Is social inequality increasing in the corona crisis? You get this impression in everyday life. The Federal President also addresses this. But in Germany in particular one hears surprisingly little from experts, from sociologists or economists, or from politicians on this topic. A guest contribution by historian Hartmut Kaelble.
The corona crisis creates five unusual social inequalities.
New inequalities arise first mostly across today's social hierarchies. The corona crisis hits the super-rich differently. Grocery chain managers are benefiting from the crisis, but airline, hotel chain and media company managers are suffering. So far, stock prices have been rising and stockholders are winning, but the real estate boom has often stopped.
The middle class is also divided. The professions and many medium-sized entrepreneurs are suffering from the crisis. Freelance artists, translators, journalists, travel agency owners and bus operators, and at times also resident doctors, did not receive orders, customers and patients. In contrast, the higher civil servants and employees, but also building contractors and architectural offices, IT entrepreneurs, local pharmacists and booksellers are more likely to be winners. They are often less under pressure, work from home if possible, get their salaries as civil servants and employees on time and start philosophizing about a better life with less stress from the coronavirus and about new values for slowing down.
Hartmut Kaelble is professor emeritus for history at the Humboldt University in Berlin and has also taught for a long time at the College of Europe in Bruges. He is one of the most famous social historians in Europe.
New social dividing lines are also emerging in the lower classes, who can rarely go to the home office. Workers and lower-level employees in companies dealing with mobility or personal services, airlines, automotive groups, hotel chains, taxi companies, car dealerships and restaurants are threatened with dismissal or at least short-time work. In contrast, salespeople and drivers can easily find new jobs in grocery stores, construction, IT, and the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. These are social inequalities that do not fit into our usual pattern.
Inequality before death
Secondly The differences in educational opportunities also worsened with the closure and hesitant reopening of daycare centers, schools and universities. It is still unclear whether they will simply strengthen the previous social hierarchies. Not only children from isolated immigrant families, but also from professionally strained middle-class families, especially one-parent families, were disadvantaged. Schoolchildren received the new support from parents when studying at home not only from middle-class parents, but also from the educated immigrant families.
Third The inequality between the sexes may also have increased. Men are more affected by the infection and death from the coronavirus. But women suffer more from layoffs, especially in part-time and mini-jobs. In the family, too, they threaten to be pushed back into the old housewife and mother role and to be particularly burdened with childcare and school at home.
The differences intensified fourth between age groups. Students feel stimulated by the new forms of learning. Young adults in training, on the other hand, suffer from difficult future prospects or the new digitized teaching. Young workers without a family enjoy the stress relief of home working. Parents with children and even more single mothers and fathers, on the other hand, are under intense stress of organizing the school education that has been relocated to the home alongside their professional problems, especially if they are among the losers of the crisis.
The Corona crisis has often brought more relaxation to married couples after the parenting phase if they did not have to look after old parents. The elderly are particularly at risk from the coronavirus. It is a new risk of death, which is etched into the memory mainly through the television pictures from Bergamo. But the corona crisis looks very different for you too. Many old people in their third, sprightly age experienced the corona crisis as relaxation. But the elderly in their fourth, frail age in old people's homes, nursing homes or palliative clinics suffered because they were separated from their families or had to die lonely. All of these social differences between the age groups are not entirely new, but have been intensified in an unusual way.
Fifth Social inequality before death from the coronavirus is also massive. In Europe, mortality from this virus is significantly higher in densely populated lower-class and immigrant neighborhoods than elsewhere in cities or in the countryside. We do not yet know whether this inequality before death is even sharper than from the number one killer of today's society, cardiovascular diseases. But pre-death inequality was certainly not mitigated in the pandemic.
Before the virus, not everyone is created equal
Still, why didn't these new social inequalities become a big issue? It has to do with three reasons. First, most assume that these new social inequalities will go away again when the vaccine is supposedly available in spring 2021 and the corona crisis is supposed to end. So far, they have not been seen as permanent inequalities to be addressed.
In addition, the coronavirus is often not seen as a plague that hits the poor and spares the rich. It also hit prominent politicians such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Jair Bolsonaro and almost caught Angela Merkel as well. The list of prominent corona deaths is long. This gave the erroneous impression that everyone was the same before the coronavirus.
After all, the protests that were there, that is, the youngsters who did not obey the rules and partied, the demonstrations against the state requirements, including the violence against the police as in Stuttgart or Frankfurt, were vague in their goals. They are likely to decline again with the end of the coronavirus. Confidence in the government even increased in some European countries, not just Germany, but also Italy, which was hard hit during the spring. There is often a high level of consensus among citizens about what governments are doing. A look at history shows, of course, that cohesion was often great in the initial phase of tough new threats, but disintegrated in long crises.
On the whole, the new social inequalities in the Corona crisis are underestimated and are underexposed in public. It takes time for scientific studies to show tangible results. Only in months and even years, when the acute crisis is perhaps over, will it be fully recognizable how much the inequality of training has worsened, how the inequality in work has been further accelerated by digitization, whether the inequality between the sexes has increased strengthened again or women successfully defended themselves against it and what permanent new differences arose between the age groups. The topic of social inequality caused by the corona pandemic will continue to occupy us.
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