Where are the social workers?

![CDATA[During the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, scholarly work in this field is burgeoning. This comes from a range of disciplinary perspectives, mostly dominated by medical science but with increasing interest in the social impact of the crisis. Social workers across the globe are working, more often than not, behind the scenes to respond to the socio-economic crisis that the pandemic has unfolded which has revealed existing inequities and denial of agency to the most vulnerable. While frontline health workers have been valorised and referred to as ‘COVID warriors’, the acknowledgement of other ‘hands on’ work carried out by the social workers has been scant. In contrast, the latest education policies in countries such as Australia have devalued the profession, its relevance and contribution by either recognising it as an ‘allied health’ discipline or by substantially increasing the fee for social work courses while also increasing student contribution towards the same. The negative impact of these policies towards those aspiring to be social work professionals is not difficult to fathom. Most importantly, a decrease in the number of social work professionals will adversely affect a society where socio-economic marginalities have further deepened and will require critical interventions to support and ensure the well-being of those whom social workers are tasked with assisting. The pandemic has revealed that apart from health social workers, contributions to crisis are minimalised for social workers in community development settings or those who subscribe to human rights paradigms. In countries such as India, lack of a contextualised approach towards the issue of public health has disproportionality affected the poor, who are unlikely to be able to practice social distancing in overcrowded accommodation nor have access to sufficient running water or soap. The lack of policy attention towards the toiling classes in the rural and urban spaces has unleashed a crisis whose impact may have a much longer bearing on human life than that of the virus. The reason for bringing the examples from two countries is to draw attention to the fact that the pandemic is not a ‘great leveller’ as was initially popularised with its rapid spread. The pandemic has shown a mirror to several existing inequities not only between the Global North and the Global South but also within each of the nation-states. We propose a strategic attention to social work at the global level to enable both critical thinking and interventions with a focus on the socio-economic and political forms of oppressions and marginalisations which are deepened by the hierarchies and top-down approach to policy. We also discuss the measures required within the social work community to facilitate the process of rebuilding societies.]]