisenmenger thus encourages the German courts to use these two criteria as a basis for determining systemic relevance in future case law, because they appear to be comprehensible, generalizable, and scalable. Furthermore, these criteria have meanwhile become more or less anchored in the legal system in all regions (ibid.: 205).

### 4 Declaring a 'service of public interest' as a public manifesto

If German case law were to classify the field of social work as a service of public interest in the future, this would serve as a kind of public manifesto clearly stating that the field of social work plays a special role in society. Up till now, however, it has been left to other actors of the society – that is, to legislators at various levels as well as to individual employers – to decide which areas constitute a public interest. Since there is not yet any case law on this in Germany and regional legal assessments differ widely, the door is potentially open for social work to be recognized as a service of public interest.

Indeed, there are strong reasons for attributing public interest to the field of social work. The German Professional Association for Social Work (DBSH) sums up in a somewhat dated study that social work is considered important or particularly important by over 93% of clients (DBSH 1998). A total of 87% of those surveyed were convinced that social work enabled them to avoid social conflicts, and well over 65% were convinced that social work helped them to avoid both the consequences of competition in society as well as crime (DBSH 1998: 4–5)13.

It is hard to ignore the fact that social work plays a particularly important role in processes of social transformation and enables society, particularly in

13 DBSH (1998): An Zustimmung wird nicht gespart! (Study on the Status and Functions of Social Work in the Consciousness of the Population Germany)

#### 'Systemic Relevance' for Social Work