Social work strike in LA leads to promises of extra recruitment

For many social workers around the world, striking is unimaginable, partly because of the concern for professional responsibilities, but also partly because you can't imagine many governments being all that concerned if they couldn't offer their social services. However, in Los Angeles County, social workers have been on strike, partly for a pay rise, but the internet media coverage has largely been about excessive workloads. And it is broadly positive to the social workers, also unimaginable in social work-hating UK. One of the outcomes of the strike has been the promise to recruit hundreds of extra workers. Hard to imagine that happening in cuts-hit Britain, in spite of the occasional moral panic about child abuse. I see from photos of the strikers, however, that 'child safety now' is an important slogan. Perhaps this is increasingly the social work equivalent of doctors 'shroud-waving'.

Picture by  Mel Melcon, Los Angeles Times.

Press reports: LA Times; South California Public Radio

Social workers should be part of corrections services

My comment on the following excerpted news report on the Californian corrections system: It's good to see some recognition that if you want to run an effective community corrections system, you need a good leavening of social workers.

The post originally on my UK policy and social work site: http://malcolmpayne.amplify.com

Amplify’d from thecrimereport.org

For the past decade, California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has been operating in crisis mode.

The catalogue of defects seemed endless. “The recidivism rate [of 67 percent],” the report noted

The reasons for California’s prison crisis, according to the commission, “were complex, yet simple: too much political interference, too much union control, and too little management courage, accountability and transparency.”

In May, 2008, Schwarzenegger named Matthew Cate as his Secretary of Correction

Cate: One of the good things coming out of this bad economy is that [high paying] jobs like California’s corrections officers have become much more coveted.

Typically in California parole agents have been former corrections officers. We still recruit some of those people, but in the next academy class,  between 50 and 70 percent will be from the outside, either from law enforcement or social work backgrounds.