Can Social Work change anything?
By John Campbell
Seven year old Khyra Ishaq died recently in Birmingham, alleged to have starved to death in her home. Khyra was unconscious when paramedics discovered her and her five brothers and sisters lying on mattresses in a bedroom, and she died on her way to hospital. Khyra's mother and partner, both Muslim converts, were arrested and charged with neglect. According one report (Daily Telegraph 24/5/08) “there is now speculation that Khyra's condition may be linked to some form of ‘religious’ process.”
There will undoubtedly be reports that conclude, quite rightly, that there should be more effective multi-agency working. I doubt however, whether there will be proposals that wuuld make multi-agency working effective or resource already overstretched field social workers to do their jobs effectively.
The problem not being addressed is that Social Services (or Children’s and Adult Services, as it is now called) is massively under-funded and that workers are being simply required to work harder with the resulting increase in depressive and anxiety related illnesses, with no qualitative increase in service for clients.
How is it that there are regular analyses in the media of public service professionals like teachers and the police but barely anything about the role of the social worker who is expected to carry the can, ultimately, for the failings of the system? I am going to make various hypotheses in this article which need to be tested out and proved or disproved. These skeletal ideas are based around the interface between individual human need and the objective “need” of capital which, while dehumanising society nevertheless provides an element of civilisation that puts in place minimal services to protect the weak and the needy. The crucial difference between sectors of education and policing sectors and that of social work is that teachers produce value for the future (by developing labour-power), and the police protect value-as-property, whilst social work does neither and is certainly not a vote-catcher. It operates as a wing of the state, but works in the underbelly of society in which the vulnerable die or are permanently damaged. It subsumes its workers, who burn out only to be replaced by others who go the same way few years later, or end up as cynical senior managers shuffling budgets from one account to another. All of this works against the interests of service-users whose often fundamental need is continuity and consistency of care by the same professional.
What role does social work play in society?
The social worker is employed as public servant to literally pick up the pieces of a society that is driven by the search for value. To this extent I am not saying anything particularly original. The origins of social work were based in charity, with the developing middle classes providing a support for vulnerable families that had been blown apart and atomised as the industrial revolution developed. The driving force of social worker, in the form of the charitable worker then, and the professional now, was the wish to protect people from the worst excesses of a system that doesn’t provide any social support for those that fall through the net. It could also be argued that charity has been a continual thread through to the present day. Ask any field worker working for a local authority how much unpaid work they do per week and how much in reality they can claim back. The point is that protection of the vulnerable in society is no protection at all, if it treats only the effects of abuse rather than prevention of the causes.The above does not mean that people who commit terrible crimes like child abuse should escape from individual responsibility. They should not. But the tragedy for many workers is that with a lack of resources to really prevent abuse and help families, it is all too predictable that the abused child one day could become the adult abuser the next.
On top of all this the last fifteen years within Social Services has seen the development of the privatisation culture, as elsewhere in the public sector, where it is now clear that the driving force is “value for money“ i.e. saving budgets so that more capital can be pushed into the professions that really service value to capitalism, like the police and education.
It is clear in that there is no such thing as needs-led services but rather services that are clearly budget focused, with need being very low down the list.
What can be done?
The above has looked at the general but not the particular role between client and worker and the essence of change itself. One thing you are taught as a trainee social worker from day one is to believe in the ability of individuals to change. Is it true then that social workers can help people change? I can think of lots of examples personally and from colleagues where real change has been effected individually in the short term by the commitment that a particular worker has put into working with either a client or a family. Often this work, if it is to be successful, has to be done in the worker’s own time and there lies a clue as to the problems inherent doint the job effectively. I would question though whether real, deep down change is made by social workers. Because the problems of vulnerable people are related to poverty, associated alcohol and drug abuse and yes, people alienated from each other in society, serious preventative resources would have to be put in to even break the skin of these issues.From a Marxist and a Humanist Perspective capitalist society’s major drive is the search for increasing value and everything else is subsumed to this pressure. The dominant relationships in capitalist society are between commodities, between things and not between human beings. A truly radical vision therefore, of an alternative society, can only be achieved by relating concretely Marxist theory to live struggles of the masses, whether it be in the UK or defending the inhabitants of a town in Africa destroyed to make way for a new petroleum plant. Human beings exist at present through the medium of producing more and more value. However it is important to underline that basic humanity still exists, to a greater or lesser extent, because part of us, as human beings, care (even, dare I say the capitalist might care but not Capital itself). The net result of this is that caring for vulnerable people, the aged, abused children, does happen, where Capital can afford it, but is only a peripheral concern of society. Your most ardent capitalist could probably argue and believe that it is disgusting and immoral how old people are thrown in to a crap home at the end of their profitable life, but would not be able to defend logically an alternative where finance is pumped in to give them a decent standard of life.
How then can a Marxist-Humanist approach be applied within social work? To answer this it is important to step back and ask why people do the job. My hypothesis is that people do the job for many reasons, but it is primarily for humanist reasons regarding empathy for other human beings and certainly less about the money. It is more complicated than this though. The nature of caring within social work, I would argue, is based on a Christian ethic that focuses on the contradiction between caring for other human beings whilst at the same time supporting the parameters of the present capitalist system, where true free human relations cannot exist. The relation of the Christian ethic to social work presupposes sacrifice on an individual level. You often hear the argument that to protect children you have to work longer hours, not go on strike and generally accept any all manner of crap that is thrown at you. There is a philosophical stoicism in this; an underlying belief that change is possible or at least that the line can be held and that the vulnerable can be protected in at least a “better”, if not the best way.
My argument is that social workers objectively have the potential to be part of revolutionary force for change in society, but to do that they would have to change into a very different type of force than what they are today. As well as the need for better annual increases etc. most be a common need to change the lives of the clients they are working with and crucially their own working lives, in which the work can potentially subsume the social workers’ own personal relationships.
To start to understand how this change within social work can start it is useful to look at a concrete example of how social workers can react to labour disputes specifically. I was involved in leading a strike for higher pay a year and a half ago. Social workers were very weak in their response to industrial action and often the argument was used that they needed to keep working to protect the vulnerable people they worked with. To deal with this argument there needs to be specific campaigning from a trade union standpoint within social work teams and offices in parallel with campaigns like annual pay increases that cover the whole of the work force. It is vital that social workers do not see their general interest as separate from the work force as a whole.
Some of the demands from social workers could be as follows:
- Manageable Case Loads
- Mileage allowances tied in with petrol prices
- Routine Clinical Supervision separate from normal operational Supervision.
- Social Workers having a direct say in resources that are injected into specific client group areas.
- Contractual Protection for any social worker placing their own professional views re client decisions on the case file.
If the demands above are going to be fought for seriously then the ethics of individual sacrifice and accepting the parameters of the present system will have to change. The common factor is to assist clients in building a service that really can assist change and also change their lives. What needs to be argued against is the position that taking industrial action is fundamentally detrimental to service users as a whole. What we need to argue for is although there may be short-term effects on clients due to industrial action; the eventual result of a successful strike could be a better service and a stronger, more united workforce. Individual stoicism will have been replaced by collective striving for a better service.
This raises an important point. I mentioned in the introduction the interface between human need and the needs of a capitalist society. In any job, including social work, there is the need of workers for job satisfaction which, in jobs directly wedded to the direct production of value, may not be possible to satisfy. However social workers, working directly with people, and therefore being needed and praised by the clients, is a potential big plus. The change in dynamics proposed above would also mean social workers allying themselves with the clients they work with on an equal basis in struggle and not through a partnership which is mediated essentially by the ethics of capitalist charity.
So far this article has concentrated on the profession of social work, within the parameters of capitalism. But the yawning chasm that the question of better services for the vulnerable in society poses is the need for a different society altogether. The problem should be not posed it in a formulaic manner in terms of Trotskyite transitional demands, but concretely in the actual struggles of workers. The vanguard Left or Labour Left do not cut it because it is clearly not enough to argue for more money and redistribution of wealth'; especially when the question posed by struggles in the social work sector is the need for a different type of society to the one that currently exists, the effects of which they work with every day.
What do such ideas mean organisationally for Marxists?
It means workers as a first step joining the trade union, predominately UNISON in local authorities. Trade union membership is very low in most areas. The recruitment material will need to be focused not just on better conditions, but also on the fight for better services. It will mean electing shop stewards/union reps. The realities of social work make it vital that at least two workers need to share the role of shop steward in each team, possibly more. Secondly it will also mean breaking though what is anathema in terms of professional ethics at present and involving service users in struggles for better services, both in social work and throughout the public sector. Finally there needs to be links built between struggles of social workers and the theoretical study of Marxism and how it relates to live struggles, specifically in terms of the type of society that we want to build. Organisationally this is no easy matter. Objectively it is a necessity. Subjectively it is about Marxist Humanists making the link with social workers in struggle and focusing on the necessity of collective theoretical study as an equal priority to labour movement activism and doing something, “now”. It is the working out of this process, which will be the subject of my next article.Conclusion:
I wanted to write this because I was angry at the death of a young child and at the current response from the media and the eventual response from the government that will not address the conditions that social workers are working under at the moment, or the very real effect of those conditions on vulnerable people. As social workers, we work with these most vulnerable people in society but the present society has no interest in real protection and human self-development, but just hopes to prevent tragedies, which will inevitably happen.
After Victoria Climbie – a young child tortured, starved and murdered by family members before and after being subjected to “exorcism” by a Christian pastor - there was a real hope that the system would change, and that there would be real resources put in that would qualitatively change the work experience and therefore really change people’s lives. Instead, there has been an exponential rise in paperwork, covering corporate arses and social workers walking around offices in a state of paralysis, with the pressure to massage workload management to provide a picture that all is well. It is not, but to change it the workers, who see every day what it is like at the sharp end, need to be part of a process of change in society that will really care for the vulnerable and which casts away forever the ethics of charity and individual sacrifice and put in its place a collective striving for a free society.
JOHN CAMPBELL 1/6/08
"The freedom of the individual is the precondition for the freedom of all" - Marx