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In Chile, the Covid-19 pandemic overlapped with a socio-political crisis that arose in response to the neoliberal model imposed during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Social workers have been key to addressing the multiple vulnerabilities the population has faced during the political uprising and pandemic. From a critical perspective that analyses precarity, precariousness and resistance as a continuum, this article examines SWs’ employment and intervention conditions during the pandemic and the resistances that have emerged in this context. Drawing upon a mixed sequential study that included an online survey (N = 872) and forty-two semi-structured (online) interviews, we identified that precarity and precariousness affecting professional interventions have persisted. However, findings indicate that (i) younger and less educated frontline SWs were most affected by worsening employment conditions; (ii) the shift towards tele-intervention has not only led to transformations in professional roles but also in the emergence of new surveillance mechanisms and (iii) new types of professional resistances emerged that have been identified as individual and spontaneous but nevertheless explicit in nature. We conclude that the pandemic and the on-going political crisis present social work with an opportunity to advocate for dignified working conditions as well as changing the historical subordinate position of the profession.

Drawing upon the findings of my doctoral research, this article examines social workers’ understanding and interventions related to the promotion of citizenship in Chile. The study involved documentary analysis and 26 semi-structured interviews with social workers who, employed by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), implemented state policy for addressing poverty and social exclusion. The findings indicate that social workers understood citizenship as the exercise of individual rights mainly. At the same time, strategies employed by some social workers to oppose resistance to such neoliberal reworking of citizenship were identified. Suggestions are made with respect to the development of Chilean social work from a critical perspective.

The views of social workers in Chile are rarely heard and considered in the policy debates. This article addresses this lacuna by examining discourses of social exclusion and underlying assumptions held by social workers with responsibility for implementing social policy interventions in Chile. It draws upon the findings of a study involving interviews with senior social workers from two large non-governmental organisations (NGOs) tackling social exclusion. We found that individual-based narratives and neoliberal rationality are dominant in the implementation of Chilean social policy. At the same time, anti-hegemonic strategies pursued by some social workers were also identified. Such an approach is highly relevant in the Chilean context, in which power imbalances remain almost untouched since the return of democratic regimes in the 1990s. The study findings pose diverse challenges to Chilean social policy and social work professional training. The necessity of promoting transformative imaginations that favour collective practices of resistance is identified to counteract, through a critical discourse, the neoliberal rationale, its rhetoric and practices affecting excluded people's lives.

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