ABSTRACT
In October 2019, mass civil protests erupted in Chile questioning the country's vast and historically rooted inequalities and injustices. These protests, which sought structural changes to Chile's neoliberal ethos, were abruptly brought to a halt by the arrival of COVID-19 in March 2020. The political, social, and economic impacts of the pandemic have only intensified the country's historic inequalities and injustices, hitting hardest in areas with higher levels of vulnerability. Increased unemployment, food insecurity, violence, and mental health crises are only a few of the many issues social workers face in the current context. Furthermore, social distancing measures and forced quarantines have caused social programs to rapidly alter strategies to meet the needs of service users, requiring front-line professionals to adapt quickly. To examine and analyse these rapid changes in the delivery of social programs as well as their impact on front-line professionals, a mixed-methods study was undertaken that included the application of an online survey and follow-up interviews with front-line social workers. We found that social workers reported greater workloads and employment precarity within the current context, that programs were changed to meet the immediate tangible needs of individuals and families, and that changes were primarily designed in a nonparticipatory and centralised manner. This chapter analyses the study's results and discusses the challenges social work faces in the current and future context. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
ABSTRACT
Social workers have played an active role during the Covid-19 pandemic around the world, providing support and continuity to social programs and, in many cases, adapting them to the new health context. In this chapter we examine changes in the working conditions of social workers implementing social programs during the Covid-19 pandemic, discussing notions such as professional subjectivity and precarization, adaptation and uncertainty in the political-institutional frameworks currently underway. From a mixed sequential study, it is identified that although an important part of the social workers who implement programs have not changed their formal working conditions (although important changes are observed in the workload and costs associated with the implementation of the programs in these new conditions), there are some specific groups that have been especially affected by the COVID-19 pandemic: younger colleagues, who are less prepared in terms of training and who are on the front line of program implementation. The qualitative interviews allow us to understand in greater detail these transformations, how the complexities of teleworking are experienced in the day-to-day of professional intervention, how the material and human costs are faced, how a heroic and precarious professional subjectivity is being reinforced, which was already observed before the pandemic, but which seems to be worsening in the face of the crisis. It is discussed how, in this context, social workers respond to precariousness and insecurity, projecting future challenges and struggles.