Virtually all professional social work practice takes place in the employment setting. Our practice and the conditions of employment are inextricably linked. To think of the first without the second is tantamount to living in an illusion.

Even full time private practice, which represents approximately 15% of the NASW membership in New York City, cannot escape this connection. Self-employment, despite an ideal relationship with the boss, is still contingent upon factors that cannot easily be influenced. Even in this setting you can't simply ask yourself for a raise and expect to get it.

Many social workers will agree with me that NASW must have a strong advocacy arm to fight for essential social welfare policies and to resist the attempts to dismantle key programs for disadvantaged people in society. At the same time, if we believe in the basic worth of social work, if we believe that social work benefits people, then it is also essential that NASW strive to develop as clear a focus on practice in the employment setting as possible. NASW leaders need to give serious consideration to how both of these two concerns are addressed to maximize the best possible outcomes.

People enter this profession to become as knowledgeable and skillful as possible in order to be effective with people in need, but they subsequently discover how challenging it is to practice and to earn a living.

There are perhaps two ways to address this. One is for each social worker to develop the greatest set of relevant competencies possible, including how to deal with the contingencies of the organization. The second is through developing the greatest amount of unity among the members of the profession in order to exert our collective will. NASW is unique in representing that unity.

As this issue of the newsletter, Currents, was going to press, the leadership of the NYC Chapter was preparing to hold a retreat to address these very issues. The purpose of this retreat was to review the Chapter's priorities over the past several years and to see how practice and employment issues have been addressed in order to determine how the Association can more effectively move forward in the future.

Of concern is how intractable these issues are and whether any organization has the capacity to actually make a difference. It is our belief that no matter how difficult the issues may be, it is our responsibility to understand them and to strive to find points of intervention.

An excellent example of an intractable problem is salaries. Even if NASW put on a vigorous campaign to get salaries raised in New York City, employing organizations have limited resources to make adjustments. So the question becomes, what can we do? We have developed salary standards, but they do not have any actual force in terms of employers. At best, the standards provide information and create some healthy tension. Where might the points of intervention be, if they exist? One of the points of inquiry in the retreat is to clarify the economics behind social work employment. What is at play that determines what social workers get paid? What are the perceptions of employers of social workers? How much latitude exists for setting salaries given an organization's finite resources? Are social workers actually a cost to organizations or are they a cost savings? Might social workers be, at times, revenue producers?

I believe that the social work profession needs to become clearer about the economic underpinnings of practice in order to make our case as well as possible. It may also make us more effective when we use moral arguments for our services; morality plus economics may prove to be a more powerful tool than referring to morality alone. We need to explore this avenue.

In addition to the economics of employment, there are so many ways to slice the employment issue. Should we work with unions more, for example, by helping them expand? Can we improve the status of the profession through our new image project? Is it possible to pressure the system to maintain adequate caseloads? Can we persuade administrators that they will improve services through listening more to their professional social workers? Are there certain program designs and personnel patterns that should be adopted?

Obviously, these are daunting questions when you realize that the systems we are talking about are not particularly amenable to change. In addition, social workers themselves will often disagree about what to do. Nevertheless, I am hopeful that by bringing good minds together for collective exploration, we will discover things that we have not thought about before. One thing is for certain. Without a strong intention of achieving better working conditions, things will definitely not change.