Getting the Short Straw : Precariousness, Marginalisation and Climate Change Lena Dominelli Email: Lena.Dominelli@durham.ac.uk Shaped by the past, creating the future
Climate Change: A Myth? Climate change is an effect of the gases emitted by burning fossil fuels. * Who decides? * What is the role for social work? * How would you work in trnsdisciplinary partnerships in local communities to find solutions that would reduce global emissions while allowing low-income countries to develop? Giddens (2009) talks about the sceptics and the greens as two divisions among groups involved in the climate change debates.
Some Climatic Changes are More Obvious than Others The Passage between Alaska and Russia is now passable in summer. The Arctic is caught in a scramble for oil. Living in an interdependent world means that for social workers have roles to play in climate change scenarios.
Environmental Risk Knows No Boundaries and Produces Precarity CLIMATE CHANGE DENIERS
Taking action on climate change is a difficult concept to get across to people who are struggling to survive in precarious conditions. I wouldn t mind it being a few degrees warmer. (Older person, BIOPICCC) Social workers can play sensitive consciousness-raising roles with older people to consider life in an interdependent world: being warmer in the UK has implications for people living elsewhere, e.g., increasing their vulnerability like the sinking of small island states.
Massage the Message: Disguising the Exploitation of Natural Resources for Profits for the Few Provide a Right-On Message and Massage the Facts. This disguises environmental and socio-economic precarity. Changing oil prices can affect the message.
Environmental Injustice and Precarity Environmental precariousness and the need for environmental justice has been a concern of green and environmental social workers for some time. Affirming human rights, social justice and enhancing people s well-being by addressing precariousness provides the rationale for social workers support for environmental justice and engagement with environmental disasters. Addressing interdependencies between people, their physical, social, political, economic and cultural environments as part of a holistic response locally and globally. Involves caring for others and being cared for by others, including the duty to care for planet earth. No one and nothing will escape the impact of climate change on the environment, but it will be differentiated and some people are living under greater precarity than others.
What is Precarity? Precarity is an existence that is uncertain, lacks employment and material security, and is psychologically insecure. Sociologists call the group that occupies this status, the precariat. Precariousness is part of the modern neoliberal condition and is global. Precarity is the new normal and a form of oppression.
Precarious Livelihoods The anxious, depressed, precarian worker s body, flayed by the reactive affects of precarity, is capable of less and different things, than the empowered, conscientised, actively desiring worker (or workrefuser) or perhaps even than the Fordist worker or the 19th-century worker, the peasant or the hunter-gatherer. Human possibilities are arbitrarily closed off by the reification of measurements which are, in circular fashion, measuring the very system they constitute (Moore, 2017: 5).
Marginality Symbolises Social Exclusion and Precarity Marginalisation and precarity are key features of neoliberalism. Marginalisation involves the social exclusion of people through engagement in low paid, low status employment or unemployment, lack of access to social resources such as housing, education, health services, and emotional distress when not accepted as a valued contributor to society. Marginalisation goes hand-in-glove with precarity.
Precarity is Inherent to a Risk society Beck (1992) has characterised modern societies as risk societies and argues that they have become risk averse and manage risk bureaucratically. There are risk assessments geared specifically to disasters, including climate change, none are linked to precarity. Countries are required by the UN, and emphasized by the post-hyogo 2015 platform, the Sendai Framework, to develop National Risk Registers that can identify risks and responses, including adaptations and innovations to disasters, including climate change. The UK has been commended for its work on disaster planning to date, although recommendations were made to improve its National Risk Register. Disaster Risk Reduction strategies (DRR) are the main ways being used to assess, mitigate, manage and deal with risk, both now and in the future. Resilience is the capacity necessary for mitigating, managing and surviving risk, and thereby reduce precarity.
Interactive Dimensions of Oppression in Disastrous Situations Personal oppression Complex Interactive Negotiations Cultural oppression Institutional oppression
Neo-liberalism s Precarity Practices Neo-liberalism, the current stage of globalisation, is a key ideology in spreading capitalist social relations as globalising practices from a right-wing, monetarist perspective (e.g., Milton Friedman, Economics Professor from the University of Chicago). These promote precarity by focusing on: Individual self-sufficiency. Unregulated business. Regulating the private sphere of individual lives. Regulating labour (fewer union and workers rights). Internationalising the state (competitiveness). Using the welfare state as a site for capital accumulation (privatisation). Exploiting natural and man-induced crises (for profit opportunities, e.g., Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine). Neo-liberalism is unsustainable. Neo-liberalism is unsustainable as it creates winners and losers.
Neo-Liberalism s Major Tenets Producing Precarity Are: Privatising industries including public utilities and services. Cutting social benefits. Liberalising trade. Commodifying social relationships. Reducing professional power. Turning service users into consumers. Making profits for the few justified as rewarding those who take risks. - exploiting natural resources. Private ownership of the earth s resources. Undermining diversity and social solidarity. Disregarding future generations rights to the earth s resources by distributing these to today s rich people. These increase precariousness.
Inequalities Produce Income Security for Some, Precarity for Others Income and wealth distribution have become increasingly polarised. The top 20 per cent of the world s population has accumulated 86 per cent of the wealth in the last 30 years; the lowest 20 per cent controls only 1.3 per cent. There were 1826 billionaires by 2015. Microsoft s Bill Gates, richest man had $79 billion; Wal-Mart s Christy Walton, richest woman had $36.7 billion in 2014. North-South differentials rose from 2 to 1 in the 18th century to 70 to 1 in 2002 (George, 2003:18-19). In 2007, the richest 3 people had more than the total gross domestic product of the 48 poorest countries. An employee at the top of the corporate ladder in the West earns 200 to 300 times Donald J Trump more than the average worker compared to 40 to 60 times more during the 1960s and 1970s (George, 2003:19). Neoliberalism has produced greater, not less inequality which is socially stratified with women, children and older people experiencing its worst outcomes, especially in the Global South.
Globalisation Produces Winners and Precarious Losers Neo-liberalism as the current form of globalisation: Claims to cascade wealth to benefit everyone, the trickle down effect. Winners are a few rich people one percent globally. In 2006, 946 individuals held $US3.5 trillion and owned and controlled the world s largest corporations and dictated terms and location to nation-states. They form an unaccountable elite that grew to 1645 by 2013. In 2015 the richest one per cent (634,000) of UK individuals had twenty times more wealth than the poorest 20% (13 million) people (Credit Suisse, 2015). American Bill Gates, the world s richest man and Christy Walton, the richest woman had $76 billion and $36.7 billion respectively. Losers are people living precarious lives 2.8 billion poor people living on less than $US2-00 a day and 1 billion living on $US1 a day (absolute poverty) and the planet. In the UK, 3.8 million people are working poor; the majority are women workers. In 2014-15, 13.5 million (21 %) of the British population lived in poverty; 29 per cent of children were poor and those with Pakistani, Bangladeshi or black minority ethnic heritages had higher levels of poverty despite being born in the in the UK (Tinson et al, 2016). Environmental degradation proceeds unabated as profits accumulate (Ungar, 2002), making planet Earth also a loser. Modernisation, industrialisation and globalisation are interlinked, rely heavily on fossil fuels, and contribute to climate change which increases precarity, especially environmental precariousness.
Neoliberal Precarity: A Failure of Modernity or a System Unfit for Humanity and the Planet? Neoliberalist Precarity For Some: Restricts movement of people, not capital. Exploits people low pay, zero hours contracts and inadequate rights for workers. Individual welfare targeted for cuts, corporate welfare or hidden corporate subsidy of 14 billion compared to 5 billion for job-seekers allowance (Kevin Farnsworth, 2011-12). DC Johnston tweeted America gives out $110 billion in corporate welfare yearly. Good Jobs First revealed that Buffet s (world s 3 rd richest man) Berkshire- Hathaway holding company received $1.1 billion of corporate welfare. Exploits the environment controls nature rather than respecting nature and engaging in sustainable use of natural resources animals, plants, minerals, natural landscape and beauty. Environmental racism (Bullard, 1980). Denies people human rights and citizenship rights by embedding these rights with a framework of nation-state sovereignty.
Income Inequalities Create Security for the Few and Precarity/Insecurity for the Many Income and wealth distribution have become increasingly polarised. The top 20 per cent of the world s population has accumulated 86 per cent of the wealth in the last 30 years; the lowest 20 per cent controls only 1.3 per cent. The North-South differential rose from 2 to 1 in the 18th century to 70 to 1 in 2002 (George, 2003:18-19). To put it more graphically, in 2007, the world s richest 3 people had between them more than the total gross domestic product of the poorest 48 countries. In 2005, Bill Gates had more money than 40 per cent of his fellow American citizens combined. An employee at the top of the corporate ladder in the West earns 200 to 300 times more than the average worker compared to 40 to 60 times more during the 1960s and 1970s (George, 2003:19).
Poverty, a Major Disaster in Precarity Poverty is the major (hu)man-made disaster and affects 1 in 2 people. Poverty is absolute or relative. Absolute poverty, defined by the WB as $US1-00 per day in the 1980s, rose to $1-25 (2005) and $1-90 (2015), is subsistence poverty. There are 1.4 billion people in absolute poverty; 70 % are women and it has been termed the feminisation of poverty. Relative poverty is country specific and varies from one country to another. Europe defines poverty as 60 per cent of the median wage. Globalisation has intensified poverty within and between countries by increasing the numbers of low-paid jobs and leading to a growth in the numbers of working poor; and by lowering wages as companies move out of high-wage economies and those with worker protection. Poverty reflects asymmetrical power relations and an asymmetrical distribution of power and resources. New attempts at alleviating poverty are the social protection floor and the post-2015 Sustainability Platform (with SDGs). Note: the policy focuses on alleviating poverty, not eradicating it.
State-induced Precarity States are reluctant to challenge other nation-states on poverty and degraded environments because the principle of national sovereignty is held to be supreme. Nation states are also reluctant to challenge global corporations because: jobs depend on them. we must remain competitive. These are poor excuses, and imply a race to the bottom. Poor people continue to suffer. Social workers can support people who challenge the status quo, but need to be fully informed if they are to move beyond picking up the pieces. Political discourses become muted as economics as ideology replaces discussion about choices and power relations that could be used to reduce precarity.
Neo-liberalism s Precarity in Social Work Neo-liberalism as the current form of globalisation is a key challenge to practice because: Market-based service provisions. Making profits over meeting needs. Changing labour practices: bureaucratisation; performance management; payment by results. Deprofessionalisation of social work. Loss of relational social work. Lack of social cohesion produces rising crime rates, increased numbers facing multiple forms of exclusion including poverty, rejection, and other signs of precarity that social workers have to address and be trained for.
Promoting Harmonious Social Relations Living in harmony amongst diverse populations relies on: Acceptance and belonging. Tolerance. Compromises. Solidarity. Egalitarian values. Understanding the dynamics of oppressive social relations, especially othering of others different from oneself is crucial to living in harmony. Accepting difference promotes acceptance and tolerance. Celebrating diversity and finding commonalities. Harmonious social relations undermine the divisiveness of neoliberalism and its precarity.
Modernising Social Services Modernising public services aims to integrate these into market discipline by restructurings the labour force and reducing funding and legislative responsibilities. Social workers now focus on enabling people to do things for themselves to save state funds. Modernisation promotes neoliberalism through social service provision, making social work itself precarious.
Re-defining Capacity Building and Resilience to Survive Surviving neo-liberalism s precarity requires resilience and capacity. Redefining capacity building and resilience in terms of: Vulnerability as the limitations imposed internally and/or externally on people s capacity to take control of their lives and act in accordance with their wishes. Risk assessment as both a personal and professional evaluation of the factors and constraints within which people take action. Capacity building as equipping people with the knowledge, skills and resources they need to access opportunities, make decisions about their lives and take action to improve their current position. Personal and structural change to build capacity. Resilience as people s capacity to influence their environment and social standing in adapting to changing situations or taking action to reduce precarious ness. Capacity and resilience are individual and/or collective.
Surviving Precarity Requires Resilience Resilience is useful in: Preparedness for an unknowable future. Enhancing self-help and self-reliance. Capacity to prevent, respond, adapt and seize opportunities. Connects global drivers to local responses (to failed states, cross-boundary risks) cross-scale linkages. Breaking traditional silos by emphasizing multisectorial interdisciplinarity. Subsistence poverty is qualitatively worse than relative poverty because even the pretence of state support for people to transcend absolute poverty is ignored for those bureaucratically excluded from receiving institutional solidarity. Divide and rule on an intergenerational, class and ethnic basis has normalized exclusion to emphasize looking after oneself (and one s family if there is one).
Precarious Lives for Women and Children Income inequalities intersect gender, race, class, age and ability divides. Poor women, at the bottom of these hierarchies, comprise most of the 1.6 billion people worse off under globalisation than in previous economic systems. Women are at bottom of any income hierarchy. In the West, women are increasingly being drawn into occupations once the preserve of men, but wage differentials still discriminate against women, even in the professions, e.g., in Sweden, women earn 80 per cent of men s wages; in the UK, 6 per cent of professors in universities are women; and they earn 14 per cent less than men (EOC, 2007). In the South, women do the agricultural work, but are unlikely to own the land, e.g., in the Cameroon, women do 75 per cent of agricultural work, but own 10 per cent of the land Around.5 million women die of preventable diseases giving birth yearly. Women and children are disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa. Many children are now looking after sick parents. About 50 per cent of the world s population does not have access to basic sanitation facilities. The majority coping with its implications are women and children who do the cooking and care of children and sick relatives. Six hundred million women in the world are unable to read or write. Global warming is increasing the burden of work on women in agriculture, feeding families, and surviving disasters.
Women s and Children s Precariousness Feminisation of poverty throughout the world. Poverty is toughest for lone mothers with children. Women disproportionately represented amongst lowest paid (hold several jobs and cannot pay bills). Women still perform the bulk of domestic and caring work, bridging the gap between low wages or no wages and family needs through their own labour. Carework/motherwork is not called work! Lack of health resources endangers the lives of children and women including in pregnancy. TB, HIV/AIDS are huge killers. Malaria kills 1 child every 30 seconds. Children suffer from malnutrition even in growing economies like India and China. UNICEF claims 15 million children are caught in armed conflicts.
Food Insecurity: The Precarity of Food Banks Soup Kitchen, 1870s UK Food Bank, 2014-5 UK Society pays a price for a stigmatised Bandaid solution: Social exclusion
Environmental Degradation Increases Precarity Poor people are more likely to live in environmentally degraded neighbourhoods, e.g., Bullard s (1990) environmental racism. UNHabitat estimates that 863 million people live in slums today compared to 760 million in 2000. To reduce poverty, promote sustainable development and preserve the earth, Meadows et al (1992) urged: Reduction in pollutants. Reduced consumption of natural resources. More efficient use of natural resources including energy sources. Control of population growth. Equitable distribution of materials, energy and resources. Precarity results in reduced health and housing.
State-induced poverty through public expenditure cuts Newcastle City Council cut public services to protect 7000 voluntary sector jobs. Poor people lose out through lost jobs and lower pay obtained in outsourced or voluntary sector jobs. As the main users of public services, poor people lose out on these too. Newcastle residents protest cuts Social workers can advocate against service cuts to support residents facing these
Poverty alleviation measures The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the most extensive poverty alleviation measures globally, aimed to halve poverty by 2015. They have failed. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) replaced these in 2015. The have similar objectives as MDGs, but focus on social justice and human rights in developing sustainable solutions to development. Public expenditure cuts on social security and welfare measures increase the numbers of poor people including the working poor. Public discourses about welfare refer to individual welfare not corporate welfare, i.e., subsidies, tax breaks and other concessions corporations receive to locate themselves in particular countries (Bartlett and Steele, 1998; Chakrabortty, 2014). In 2011-2, Kevin Farnsworth claims hidden subsidy to corporations were 14 billion cf to 5 billion for those on job-seekers allowance. DC Johnston tweeted America gives out $110 billion in corporate welfare yearly. Good Jobs First revealed that Buffet s (3 rd richest man) Berkshire-Hathaway holding company received $1.1 billion.
Eradicating Poverty to Enhance Well-being Strategies for enhancing well-being can include using the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) to acquire resources. Susan George argues that Article 23 of the UDHR is relevant to poverty eradication strategies because it asserts that: Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health and wellbeing including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood (George, 2003:17).
Out of Precarity: Self-Employed Women s Association (SEWA) SEWA is a voluntary organisation that began in 1972 in India that is managed, organised and run by women to lift women out of poverty through collective endeavours. SEWA aims to make the invisibility of women s work visible. Its values include democracy, equality, and mutual self-help and learning. It funds cooperatives that provide women with work, social security, child care, health care, land access, asset development and other activities. SEWA has networks and allies throughout India, and in some parts of the world (see http://www.sewa.org/ ).
Building Resilience to Reduce Precarity There is no agreed definition of resilience in the social sciences. The British Cabinet Office defines resilience as: the capacity to reduce the risk from emergencies so that people can go about their business freely and with confidence. Bernard Manyena (2006) defines resilience as bouncing back, but more recently has added bouncing forward. Dominelli (2012) suggests resilience is an emergent property that operates on a continuum from failing to thriving, and is dependent on context.
Dimensions of Resilience Exogenous Change Shock / Gradual Endogenous Change Shock / Gradual Resilience failing surviving thriving External Response Non-response / Adaptive / Evolutionary / Transformative Internal Response Non-response / Adaptive / Evolutionary / Transformative Source: Dominelli (2011) Social Work in Times of Disaster in Klausser, F and Lane, S (eds) Risk. Wiley Social workers see resilience as non-linear, dynamic and context-dependent. Risk = Hazard X Exposure X Vulnerability. This affects how social workers use the concepts of risk and resilience in their practice.
Internationalised risk and resilience Climate change highlights how risk knows no borders. Resilience is problematic for poor people who are intellectually resourceful and resilient, but these capacities cannot fully compensate for inadequate material resources and lack of information to recover from a large disaster. Resource limits are difficult to tackle without international political and economic goodwill, especially for climate change. COP21 in Paris (12 Dec 2015) reached an agreement that each country would develop National Plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without agreeing any penalties for those not complying. No agreement on climate change increases precarity.
Disasters, Risk and Resilience Sichuan Wenchuan Earthquake, 2008 From This and This To This The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami in Sri Lanka
Climate Resilience Relies on Accountability Accountability is required from: Corporations, including banks; Elites; Governments at all levels; International organisations including the UN, the IMF and World Bank; Other actors groups, NGOs, CSOs; and Individuals and families. Poor people experience the greatest impact of disasters. Governments are less keen on imposing controls on global corporations, making the media war with the public important in defining who and what is the problem and how to address it.
Green Social Work s Disaster Resilience Framework Contexts in local, national, and international communities Community residents, in/external players, government Shocks and stressors - natural/(hu)man made hazards, armed conflict shocks Stressors Capacity to tackle shocks and stressors Prevention Forward Planning Mitigation Adaptation Transformation Principles that shape action Sustainable development Community Participation Empowering governance and partnership Coproduced reconstruction and critical reflection Outcome - failing, coping, recovery, thriving Thriving Return to original state Inferior state of recovery Temporary collapse Permanent susceptibility, failing Risk and Resilience Levels Resilience - Planning Resilience - Action Resilience - Actors/Process Resilience - Outcome
Social/Community Workers Action to Reduce Precarity Can we all be wealthy together and not destroy the planet? Research the impact of neo-liberalism on local communities and individuals, to highlight diverse forms of social exclusion. Develop and agree new holistic professional vision. Mobilise local communities and groups to reverse their disempowerment, develop new visions for how to live. Include environmental justice alongside social justice. Endorse non-violent conflict resolution (e.g., Nairobi). Lobby governments and international organisations to move away from profit-making at any cost towards caring for people and planet s physical resources/environment (e.g., community-based energy). Advocacy and collective action. Mobilise civil society organisations. Promote egalitarian social relations Redistribute resources globally (e.g., new social movements). Multidisciplinary working (e.g., EwF). Raise professional profile (e.g., Global Agenda).
Social Work Actions to Reduce Precarity Poverty eradication Differentiated experiences Environmental protection GHG emissions People s livelihoods Planet sustainability Holistic Interdependent world Socially constructed world Empower people Collaborative partnerships Coproduce solutions Eradicate poverty Sustainability Human rights Social justice Environmental justice Planet and people s well-being and resilience
Neoliberalism Affirming AOP Values and Human Rights Empowering Socially Just Practice Tackling Resource and Structural Inequalities Tackling Environmental Degradation and Risks Knowledge, Skills Empowering social justice-based practice tackles oppression and environmental degradation
Social/Community Workers Actions Against Precarity Analyse the new global world order in terms of who benefits at the local (including neighbourhood) level. Work with local communities and politicians to develop strategies that develop alternative social, economic and political structures, harness people s energies to work collectively to secure social justice, equality and well-being of all (ending neo-liberalism s preoccupation with materialistic individualism). Help local communities mobilise and organise to enhance well-being and care for people, the environment and the planet to increase resilience and reduce precarity. Develop links and alliances with other like-minded peoples across the world in the workplace and outside it. The internet can facilitate this. Support demands for corporate accountability. Practice holistically to link personal attributes and structural inequalities in change endeavours. Look after yourself to ensure you survive the neo-liberal workplace a resilient, not precarious worker.
Why Green Social Work for Environmental Justice? To be free is not merely to lose one s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others. Nelson Mandela June 1999
Young People s Views of a Good Social Worker
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