Tough-Love Pedagogy to Prepare Students for Social Work’s Systemic Inequities in a Globalized Economy

Overview: Social workers have received almost no public recognition as pandemic "essential workers" despite their heroic efforts from 2020 on. Such invisibility reflects the profession’s deteriorating status and compensation over the last 40 years. This workshop explores how to help students understand such inequities and then engage in collective struggle.Proposal text: In the last 40 years, neoliberalism has had a degrading impact on the human service workforce. (Burghardt, 2020) The global COVID pandemic has brought its damaging effects into sharper relief. Even though social workers continued to provide critical services to various marginalized populations, our helping profession received scant public mention as "essential workers," unlike nurses and teachers. This invisibility reflects our field's lessened status compared to these other professions. In the mid-1960's, social workers, teachers, and nurses made equivalent incomes (Ozawa & Law, 1993). Currently, social workers make 2/3's the salary of nurses and 3/4's of teachers (Parrot, 2017). In a 2019 national survey, nurses were rated as the most respected profession; teachers were third. Social workers did not make the list (Brenan, 2018).

These diminished circumstances have occurred even though the field continues to expand. Social work jobs will grow by 16% over the next five years. While such growth is celebrated, what is missing from discussions is the concurrent deterioration of compensation and working conditions. Abramowitz and Zelnick (2018) found that 85% of social workers in New York City agencies suffered from agency burn-out and demoralization; a British survey reported 61% of supervisors were planning to leave the field (Haynes, 2018). As seen throughout the global economy, contingency work arrangements in human services are on the rise, creating greater precarity for social workers (Hyde, 2021). While some policy analyses focus on the shrunken welfare state and its painful impact on marginalized populations, there is a dearth of information on the equivalent shock to social workers –larger caseloads, increased oversight, more data entry, shorter client hours (Pettijohn, et al, 2014). Consequently, students and newly minted practitioners do not have an adequate framework to understand how neoliberal dynamics impact their work; instead, they assume they are individually inadequate.

This proposed “tough-love” workshop focuses on how to incorporate into social work curricula a more trenchant, systemic analysis of neoliberalism’s impact and the collective strategies to address these conditions. The presenters, whose teaching and scholarship centers on professional and workplace conditions, workers’ rights, and mobilization strategies, will facilitate an interactive session in which participants will delve into factors that contribute to the deterioration of the human services, develop a more realistic framework that captures current challenges, and design pedagogical plans to incorporate this content into various courses so that students acquire much-needed analyses and solutions. Attention will be paid to necessary organizational reforms and collective actions including social media tools and on-the-ground activities.

Presenters will share case studies, in-class exercises and other tools that contribute to the development of this analysis and subsequent strategies. Participants are encouraged to share their experiences in recognizing and combatting neoliberalism’s impact in our globalized world and in supporting students as they move into an increasingly precarious professional world. Discussion will emphasize addressing systemic issues in ways that confront our field's problems without debasing social workers themselves. The goal is to plant within future generations that collective self-determination and individual advocacy is essential to social work.