Focus on Welfare is a series of articles from the Welfare Reform Task Force of the NYC Chapter of NASW. The series aims to inform social workers of the range of issues related to current trends in welfare reform and mobilize them to act on behalf of their clients, themselves and their agencies.
This article, written by Julie Carlson, a social work intern with the Urban Justice Center, describes efforts to organize social work students to oppose punitive welfare policies.
Throughout the history of the profession, social workers have played pivotal roles in struggles for social, political, and economic justice.* In the spirit of this progressive tradition, in the Fall of 1997, some first years students at Hunter College School of Social Work (HCSSW) organized themselves into a group called Students for Economic Justice (SEJ). One of SEJ's main goals is to bring social work students into the fight against welfare "reform" and for welfare rights. SEJ believes that organizing students is critically important, for today's students are tomorrow's rank and file social workers. Imagine how strong our voice could be if social workers were more organized from within.
To this end, SEJ has been organizing social work students at HCSSW. We came together early in our first semester in response to our concern about New York City's Work Experience Program (WEP), better known as workfare. Workfare requires welfare recipients to "work off" their benefits in municipal, non-profit or religious agencies. WEP participants also lack workers' rights or benefits and often work in unsafe conditions. Believing that all people should be paid for their labor, regardless of their income status, we were shocked to learn that social work schools place students in agencies that serve as WEP sites. SEJ members felt that by placing students at agencies that use WEP labor, HCSSW was indirectly supporting this punitive welfare program. Driven by our strong beliefs in social and economic equality and our knowledge of NASW's Code of Ethics, we sprang into action.
During our first semester, SEJ developed working relationships with the Urban Justice Center and the Welfare Reform Task Force of NASW's NYC Chapter, and other advocacy groups. Two ongoing welfare campaigns inspired our projects. The first was the drive by welfare participants who are fighting for real jobs and to improve their working conditions at WEP sites. The second, organized by the Urban Justice Center and the Judson Memorial Church, was the Pledge of Resistance which seeks to challenge and block the expansion of WEP by asking non-profit social and religious agencies to refuse to become a WEP site. To date, some 200 organizations have joined the pledge.
SEJ also began to educate the HCSSW community about the horrors of WEP. We created and distributed flyers and posters around campus including our ?WEP Thoughts" (myths about welfare) which were posted throughout the school. We also worked with HCSSW faculty and staff to organize a teach-in which drew over 200 people from the HCSSW community. This was not the first teach-in organized by social work students and faculty. In the early 1990s as welfare reform surfaced as a major issue, faculty from several social work schools in the New York City area, along with NYC NASW, sparked teach-ins in numerous social work schools nation-wide. During that time, we also proposed to our school's administration that they refuse to support WEP by not placing students in agencies that accept WEP labor. We subsequently learned that NYU social work students had made a similar proposal to their school administration and fieldwork office.
Later that first year, SEJ launched the Conscientious Objector and Pledge to Educate campaign to encourage individual social work students to resist and challenge WEP. Complementing the Pledge of Resistance, we urged students to refuse to accept placements in agencies that participate in WEP and/or to organize an educational forum about NYC's workfare program at their agency. Currently, 40 Hunter students are participating in this social protest.
SEJ continues to focus on welfare activism. Our membership now includes first year students, which ensures that the student voice for economic justice will continue to be heard at Hunter. We have also begun working with students from other social work schools who want to organize their campuses around this issue. We would like to revive the inter-school council formed by NYC area social work students a few years ago to deal with similar issues. In addition to working with other social work students this spring, SEJ plans to take its message to the streets through public education and direct action. In the tradition of social work activism, we want to help keep social work's commitment to social, economic and political justice alive. To learn more about social work student organizing or to get involved, contact Julie Carlson, 212-533-0540 x335. To learn more about the Welfare Reform Task Force or to get involved call the NASW Office, 212-668-0050.
*Mimi Abramovitz (1998). "Social Work and Social Reform: An Arena of Struggle," Social Work 43(6), pp. 512-526.