Page 2917 - Week 10 - Thursday, 7 October 2021
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Women are also more likely to work in those low paid, casualised, part-time roles that have been disproportionately impacted by COVID. Likely outcomes of the outbreak in the ACT include greater housing stress and homelessness for women, increases in the mental health conditions needing care, and a long tail of underemployment and unemployment for women as the economy recovers from the recession.
Young people are also three times as likely to work in sectors that have suffered large-scale losses, and youth unemployment is as high as it has ever been. As the Brotherhood of St Laurence pointed out in a report from late last year:
The blow that COVID has dealt young people … will leave long-term scars. Those entering the labour market during a recession can expect lower wages and fewer opportunities for career progression, and the impact can last a lifetime.
Finally, people receiving unemployment benefits report poor health at 6.8 times the rate of wage earners. They have double the risk of hospitalisation, they are twice as likely to report mental health conditions and they are three times as likely to report high psychological distress. This is the baseline health inequality we are dealing with, with flow-on effects to all areas of social, financial and material wellbeing.
The crisis has highlighted the intertwining of our economy, society and public health. Resilience and wellbeing into the future means paying attention to social and justice capital, not just the financial capital. The path to recovery may be slow and uneven, but we will come out of this pandemic a different city. The question is how different and who decides? To this end, we need a plan that is honest about our prospects, realistic about the consequences, but ambitious and creative in its goal.
So what is social recovery and why have I raised this today? Social recovery is a simple acknowledgement that there have been many kinds of harms from the pandemic and the public health orders that have been made to help keep us safe: harms to social connections, social involvement and social inclusion; harms to equity, security and belonging.
Social recovery is often spoken about in terms of a response to a natural disaster—how to help a community after it has experienced a short, sharp, traumatic event, help it get back on its feet and on a path towards recovery, towards normal. But what happens when that crisis is not short and sharp, but a prolonged, grinding, tortuous, extended period of time, where hopes of normalcy are faint, where you cannot simply move away to another location, away from the disaster zone where you can start your life afresh?
This is when social recovery becomes more important, because, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, we are as a community together in this. Everyone has experienced the challenges from COVID-19, but some have been more affected than others. Some have baked sourdough, learned new skills and bought Ken Behrens T-shirts. Others have struggled to just make it to the end of the day.
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