Integrating Islamic Work Ethics in Work from Home Arrangement

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in changes in the way working is perceived. The concept of work from home which was previously only associated with specific types of work has had to be implemented for many sectors in Malaysia. This concept is novel in Malaysia, thus creating a lot of uncertainties in both law and practice, including the issue of work ethics. This mode of working may be the new norm in the future, which makes it important to examine the work ethics for work from home. The objectives of this study are firstly, to analyse the concept of Islamic work ethics, and secondly, to integrate Islamic work ethics in a work from home arrangement. It is believed that the application of Islamic work ethics by both the employers and the employees may avoid conflicts at work due to different expectations. In this context, the research is based on secondary sources and analyses of existing literature, and on reading of Islamic texts (the Quran and Hadith). Islamic work ethics consist of universal values where they underline the responsibilities of employer to live up to promises, consider an employee's situation, negotiate with an employee to improve their contract, and equal treatment of employees. Apart from that, employees are also responsible for keeping their promises, being honest, working in a team and performing their jobs in good faith. This research found that Islamic work ethics can hinder conflicts between employer and employee. They are suitable for integration in working from home arrangements as the new normal in Malaysia and directly encourage the implementation of organisational justice.

Work ethics, stay-at-home measures and COVID-19 diffusion : How is the pandemic affected by the way people perceive work?

Non-pharmaceutical interventions aimed at reducing the spread of COVID-19 rely largely on voluntary compliance among the target population to be effective, since such measures, which are aimed at the entire population, are very hard to enforce. In this paper, we focus on the impact of different work ethics on the spread of COVID-19. There are indeed reasons to believe that populations with different attitudes toward work will react differently to stay-at-home orders and other policies that forbid people from working. By means of a quantitative analysis, using hybrid model estimators, we test the impact of different work ethics on COVID-19 diffusion in a sample of 30 European countries. Results show that the more a population holds certain beliefs about work-namely, that it is humiliating to receive money without working, that people who do not work become lazy, and that work always comes first-the higher contagion rates of COVID-19 are, ceteris paribus. On the other hand, the more a population perceives work as a social duty, the lower contagion rates are. All this suggests that different work ethics matter in the containment of COVID-19.

Between Minimum Living Income and Basic Income: disputes over the government of poverty in Spain during the Great Interruption

In this article, the discourses around wealth redistribution policies in Spain based on the case of disputes around the Minimum Living Income during the Great Interruption ???the period of health and economic crisis from March to September 2020??? are analyzed. To do this, the most meaningful moments in the evolution of the public debate on the policy are synthesized and analyzed: the outbreak of the pandemic in March, the approval of the Minimum Living Income in June, and the first phase of implementation of the policy until September of 2020. The analysis of political, media and activist discourses shows the disputes in the ways of tackling poverty, on the one hand, with the initial openings of the political imagination to innovative policies ???such as the Universal Basic Income or the Quarantine Income??? or the normalization of an approach to the expansion of social and economic rights, and on the other hand, the transversal affirmation of the work ethic, the narratives of stigmatization of people without income, the modes of control, bureaucratization and government of the poverty, and the technocratic justification of the policy as an improvement of the minimum income system of the regions. Despite the continuities and discontinuities in the discursive frameworks, it is concluded that the disputes analyzed around the Minimum Vital Income express some of the social tensions derived from the trends of growing inequality since the 2008 which have not been reversed to date.

Ethical decision-making of social workers in Spain during COVID-19: Cases and responses.

In this article we address the ethical decision-making processes of social work professionals in Spain during the first wave of COVID-19. We present some of the findings from a broader international research project led by professor Sarah Banks and carried out in collaboration with the International Federation of Social Workers. The first wave of COVID-19 had a major impact in Spain, hitting harder the most vulnerable groups. In this unprecedented and unexpected context, social workers had to make difficult ethical decisions on fundamental issues such as respecting service-user's autonomy, prioritizing wellbeing, maintaining confidentiality or deciding the fair distribution of the scarce resources. There were moments of uncertainty and difficult institutional responses. The broader international project was carried out using an online questionnaire addressed to social work professionals in several countries. In this article, through several specific cases, we examine the ethical decision-making processes of social work professionals in Spain, as well as the way to resolve that situations. We have used a qualitative content analysis with a deductive approach to analyze the responses and cases. Findings show many difficult situations concerning the prioritization of the wellbeing of users without limiting their autonomy, the invention of new organizational protocols to provide support and resources for vulnerable people… Social workers had to manage the bureaucracy and had to solve some emergency situations getting personally involved or developing other cooperation mechanisms. The pandemic forced them to look for new forms of social intervention.