"Defund Social Workers" is just bad strategy
A response to Emily Cooke's piece in The New Republic
Let me start with my silly little credentials that will make it even more impossible for me to become gainfully employed again so that I can establish that I’m not just some racist weirdo who loves cops and taking babies from poor people. When I was in graduate school at University of Chicago, I founded Social Service Workers United (SSWU) and was later a member of Social Workers United ATX. I’ve collaborated with grassroots radical social work organizations in New York, Massachusetts, and folks looking to start their own efforts. I’ve been out on a break from organizing for about a year and a half. I have written a lot of press releases and position pieces called, like, “We Will Not Be Deputized.” I promise I’m on your side.
By the time you read this, a bunch of people I know will have already retweeted Emily Cooke’s “Defund Social Workers” article in the New Republic and I will feel awkward the next time I see them. But I get it! I too resonate with her central premise that social work is an arm of a state that can only subjugate and punish. This is not unique. Dorothy Roberts wrote Shattered Bonds in 2001. I don’t mean to be hostile. It’s just that I’m tired of social workers wrecking our own potential for progress through guilt and immature class analysis. Ostensibly, I should be one of Cooke’s retweeters. But signaling agreement without critiquing the message of articles like this one gets us nowhere fast.
There is more to the familiar call to “defund the police” than indicating the police are bad.
Honestly, had the piece been titled “Social Workers Suck,” I would have scrolled past it in quiet understanding. But Cooke states the cliche herself: “in few jobs will you get paid less while helping people more.” The dry funding doesn’t reflect only social work salaries, but the programs that budget those salaries as well. We’ve all seen the graphs! If city budgets are a pie, we’re all fighting over the slice remaining once law enforcement departments have had their fill. People know that social workers do other things besides working in child welfare, right? JMacForFamilies, the organization devoted to fighting the child welfare system mentioned in the article, employs and collaborates with social workers and social work schools. There is nothing inherent to the job title that makes you a baby-snatcher. In a political economy so lopsided, calling to defund social workers without offering an alternative vision is fundamentally reactionary.
I desire and push for the abolition of social work—meaning not that we should get rid of the current social service systems, but that we work against the systems and their founders to create a world that needs fewer social workers. We know by now that we can’t do that through edgy writing. At this point in my life, I have spent hundreds of hours sitting in rooms of radical social work students and early career social workers criticizing organizations, reading theory, using words like “problematizing,”, and wondering why the exhausted seasoned social workers don’t stick around. We need to take our heads out of the zines and collectively think about what gets us to a more just place on the ground. There is a bit of a social worker strawman woven in between the lines of critical social work discourse. Personally, I have never met a social worker who was trusting of the child welfare system. To be fair, I may only hang around with cool social workers. And I don’t know if people know this, but most social workers are not employed by child welfare agencies. According to a 2017 report of the 2015 social work workforce, only 30.9% of masters-level social work professionals were employed by individual and family services, with no further breakdown by type of services (therapy, educational, etc). Anecdotally, I don’t know a single social worker at a child welfare agency.
I was told I would meet them: the old guard of true believers who thought that state involvement was the best solution to a child without a winter coat. I never found them. It may appear from the outside that there is some kind of war between the cool radical social workers who do cool radical work and the evil authoritarian henchmen. But perhaps if we took a more realistic look at the workers in all of their positions, we would see a lot of people fighting back against varying levels of oppressive policy to varying degrees.
Let’s think about this. One of the many benefits of siphoning money out of our cities’ bloated police budgets is the potential to reorganize such funds into places that actually do benefit people and create real public safety. People will always have to administer these resources, maintain these programs, or at the very least, answer the phones. We don’t even allow ourselves to imagine getting to this point before writing off all future possibilities because one possible direction is bad. Funding social services (and thus social work!) could mean finally using our collective wealth for our collective well-being. It could even mean providing cash stipends needed to ease the financial burdens of families instead of funding an apparatus of surveillance and punishment. It’s capitalist realism at its finest. We can’t imagine a benevolent social safety net, even though we may be closer to it than the removal of all of the existing systems. And I’m thankful for that because these systems also provide legal advocates, food provision, housing solutions, and healthcare. It’s just that our safety net has a lot of holes in it because it is not being properly maintained and it is held by people who definitely want to defund social work. You can see that they probably have very different priorities than you do. So why would you have the same rallying cry?
This blanket social work essentialism wrecks movements.
What exactly does this columnist want? What do any of my grad school professors, paid by our tuition, accomplish by finding more creative ways to express that our field is a repressive force? Did we build toward any vision by sitting around and reflecting on how problematic we were for 2 years? Were these conversations more than intellectual exercises for burgeoning middle-class thought leaders? I have found that you have a few options as a social worker serious about anti-oppressive practice.
First, you can compete with all of the other radical social workers for the same few positions at the same few social justice-oriented organizations, wondering if that role should be filled by someone who has more in common with the population served than you do.
Second, you can quit. I would argue that quitting social work includes becoming a private practice clinician and moving into academia.
Finally, you can attempt a role at a normal nonprofit, be stealthily disobedient, and try to change policy when you can. What is not mentioned in Cooke’s piece, and not spoken about openly, is that good social workers break the rules. Policy that is inflicted upon us, and that we are tasked with inflicting further, comes from no one place, but is instead a Frankenstein’s monster created by federal, state, and local law; grant compliance; agency and donor requirements; and professional regulatory body codes. You quickly learn that it’s almost impossible to be in alignment with all of these, even with things like paperwork, and you do your best. You also learn you typically get away with treating people better than you’re supposed to. This decision-making is what makes us street-level bureaucrats. We are the ones determining policy because we are on the frontlines of it, and in our day-to-day duties, we decide what matters personally— and thus arbitrarily. Even if we’re being generous and assuming good intentions, it is unpredictable and untenable to enforce policy based on our own individual values instead of what is written down and available for all to see. The creator of the street-level bureaucracy concept, Michael Lipsky, describes our primary constraint as the perpetual shortage of resources that makes rationing such resources a part of our jobs. At the very least, we can alter this lack through adequate funding of social services, not restricting resources even more. After all, if you want social services, you are going to need social service workers, whether or not they are called social workers.
The essentializing force of the discourse exemplified in Cooke’s writing is what creates confusion and shame in social workers fresh out of graduate school, who are forced to choose from all of the “problematic” options in front of them. We blame and gossip about each other and do whatever we can that would separate us from the image of the soft police force, and many simply leave the field altogether. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Another social work is possible.
That’s a SSWU slogan and the ethos of the movement to organize social workers, not just for us, but for our clients. And because of our presence in hospitals, clinics, schools, and everywhere else, it’s a movement to change the dynamics of care for the entire American population. Projects like SSWU, Social Service Workers Uprising Now-NYC, Liberation Health Boston, Social Work Action Network International, and Social Workers United ATX see labor organizing as a means to change the nature of our work, thereby improving the material conditions of our clients. Social justice unionism is at its most powerful in the social work field. When workers don’t have democracy in their workplace, we don’t have the ability to affect policies that are inflicted upon the public. To change our social service apparatus, we need democratic control over our workplaces and a militant labor force. Radical social workers need to be at the bargaining table with nonprofit executive directors changing policy, not winning the “most knowledgeable” trophy at the HR DEI training. The more that the social work field is professionalized, the further we get from aligning ourselves with our clients and fighting our common enemies.
We’d better organize for the better, and we better get our ideas straightened out before it’s time for us to actually make decisions instead of complaining about all of the things we are not in charge of. We have the potential to create, just not critique. Social work and law enforcement have a flirtatious relationship where they force our hand. We are all coerced by the police, who are empowered by our criminal legal system. Organizing provides an underutilized shield.
While social workers need bread and butter gains, such as increased wages, they can also use organizing to protect workers who break unjust rules and we can change policy through democratic means. The possibilities for social justice unionism are endless. Following the lead of JMacForFamilies and other anti-oppressive family regulation system reform and abolition organizations, we can advocate for policies like NY Senate Bill S5484B, requiring oral and written disclosure of charges and rights to parents and caretakers who are the subject of a child protective services investigation. We could utilize standard grievance policies to fight punitive consequences for social workers who do not meet conservative mandated reporting1 expectations in community mental health settings. Those of us in schools can bargain for budget allocations to meet all daily nutritional needs, preventing neglect calls.
Why do I care enough to respond in essay form? We are saturated with “social work is actually really problematic” discourse. Of course it is. If there isn’t a call to collective action, we don’t need more of this discourse. It’s not helping.
I’m not mad at Emily Cooke. I’m mad at where we’re at. I’m mad that all we do is post. I’m scared that we’ll let criticism keep us complacent and make us even quieter. Defunding of social safety nets isn’t abolition, but a forgiving slide into privatization. We can abolish predatory state family regulation by empowering families and communities through existing channels.2 We get to create the pressure, and we’re deciding to pass on seizing the power to do so. I do appreciate Emily Cooke for upholding this piece in The Appeal which lets radical social workers in networks across the country speak for themselves and connect readers to their online homes. I hope to see more abolitionist social workers willing to organize at work and between workplaces. I want social workers and those who deal with social workers to stay critical, but not without a theory of change.
All existing unions that workers who are mandated reporters can bargain to keep families out of harm's way. Remember—it’s not just social workers who are mandated reporters. In my home state of Illinois, almost all workers in healthcare and education settings are mandated reporters. Here are some other random Illinois mandated reporters: animal control officers, dental hygienists, and clergy.
Just in case its not abundantly clear—I am NOT talking about child welfare agencies. I am straight-up anti- those.