Of social action, professional action, and affirmative action:
three sides of one whole Chapter
Just as crisis implies opportunity as well as danger, it can also make us strong. Threats focus your attention most completely. These are heavy times and potentially demoralizing, but focused activity toward a meaningful outcome is enormously helpful, even if short of long lasting resolution. Look at NASW, New York City Chapter.
SOCIAL ACTION
Last October, even before the state and federal elections, our leadership saw the necessity of organizing ourselves in order to learn what most social worker know, the human toll of budget cuts. Through collaborative efforts involving the Social Action Committee, the Board of Directors, and staff, hearings were held on the last two days of February. Sixty social workers and clients told their stories in clear and compelling detail. And we learned, as did two reporters from the New York Times, the political columnist of New York Magazine, and the reporters from the City Sun, the Amsterdam News, the Staten Island Advance, and City Limits. And so did elected officials, including Public Advocate, Mark Green, and City Council members C. Virginia Fields and Guillermo Linares.
This issue of Currents highlights what we learned (see page 1). We want you to know about this in the hope that you might share some of our feeling that comes from concerted action. It gives us a sense of fighting back using the potent evidence of our members' first hand experiences. It makes law makers and the media take notice because experience has a power that rhetoric, which is basic to much of politics, simply lacks.
Speaking about concerted action, Chapter President, Dr. Barbara Brenner, sent you a letter inviting you to our annual meeting. In the last two years, we attracted 250 members. Based on this experience, we reserved a 250 seat auditorium. Within days of Dr. Brenner's letter, we surged passed the capacity of the room. We were sorry that we could not accommodate more members, but coming together, as the title said, "asserting our strength and resurrecting a compassionate society", is a compelling theme. If members stay focused on this, social workers will push forward in the right direction.
There are other things going on. The Chapter issued a needed paper to public officials identifying why we have such a deep budget deficit. The reason is that the state has given the money away in the form of tax cuts to the highest income earners and businesses. People do not generally understand that there is an inverse relationship between income level and the tax rates paid. As income goes up, the rate goes down. The principle of progressive taxation has flipped over the last decade. The result has been insufficient revenues to pay for services. Governor Pataki's tax cuts build on this. In the State's 1997 fiscal year, his tax cut will explode into significantly greater revenue shortfalls. NASW, through its President, has challenged legislators to assume a new form of leadership, to speak directly to people in the State, about this reality. Because of State tax policy and deep budget cuts, New Yorkers are now beginning to realize that we are threatened with being thrust into an economic depression. NASW has a role to contribute to this understanding.
PROFESSIONAL ACTION
NASW is also addressing practice head on, even in this period of cutbacks. Our leadership believes that we cannot afford to put social work practice on the back burner. That is why Past President, Elaine Walsh, along with Barbara Brenner, met with the United Way and directors of 30 voluntary agencies last month to discuss the utilization of social workers and the need for adequate funding to pay decent salaries. That is why the Chapter is pursuing managed care as it affects social work primary health and mental health services. And that is why the Chapter is pursuing licensing .
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
Our work in the Chapter suggests that we are on the right track toward building an organization of social workers that can be meaningful in these times. But there are other challenges. One is the re-examination of affirmative action in the United States and the re-emergence of a thinly veiled racism, exemplified by the book, the Bell Curve. Consider two ideas that Roger Wilkins noted in the March 27th issue of The Nation:
. . . As amply documented in the 1968 Kerner Commission report on racial disorders, when left to its own devices, American institutions in such areas as college admissions, hiring decisions and loan approvals had been making choices that discriminated against blacks. That discrimination, that flowed from what came naturally, hurt more than blacks: It hurt the entire nation, as the riots of the late 1960's demonstrated. Though the Kerner report focused on blacks, similar findings could have been made about other minorities and women. . .
. . . What makes the affirmative action issue so difficult is that it engages blacks and whites exactly at those points where they differ the most...
The Chapter has worked hard to develop its social action and professional action strategies, and these are still being developed. The Chapter also made "multicultural issues" a priority last year and is attempting to develop a strategy for addressing this area. But it is still in the nascent stage and needs to develop further. The Chapter leadership has been examining the formation of task forces to reflect the equity groups that are part of the NASW affirmative action policy. The Chapter's Affirmative Action/Multicultural Affairs Committee has been convening African American social workers, and the Hispanic Task Force has become a model for the formation of other groups. Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi social workers have been meeting at NASW, and we might see in short order the formation of an Asian American Task Force. Such groupings can examine what members would like from NASW, develop programming and provide an entry point into the organization for social workers who have felt distant and isolated.
With close to 2,000 members who identify themselves as people of color, NASW is indeed a diverse organization. And with 7,500 members being women, there is the broad base for addressing affirmative action and related forms of bias. But it is not clear that this can be done easily. What concerns members varies. For example, some social workers have observed that when issues develop around ethnicity and race, people from different groups tend to see things quite differently. There have also been observations that when meetings are held on multicultural issues, social workers who are white generally do not attend. In other words, multicultural issues have frequently been left to people of color to deal with by themselves.
It takes the membership, beginning of course with Chapter leadership, to activate itself. But so far it has been easier for us to move on social action and professional action. Affirmative action and addressing bias require strategies that enable us to really engage ourselves. Such engagement is hard because it makes us uncomfortable and because people disagree. The challenge is how to do it. Silence on these issues will result in confusion and indecision. Raising questions about how we can become more effectively engaged in these issues could provide the basis for the answers. Perhaps the current crisis will make us clearer.