| Social work has had an ambiguous relationship to the working class but in its current form and context there would seem to be many opportunities to engage in class struggle... |
Class conscious social work?
WORKERS, FEB 2005 ISSUE
Social workers have not always been regarded as a section of the working class, and have been treated with a degree of disdain by other sections of the class. For instance, in the Reg Birch biography (see menu to the left) Dorothy Birch notes how within the community of Byker, Newcastle, where she grew up in the 1920s-30s, "...everyone hated the welfare workers who gave good advice like why don't you sell your tea set?". Such sentiments would have carried considerable weight both at the time and more recently.
Social work originated in Britain through bodies such as the Charity Organisation Society in the late 19th century, dominated by people such as Beatrice Webb, and had a specific role of policing the poor through the Poor Laws and educating them to "live better lives". But things have changed a great deal since then. Nowadays social work is given extremely narrowly defined roles, such as the recognition and prevention of child abuse and care management of the elderly.
For at least the past three decades social work with children and families has lurched through a series of high-profile child death cases such as Maria Colwell and Victoria Climbié. Successive governments have responded with increasingly tight regulation of the daily work of social workers in local authority social services departments.
Technical procedures have been designed to minimise social workers' discretion and scope for making autonomous decisions based on sound professional judgements. At the same time their ability to contribute to the welfare of society generally has also been marginalised and labelled as out of step with the alleged need to target resources and "get tough" on welfare dependents.
Every time a child dies, the tragedy is likely to be portrayed as the fault of incompetent, arrogant or uncaring individual social workers. No government has faced up to the damage caused to sound professional practice by their attacks on the structures and financing of local authorities.
But neither has there been strong or consistent resistance by social workers themselves. A "what can we do about it" attitude has prevailed for too long. Current figures for the length of time people stay in the profession indicate the way many have responded: a large number leave social work within five years of qualifying.
Liverpool strike
Now there are signs that social workers are starting to act on the need to fight these trends collectively through their unions. In Liverpool, a strike has just ended, begun in August against the local authority's plans to reduce the number of qualified workers manning the out-of-hours emergency team, a crucial service which covers adult, and children and family services through the night. The authority plans to move the service to a "call centre" with a few qualified workers overseeing people who have had no social work training at all.
The Liverpool social workers are also striking over the practice of allocating complex child protection work to unqualified social workers or, at best, newly qualified workers in their first posts. This is despite the recommendations of the Climbié enquiry and must be seen as a short-term response to the massive shortage of qualified workers.
The strike received a lot of support from UNISON local government branches in the form of financial donations and communications about similar issues going on in social services departments across Britain. There is also a national campaign, led by various social work educators, for a "social work manifesto" designed to encourage social workers to start setting the agenda within the profession and begin, collectively, to resist the trends that are alienating so many skilled workers from the work they feel passionately about. The manifesto calls for work to achieve these aims through unions - a far more productive course of action than the sometimes fashionable chasing of world-wide anti-capitalist protests.
Underfunded, undervalued: social services workers need to start setting their own agenda and improving their conditions
A British-based workforce
While it has not yet reached the levels seen in the NHS, there is an increasing trend to respond to the recruitment and retention crisis in social work by recruiting from overseas. In 2001-2 1,175 social workers were recruited from countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe and New Zealand. In 2002-3 this rose to 1,370. A comparison of these figures with the numbers of British social workers leaving the profession illustrates some absurd situations. Home care workers from India, for example, have been recruited in the Hampshire area.
Private recruitment agencies go to national government and local authorities, encouraging them to pay thousands of pounds to social workers from the Philippines (an area seen as having untapped resources) towards their living costs in moving here. These same agencies take 17-25% commission on each social worker who comes.
All this is happening despite the protests of government officials from some of the countries concerned. In 2001 Dr Zola Skweyiya, South Africa's minister for social development, complained about the poaching of South African social workers needed in their own country.
There are examples of other local authorities looking to recruit local people to train as social workers, as inKent, where a scheme has run since 2000. But unless workers start to exercise control many employers will take the option of recruiting from overseas.
The European Union
One area overlooked so far by social workers seeking to resist the destructive trends described above is the EU. The government is making many legislative and policy changes to prepare for further integration, involving cuts and privatisation in public services. The impact on social work and social services is highlighted by a recent independent audit (August 2004) of Edinburgh social services.
The audit supports UNISON's contention that social workers in the city cannot do an effective job with the resources provided. At the same time as this audit was being produced, the government was commissioning PricewaterhouseCoopers to look at ways to "out-source" crucial child protection, fostering and education services within the Children Act.
Social workers have to connect this move with the EU's insistence that national governments reduce public spending to EU-prescribed levels and open up public services to private companies. Again, the most effective way to do this is through the organised, protracted struggle only possible through trade unions. Social workers could also highlight this issue in conjunction with other national campaigns such as Defend Council Housing.
The most positive aspect of the emerging collective resistance to these issues is the clearer thinking emerging about class. For too long social workers have seen the working class as those who use their services, mainly the poorest in society, while agonising over their own "middle-class" status in relation to this group.
But those involved in the social work manifesto are emphasising that the nature of capitalism is such that all those who rely on selling their labour power, including social workers and social work educators, are alienated from any sense of fulfillment in their work, the very same alienation that their clients feel when excluded from employment, or from finding work to enable them to feed their families or to gain a sense of worth. It is time for workers in this sector to grasp the nettle and engage in the struggle to take control of their workplaces.
As social workers begin to see and take their rightful place it will be appropriate to think about the contribution they could make to a genuinely democratic society, in the sense seen in countries like Cuba. Social work does have a distinctive set of skills and knowledge that are essential to dealing with social issues. While under a system where society was organised for the benefit of the majority these problems should be largely eradicated, it would be rather romantic to think that they would simply disappear.
There would still be a need for skilled and dedicated professionals to deal with issues around those who are unable to work through sickness, severe disability or old age. Childcare and the prevention of child abuse is another area where the contribution of social workers could be beneficial. Working closely with a range of other health and education workers, social workers do have the knowledge and skills to be effective in these areas.
