Steve Burghardt & Michael Fabricant. The Handbook of Community Practice. Editor: Marie Weil. Sage Publications. 2005.
An analysis of social work and its professionals’ labor activism has its own contradictions and dilemmas that make its labor movement activity distinct from that of traditional manufacturing industries like garment and apparel, mining, or automotive. Perhaps the following three scenarios, each having its own distinct context and demands, capture the variability in the social work field.
The March 2000 announcement in Honolulu, Hawaii, was the culmination of a worldwide effort to end sweatshops around the world. Led by two international human rights organizations, Global Exchange and Sweatshop Watch; a legal advocacy and civil rights group; the Asian Law caucus; and UNITE!, the labor union that represents many U.S. garment workers, a coalition forced Calvin Klein, Inc.; Jones Apparel, Inc.; Liz Claiborne, Inc.; and 17 other retailers to greatly alter their labor practices in the Western Pacific Island of Saipan. “These settlements will dramatically improve the lives of thousands of garment workers on Saipan,” said Jay Mazur, President of UNITE! (www.globalexchange.org). The retailers paid $8 million, promising to maintain strict employment standards, including overtime pay for overtime work; provide safe food and drinking water; and honor employees’ basic human rights. Social workers could be found actively supporting this struggle from its inception.
In New York State, a historic agreement 3 years in the making was reached between the state and New York City chapters of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the powerful union of drug, hospital, and health care employees. Initiated and developed by Robert Schachter, executive director of the National Association of Social Workers’ New York City chapter, and Dennis Rivera, the president of 1199/ SEIU, the carefully crafted agreement stated the pact would last for 2 years and focus on improving benefits, licensing, and other legislative items of common interest. Some social work activists were thrilled by the alliance; others have continued to voice their reservations.
A recent study of social workers offering clinical services to downsized workers showed that when they, in turn, were faced with their own work-related threats from managed care, they tended to define clients’ responses to economic contraction in terms of personal pathology but framed their own conditions in terms of “victimization” (Rosenberg, 1999). Almost none of the social workers saw collective struggle through unionization as one of their options.
These three scenarios suggest the breadth of social work mobilization, community organizing, and the labor movement. They also capture the contradictory tensions and dilemmas of social workers’ labor activism in the 21st century: There is almost an inverse relationship between social worker/community organizing and labor and the increasingly degraded concrete conditions of social work practice itself. In short, the more global the cause, the higher the level of widespread social worker activism; the more focused on social work agency life, the less likely workers’ response will be grounded in solidarity with labor. This chapter explores why in the social services field, “think globally, act locally” often has been turned on its head by social work practitioners.
Globalization: Finance Capital, the Rise of Social and Economic Inequality, and the Internationalization of Jacob Riis
As practitioners confronted with the cost containment demands of managed care and organizers struggling with the neoliberal agendas of both Democratic and Republican parties now recognize, the political landscape since the 1980s has greatly shifted away from the pro-welfare state policies of the past. Indeed, we now see that the globalization of the world’s economies, with the ensuing rise in the power of finance capital to dominate economic and social relations, has greatly increased both economic instability and social inequality. As Prigoff (1999) pointed out, the unprecedented expansion of greater and greater wealth for a narrower and narrower sector of the economic elite has simultaneously led to the worldwide reemergence of catastrophic working conditions and economic exploitation: children as young as four forced to work in the rug factories of Pakistan; men and women in the Philippines and across the Western Pacific forced to work 14-hour days making college sweatshirts in cramped, window-less, polluted factories; and the surge in selling children into prostitution in Thailand, to name just three examples. Although some sectors of the world—the United States and Western Europe especially—reaped the benefits of worldwide economic growth throughout the late 20th century, others were far less fortunate: 840 million people are still illiterate; 1.2 billion do not have access to clean water; 160 million children under the age of 5 are malnourished; and in industrial countries alone, 100 million people live below the poverty line (Prigoff, 1999).
These grievous economic conditions were being propelled by the fluctuations in finance capital, an especially unstable form of advanced capital formation (Soros, 1998). Governments, historically slower to respond to capital movement, began attempting to enforce certain trade and labor agreements among countries so that longer-term economic interests could be maintained or stabilized. Furthermore, they attempted to improve coordination of existing economic lending institutions such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and worked to ensure that national economies would be held to the specific financial provisions of intact trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement. Attempting both to support rapid capital formation and to moderate the extremes of economic dislocation, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was formed in 1995.
Established among 134 nations to oversee international trade agreements and with the power to enforce specific rules through trade sanctions, the WTO has served as broker for the IMF and WB. It has substantially increased its own influence, as well as that of the other two institutions, over various nations’ economies and their leaders’ decision making (see in particular, reports on Ecuador, Brazil, and the Philippines through www.globalexchange.org, which provides up-to-date information on particular countries and the WTO). As a recent AFL-CIO report stated, “International trade negotiators have grown increasingly ambitious, and world trading rules have begun to encroach on areas considered the domain of national governments, such as environmental and public health regulations … seen as ‘barriers to trade’” (2002, p. 1). Although examples of increasing economic inequality and deepening poverty may be found worldwide, we need look no further than within the United States itself, where, as Doug Henwood said, “It was only under the reign of Clinton and Gore that the wealth of the top 1% came to exceed that of the bottom 90%” (2000, p. 26). Prigoff noted that “nearly one in three American children will be poor at least one year of their lives before turning 16” (1999, p. 163).
This mix of increasing economic impoverishment, rapid wealth accumulation, and widening global social injustice, much of it promulgated by worldwide organizations lacking national sanction or clearly defined auspices, has been the catalyst for a burgeoning social movement involving labor, environmentalists, social workers, and community organizers from across the world.
The presence of organized labor in environmental, social justice, and economic equality movements was, if not unprecedented, extraordinary to behold over the last decade. The election of the “New Voice” reformer John Sweeney as President of the AFL-CIO heralded this change most dramatically. As the former president of the fast-growing SEIU, he joined forces with Richard Trumka of the United Mine Workers in 1995 to push through a platform based on “a worker-based movement against greed, multinational corporations, race-baiting, and labor-baiting politicians” (as cited in Brecher & Costello, 1996, p. 33).
Such movement-influenced rhetoric served to further embolden the already-activist grassroots and rank-and-file groups such as the Teamsters for a Democratic Union, the Washington, DC-based national community-labor coalition of Jobs for Justice, and insurgent groups such as New Directions in the Transport Workers Union and the New Caucus of the Professional Staff Congress, a college faculty-staff union in New York City that is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers.
This current of labor and community organizations was rising in the early 1990s at the same time two other movements were growing across the world. The first was the environmental movement. From grassroots, militant Greenpeace to planning-focused Earth Watch to the electoralist-activist Green Parties in Western Europe and (to a much smaller but no less controversial degree) the United States, environmental organizations began to see the connections between environmental degradation and globalization, with its concomitant effect on specific local populations. As the 20th century drew to an end, it became easier and easier for activists to make connections between polluted rivers, unregulated toxic waste from multinational corporations, exploitation of workers, and the decline of ravaged communities. The ensuing political and economic analyses that emerged in these movements has begun to create an organizing framework of economic, environmental, and social coherency unseen since the 1930s. The leading exemplar of this synthesis is the protean Noam Chomsky, particularly as articulated in his 1998 work, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order.
Perhaps nowhere has this sophisticated and energized analysis been more apparent than in the student-led, antisweatshop campaigns directed at the apparel industry. This emergent movement’s leadership recognized student economic power as the primary market for such pervasive corporations as The Gap, Tommy Hilfiger, and Calvin Klein. Students also used their advanced understanding of the Internet to create a worldwide movement of support for a campaign that joined specific prongs of labor and economic boycott with environmental and social justice activist groups. Borrowing a page from Jacob Riis, the radical reformer of the Progressive Era who used his striking photographs of poverty, malnutrition, and illness among the residents of New York City’s Lower East Side to fight for major social welfare reform, student activists created some of the first World Wide Web sites that showed the shocking conditions of 4-year-olds at work weaving rugs, 11-year-old prostitutes walking the streets of Bangkok, and starving families drinking water polluted by nearby toxic factories. (There are hundreds of Web sites on globalization and inequality)
The ensuing activism these efforts unleashed on a cross-section of campuses helped contribute to the historic trade and labor agreements mentioned earlier. Their efforts are an exemplar of the burgeoning worldwide struggles against the WTO itself. Perhaps best-known for the storm of protest at the Seattle WTO meetings in 2000—at which AFL-CIO leaders, environmental activists, antisweatshop organizers, community activists, and anarchists marched arm-in-arm to protest a WTO meeting—this growing movement remains a fertile arena for labor and social activism. These protests vividly spotlighted the content and consequence of WTO policies. In addition, they were powerful enough to shut down the WTO’s annual meeting. Among the ranks of the protesters were social workers committed to worldwide child welfare reform (whose campaign planks are remarkably similar to those of 19th-century reformers in the United States), women’s rights activists, labor organizers, and community organizers who understand the linkage between runaway, unregulated economic globalization and their own communities’ decline. Social workers’ influence, joining grassroots activism, legislative advocacy, and the setting of international agendas through the mechanism of the Internet, has only begun to be felt, both in the field of social work and across the shrinking borders of the new world economy.
Pushing the Sisyphean Boulder: Trade Union-Social Work Alliances Begin to Form, Old Antagonisms Continue to Grow
Although the worldwide struggles related to free trade, economic exploitation and inequality, and environmental degradation are relatively straightforward in terms of group formation and social workers’ activism, alliances between the social work profession and labor movement in the United States are less so. Of course, alliances between labor and the social work profession are hardly new forms of activism. From the social work Rank and File labor movement of the 1930s (J. Fisher, 1980; R. Fisher, 1998) to the National Welfare Rights Organization-American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees coalitions of the 1960s, to the anti-cutback coalitions of the 1970s, to the Jobs for Justice statewide campaigns of the late 1980s through the 1990s, activist alliances have emerged to fight for improved rights and conditions for social workers and the community.
Most present alliances between social work professionals and labor unions have focused on legislative agendas. Other, more formalized relationships have been drawn primarily from individual agencies and subcommittees of professional chapters known for their activist stance but lacking official sanction. The historical ambivalence of the profession to unionizing itself has limited formal alliances to electoral campaigns for particular political office (Alexander, 1980). Thus, the formal pact between the New York State and City Chapters of the NASW and Local 1199 of the Drug, Hospital, and Health Care Employees Union/SEIU was rightly hailed as a “historic breakthrough” when it occurred in late 2000. For one of the few times in the profession’s history, NASW created a 2-year pilot project that transcended normal (and short-term) electoral/legislative alliances (Carten & Schachter, 2000). The groups found common identity on both the legislative agenda and the effect that managed care was having on the working conditions and professional autonomy of their joint memberships. For the first time in generations, the social work profession was aligning concern about both its own conditions—and its progressive causes—with those of a labor union’s membership.
That it took NASW chapters’ leadership years to convince the chapters’ boards to create this alliance—and then only as a pilot project—is not difficult to understand. Among comparable professionals (teachers and nurses), 25% of social workers, as opposed to 40% of nurses and 75% of high school teachers, belong to labor unions (Karger, 1988). Indeed, if there had not been the surprising precedent of the Clinical Social Work Guild’s alliance with the numerically small Podiatrists Union around conditions of managed care in the health care field, it is unlikely that this formal agreement between NASW and 1199/SEIU would have occurred at all.
This progressive alliance can be traced at least in part to the toll managed care has taken on all professionals and workers throughout the physical and mental health fields over the past 20 years. Social work professionals, allied health care professionals, and physicians have felt the constraints on their approach to their work through the imposition of Diagnostic Review Groups and Uniform Case Records. Such loss of professional autonomy and deteriorating working conditions are particular symptoms of cost containment and neoliberal attempts to diminish social welfare state expenditures. It may come as little surprise that these cost containment strategies are woven into the larger dynamic of globalization and worldwide economic competition now under way (Fabricant & Burghardt, 1993).
However, as significant as this alliance has been, there is a corresponding historic and contemporary tension between unionism and the professions. Like Sisyphus, the legendary king of Corinth doomed to push a boulder to the top of a mountain in Hades only to see it roll down again and again, those who work to unionize social work professionals face what sometimes seems like eternal frustration. Both in the unions, among social workers and administrators, and between the two groups, there are concrete dynamics that have restricted these alliances to the work of legislative coalitions.
For example, in social work, the boards of local, state, and national chapters of NASW are disproportionately represented by agency executives and managers with very different interests than those of a potential union member. The very cost containment issues affecting their nonprofit and public sector agencies—shrinking budgets and higher unit-of-service demands by managed care companies and other state funders—make union demands for higher wages and reduced caseload size anathema to a pragmatic administrator. Although some executives struggle with their staff to minimize these problems, others are as bureaucratic and centralized in their response as traditional managers of the corporate sector (Fabricant & Fisher, 2002).
As social workers address broad issues of social justice and international struggles for workers’ rights, their contradictory class location (Wright, 1996) creates an internal divisiveness not easily bridged. Social workers are executives handling multimillion-dollar budgets, caseworkers overloaded with too many clients to visit and too much paperwork to do, managers forced to juggle multiple programs, and clinicians frequently interested in how object relations theory enhances their diagnostic skills. The cacophony of interests combined with the varying levels of power, influence, and responsibility that exist across the ranks of the social work profession does not lend itself to the common collective response demanded by a labor union.
The mirror image of this professional dilemma lies in today’s trade unionism. Although the topic is too broad to cover in this chapter, the historic break by the labor movement in the 1940s from its earlier social agenda of community mobilization and support for the unorganized has led to a narrowing of vision and interests that finds little resonance among many community activists, especially people of color long denied access to craft unions or union leadership (Boyer & Morais, 1990; Draper, 1992). Although Sweeney, Trumka, and numerous local affiliates have made significant gains over the past 10 years in re-creating a more progressive voice in the ranks of labor, the overwhelming focus of trade union leadership has been toward the narrowest of interpretations of union activity. This “look at the contract” approach is often antithetical to social work values of engagement, participation, and extended protections for clients, as well as the provision of quality services.
Labor’s Sisyphean boulder in the field of social services is its unwillingness to view a practitioner’s response to clients’ needs in anything other than the prescribed terms of workers’ contractual rights and obligations. By joining the provisions of contracts to civil service regulations, many public-sector social service unions have been a significant brake on progressive reforms that might benefit social work clients. For example, in New York City, the major child welfare reform effort undertaken by the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) Commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta, was consistently slowed by trade unionists battling to hold on to old contractual agreements that protected even those workers who consistently failed to go into the field to visit children at risk. In another example of union efforts in direct conflict with clients’ interests, local union leadership in ACS voted to oppose the Title Series Plan, which would have resulted in salary increases of 15% to 25% for its membership as supervisory staff were reorganized onto two new tiers of accountability. The agency executives then were forced to fight the union grievance for months and months, thus diminishing the momentum for other reforms. Meanwhile, the individual leaders of the union local behind the scenes were applying for the raises the plan proposed—while continuing to fight against its acceptance!
Such individual maneuvering, combined with a narrow contractual interpretation of everything from worker-client relationships to job descriptions of tasks and functions, is the kind of “business union” framework that causes many social workers to be profoundly skeptical of trade unions’ openness to their labor-intensive work that often focuses on building interpersonal relations, community, and social capital. Relationships in social work between staff members and clients, community members, and agency representatives cannot be built in a rigid, formalistic manner specified by job title and prescribed hourly quotas. It is therefore highly unlikely that major movement toward either “labor solidarity” or “social capital creation” is likely to occur between the social work profession and trade union leadership in the near future. Social work managers and community builders will rightly remain skeptical of union’s flexibility regarding the needs of clients and agencies. Labor union leaders will justly doubt that the social work profession’s leadership embraces union members’ financial interests.
These dilemmas of class and social interest make the alliances forged by NASW chapters and individual trade unions and progressive legislative coalitions all the more important to support as incubators of further experimentation. It is perhaps here that the cross-fertilization of ideas and opportunities for joint ventures in community/labor solidarity will grow, but activists must recognize the historical conditions and causes of the present impasse if movement is to occur.
Which Side Are You On? Methodological Choices in Relationship Building and the Creation of Social and Class Consciousness
The first section of this chapter examined the shifting relationship between global economies and the social dislocations of millions of people around the world. The second briefly explored the changing relationship and ongoing strains in the formal relationship between the social work profession and the labor movement. This is perhaps no accident; after all, the enhancement of relationship, both collective and individual, worldwide and in the community, is one of the primary reasons why we engage in organizing in the first place.
That said, one of the continuing dilemmas we face in building mass social movements capable of countering the neoliberal agenda is that the vast majority of social workers (as well as many others) do not interpret their objective conditions as warranting a change in how they relate to their work, their clients, or their communities. As more than one analyst has noted, if objective conditions were sufficient for massive struggle, the left would have won the battle for social and economic democracy a long time ago (Heilbroner, 1980).
In surveying globalization, economic and social dislocation, and the still-sporadic level of organizing and mobilization in social work and the labor movement, it is clear that the famous axiom on the development of consciousness is only partially accurate:
In the social production of their existence, people inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of them, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Marx, 1992, p. 287, emphasis added.)
In short, people of the 21st century may not think and act like those at the dawn of the 20th—we all have so much more information to digest, so much more open sexuality to consider, so much less time to grow vegetables or bake a cake from scratch. The material conditions of our lives make that inevitable.
These material conditions do not, however, translate into the inevitability of social struggle just because the conditions of our lives are more stress-filled and social inequality is greater. Why? What happens in the profession itself that might diminish a more collectivist response? This discussion is as old as the decline of Eugene Debs’s presidential campaign right before World War I in 1912, and the debate ranges over such topics as the emergence of a nonfeudal working class, the lack of an aristocracy, and the social and economic escape valve of frontier expansion available to white working-class men and their families (Gorz, 1990; Sombart, 1976). For purposes of brevity, we will look at a select few of the dynamics of pro-fessionalization in this essay.
We believe that a significant part of the answer as to why social workers do not respond collectively to the material conditions encroaching on their professional lives can be found in Rosenberg’s (1999) data. His study focused on social workers treating clients who had been downsized or had lost their jobs. The vast majority—92%—categorized downsizing as “a metaphor for ‘traumatic loss.’” Rosenberg pointed out that this traumatic loss metaphor, with all its pathological implications, fits in Erikson’s (1994) Life Cycle framework for understanding human behavior, which is commonly taught in schools of social work. Rosenberg further suggested that “by introducing the unpredictable social or personal effects of variables such as class, race, gender, and age into the highly volatile world created by occupational restructuring and globalization, the usefulness of the life cycle categories diminishes terribly” (p. 133). Rosenberg further argued that equating the traumatic loss of aging, death, or injury with the upheavals wrought by job loss is to vitiate the social content of the experience—for worker and client alike.
In short, diagnosing or telescoping a client’s condition through the life cycle alters the relationship between worker and client to that of “worker/helper-client/ victim”—that is, individualized and particularistic to the conditions, concerns, and capacities of the client and worker alone. This narrow form of diagnosis models an individuated and inherently paternalistic approach to intervention that is at the heart of Paulo Freire’s methodological critique of the “banking system of education,” which structures most helping professions’ approach to work with the oppressed (2002).
As Freire makes clear, this dynamic fostered between worker and client is critical, because any intervention’s methodology, by definition, fosters a two-way relationship—not only worker to client, but client to worker. Understanding this explains Rosenberg’s (1999) finding that social workers defined their own job-related problems in terms of individualized victimization. Social workers
interact… in a helping role… which [orients] them to apply trauma, loss and pathology to those who seek help … [so that later] when thinking of themselves as individuals or members of a professional group, they are more apt to apply depoliticized explanations when conceptualizing their personal response to downsizing. (Rosenberg, 1999, p. 129)
In short, a professional relationship based on helping and individuation with clients socially reproduces the same narrow, nonsocially based interpretation to the professionals’ own conditions. Collective struggle will not be part of this kind of interpretation.
The process of social reproduction is embedded in all spheres of economic and personal life. As Gorz wrote:
Capitalism, as a complex social formation, does not exist in some massive and static reality, but is in the constant process of renewing conditions for its continued existence through all aspects of life. The concept of social reproduction explains not only that workers have to be fed, sheltered and kept healthy if they are to return each day to the work place … but they need their “own” ideas and attitudes, those which ultimately maintain them within the social hierarchy and which keep them subservient to routines of daily lifer under the domination of capitalism. (Gorz, 1977, p. 108)
Those routines obviously include social work processes as well.
Rosenberg’s (1999) findings illuminate a central flaw in the strengths-based, “person-in-environment” framework common to most social workers’ methodological choices: Solutions to problems, for worker and client alike, are rooted solely in the strengths, abilities, and resources of the clients and workers themselves. Reproduced over time, the relationship itself stands as the problem-solving incubator for change—an internally directed focus that vitiates attention to outside, external forces that constrain and moderate individual effectiveness. Profitt’s brilliant analysis (2000) of woman abuse, feminist intervention, and collective action makes a similar point at the conclusion of her description of how battered women moved from individualized, blame-riddled interpretations of their condition to a socially charged and collectivist response to abuse: Although Profitt found that survivors can and did benefit from individual counseling and therapy, they also benefited from feminist social spaces that encouraged a critical exploration and analysis of their experience, emotions, and social world. Identifying our emotions and feelings and understanding them involves putting a name to the feeling, situating it in the social world, joining feeling and behavior in a meaningful way, and noting a purposeful pattern.
Explaining how such social spaces can be created by practitioners committed to a socially charged practice, Profitt adds a cautionary note from her clinical experience:
We … need to challenge the appropriation of the language of feminism and activism by mental health, professional, and recovery discourses…. This situation has fostered the cleaving of the personal from the political and the conflation of the personal with the political…. We need to develop new modes of working together with survivors that would respect them and their experience, and refuse to define them in terms of their victimization…. The fact that survivors can be witnesses and experts, reporters and theorists of their experience, will alter existing subjectivities. (Profitt, 2000, p. 93, emphasis added)
Profitt (2000) and Rosenberg (1999) both make clear that the struggle in social work for the kind of collective response needed for building broad-scale labor and social movements will require as much commitment as engagement with antisweatshop and child protection campaigns around the world. Social workers, whether organizers or clinicians, will focus as much on socially changing their daily practice as in responding to the social conditions that drive managed care. Such a task may seem daunting and even unfair, given so much else that activists seek to do in today’s globalized and increasingly inequitable marketplace. However, perhaps by seeing the connections in relationship building between client and worker, worker and agency, and agency and community as more socially charged than before, we can take the needed steps that make global and local action more closely linked than ever.