As COVID-19 sweeps around the world, even initially recalcitrant governments are taking drastic action. This consists, in part, of protection for businesses, workers, homeowners and renters who may unable to meet their financial commitments and/or basic needs. Businesses too are stepping up, with some exceptions, to assist society as best they can. But the virus is best seen as exacerbating many of the issues now being addressed, rather than creating them sui generis. The scale of the crisis has made individuals and their specific vulnerabilities visible, but they were already here.

In this post I want to focus on the current visibility of personal crises that affect one’s ability to work, the measures taken by states and businesses to protect individuals from these crises, and why these measures should be continued long-term. COVID-19 is causing job losses and reduced hours, evictions and debt, impacting particularly those who lack sick or holiday pay or lack the financial resources to employ childcare when facing external shocks. In the UK, confirmed or mooted policies for those impacted by COVID-19 include: mortgage payment holidays, halting ‘no fault’ evictions, wage protection, expanding labour protections to those in the gig economy and those on zero-hour contracts, increasing statutory sick pay, quickening access to unemployment benefit, small business protections, and lost earnings protections. This temporarily replaces a punitive system of strict conditionalities that made inevitable dire consequences for millions regardless of whether they contracted the virus.

But those impacted by COVID-19 have corollaries in normal times. The precarious worker was always one emergency away from ruin. And inevitably, every year some would suffer that emergency, lose their job, their home, sometimes their family. Perhaps they were too few to notice, although the rapid advance of food banks in the UK, homelessness in Ireland, and ‘shantytowns’ in Spain suggests this may be a wilful blindness. Either way, they exist, and they will continue to exist after the virus has abated, unless the protections mentioned above remain in place to form the basis of new domestic social bargains.

It is likely that some governments will seek to fund COVID-19 expenditures with ten more years of the forced austerity that has already caused immense harm to human rights and to communities. Such arguments must be forcefully rebutted before they can embed, and human rights offer an inroad. The issues raised above are the natural remit of human rights: addressing precarious work is part of the right to just work; rent protection, the right to housing; improving the safety net, the right to social protection. I make three cases in support of the long-term retention of relevant measures. First, the state-oriented case that these new measures are feasible, beneficial, and pre-existing human rights obligations. Second, the business-oriented case for more humanistic management and the acceptance of meaningful (profit-reducing) regulation. Third, the social case for the maintenance of the currently evident collective ethic to reimagine the future.

First, states hold obligations to avoid creating systems that compel mass precarity on the population. Businesses hold responsibilities to avoid causing adverse human rights impacts even where these impacts are permitted by national laws. Human rights treaty bodies and activists must use this moment as an opportunity to embed improved protective structures practices, and to concurrently, or prefiguratively, shift human rights practice. Philip Alston, as UN Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, and Leilani Farha, as UNSR on the Right to Housing, have both exposed precarious systems in their area. Despite this, issues of structural injustice struggle to generate normatively powerful obligations. This is something that can and must be revised.

States are demonstrating that even during the worst crisis of modern times, it is possible to provide significant protections. Now, the economic cost is reframed from constituting an unaffordable burden into a social necessity. If we understand that these risks were always with precarious members of society, and some would inevitably fall prey to them without fault, these protections must carried forward after the crisis has abated. The economic cost will be far lower in normal times, with measures such as wage and rent protection in times of personal crisis just one more thread in the social safety net to be needed only occasionally.

Second, all businesses are currently reliant on government intervention, whether directly or indirectly. Businesses are going to need bailouts and other forms of relief. Amazon will likely have a profitable pandemic, but only if governments assist the company’s suppliers and customers, from big business to individuals. The quid pro quo for these interventions must be more socially responsible business, including protection for their global workforce. At least those in receipt of bail-out funds must be compelled to drastically cut the number of workers on zero-hour contracts and to provide protections such as sick leave to all staff members.

Businesses are learning that they are not invulnerable. The virus threatens global supply chains and has already sparked nationalizations. With further crises inevitable, not least climate-related, globalization’s gilded age must end, and businesses must relearn the social compassion lost to atomized global production. This does not mean adding a rainbow flag to one’s twitter account every so often; it means treating those within and impacted by the business as human beings who matter. Mass state support in times of crisis entails correlative obligations on all businesses to accept greater social responsibility and more egalitarian regulation in future, including around human rights, labour, and tax.

Third, a collective ethic spurred by crisis underlies these drastic responses, and these responses can help embed the collective ethic more deeply in the future. Can COVID-19 teach our world of global competition, of inequality and isolation, the importance of the ‘relatively neglected value’ of mutuality? Structural injustice relies on obfuscation and tactical ignorance. COVID-19 has shown us reality and it must be reckoned with. Regenerated bonds of social solidarity that lead communities to see as obvious the need for mass-scale intervention must be maintained to prevent the more sporadic, but no less damaging, instances of precarity slipping into ruin that blight contemporary, often wealthy, societies.

The crisis makes clear who the country, the state, and the oligarchs rely upon most. These individuals do not demand great wealth for their service. But they require and deserve adequate salaries and protections that acknowledge their importance and their motivation. Instead, the strict conditionalities currently imposed operate on an assumption that all difficulties are a result of personal failings. This drives a narrative of fecklessness, dismantling the collective ethic in a vicious circle. The additional protections currently being implemented offer both practical solutions and a counter-narrative. They must be made permanent and be the starting point, not the end point, of structural transformation after COVID-19.

David Birchall is a Visiting Fellow at the City University of Hong Kong School of Law and co-editor of the Business and Human Rights Journal Blog.