by Robert S. Schachter, DSW, ACSW
(June/July 1999)

The leadership of the NYC Chapter just spent the better part of a year looking at the major trends affecting social work practice and employment. The imperative is that our membership organization has a major responsibility for assuring that the most pressing issues facing practitioners are being addressed.

There is a lot of strength in social work and the tendency is to keep the focus on this. For example, there is a lot of benefit to work towards the advancement of the profession through expanding social work into areas where they are not currently practicing. We know very well that social workers can make a great contribution.

But there is also an unpleasant side to social work that usually does not get addressed in formal circles. Our leadership is taking this on. This includes poor salaries. It is also more than this.

At our March 19th "think tank" (see the May issue of Currents) experts on trends in the field told of the impact on practice when caseloads soar, paperwork is valued over client contact, and the quality of the engagement with clients is relatively ignored by the organization’s leaders. This has been a problem for many years in social work, but the problem is getting significantly worse with managed care and the way in which contracts with government agencies are being implemented.

NASW’s leadership is itself faced with a daunting reality; the roots of these problems are embedded deep in the political and economic institutions of our society and are not amenable to large-scale change. However, that does not necessarily mean that change is impossible. Our job is to figure out what will make a difference.

For any change to begin to occur, it is essential that NASW work to shed light on these conditions of practice. That’s why the Chapter’s leadership is now planning to convene meetings that represent what we might think of as the three pillars of the social work profession: the schools of social work, organizations that employ social workers, and practitioners.

In other words, let’s bring together the deans, agency directors and leaders of NASW with social workers who are living through the realities of practice. Let’s start talking to one another. I’m certain that this has not occurred before, not in quite this way. Without a doubt there will be a great desire to express why the schools and agencies do what they do in the way that they do it, but the realities of practice from the social workers’ perspective will be very compelling.

Frankly, agency leaders spend so much of their time dealing with their sources of funding, it creates the conditions for disconnecting with the actual delivery of service and the supports that need to be in place to assure quality. And they are under pressure from their funding sources, subtly and not so subtly, to be positive about what can be accomplished and to remain silent about what is being compromised.

We are hearing, although too infrequently, that some agencies and social work departments, while having no extra resources than other places, somehow manage to create better working conditions for their staff. The outcome of this is better service to the organization’s clients and greater worker satisfaction.

Creating Better Conditions

What does this suggest? If some can do better, why aren’t others? The Chapter’s leadership is very interested in pursuing this question, learning more about how better conditions are being created in some places, and pressing for improvements in this direction.

This also suggests something about the notion of what leadership is in our field. Are the people who are running organizations leaders if they are not attending to and supporting the direct social work-client encounter? Must they be leaders in precisely this way? For the sake of the people who need our services, and not just for ourselves, I think so.

We are also learning how recent graduates are experiencing their entry into the profession following graduation: lack of supervision, too few opportunities for mentoring, being expected to handle daunting client problems as if there was nothing to it. And there are the seasoned practitioners, in the field for many years, who are finding that they are no longer valued at all. National NASW membership data suggests that this group is leaving the field in larger numbers than any other group of social workers. We must not take this for granted because it points to the nature of the careers we are choosing for ourselves.

I believe that the schools of social work offer a phenomenal education for social work, but there are daunting gaps in preparing for the realities of organizational life. Along with the organizations that employ social workers, the schools are a large institutional pillar of the profession. We need to work collaboratively to assure that every available resource is being brought to bear on the problems of practice in the workplace. But I don’t think this will happen in significant ways until we are all at the table together, and stay there until some reasonable strategies are agreed to.

The first 100 years saw the rise of very meaningful profession. But it has always been riddled with problems. This is somewhat understandable given that our problems are intricately related to deeper social problems, the very problems we are expected to ameliorate. But we cannot afford to accept things because they have always been this way.

At the turn of the century, things may very well be getting worse for the social work profession We will ignore it our peril. If clients cannot be engaged in meaningful ways, the reason for our existence will eventually disappear. I hate to sound melodramatic, but I’m not sure there is any choice.