Dragon Info
Related Articles

SF Children’s Social Workers Rally for Better Services

San Francisco Labor Council Executive Secretary Treasurer Walter Johnson tells the Department of Human Services Commission to listen and respect what workers are saying. “Don’t make me come back, because next time I won’t be alone,” he warned. Other speakers included Local 535 Northern California Regional Director Damita Davis-Howard, Field Representative Linda Joseph, San Francisco Chapter President Roger Valera, Children’s Services Committee Chair David Williams and childrens social workers Dan Phillips, Anna Marie Clark, Carol Crittenden, and William Kearns.

July-August 2001

The San Francisco Department of Human Services is not respecting workers and is endangering the well-being of the children and families of San Francisco, workers told the DHS Commission. Social workers testified before the commission and rallied in front of the San Francisco social services building on July 26. According to union field representative Linda Joseph, the union has been meeting with management to resolve a grievance around the department’s restructuring into multi-functional units, but management has reneged on several agreements and is acting in bad faith. “We want to find a solution that will allow workers to provide services to kids and families, and management is not being serious about it,” she says.

Recent federal regulations have shortened the time emergency response workers have to respond to a complaint and have increased the documentation workers must fill out, Joseph explained. To make up for the added work and speedup, management agreed to increase the number of workers. Management, however, never made good on the promise. When the issue of hiring more workers was brought up, management proposed hiring an independent contractor to supervise family visits and told the union they had no intention of negotiating staffing issues. This is at a time when caseloads in some units are as high as twice the statewide average. According to Joseph, instead of hiring more line workers, the department is hiring more managers and spending money on projects that don’t involve case-carrying workers.
According to shop steward Craig McCracken, the workers support the goals of many of these new programs, but they are being staffed at the expense of line workers. Management is trying to court foundation grants at the expense of the basic child welfare programs. Things got so bad that at one point they ran out of emergency response workers and had to transfer workers from other units.

The situation reached a crisis point two years ago with the creation of multi-function units, which combine emergency response, court dependency, and family preservation units. The restructuring exacerbated one of the welfare agencies greatest problems. Workers have been complaining that new workers are not properly trained when they start the job and supervisors lack the expertise to train them. The creation of multi-function units took this problem and multiplied it by three: instead of having to bluff one’s way through one job, workers and supervisors have had to stumble around trying to learn three.
Veteran workers are particularly overwhelmed because not only do they have to do three jobs, but supervisors who don’t know how to do the jobs are pressuring older workers to make up the difference by training new workers.

What really upsets the workers is that families and children are suffering because of mismanagement. As child welfare worker Dan Phillips explains, before the multi-function units, emergency response workers were able to keep families together by offering family preservation services. An ER worker could assess a problem in a home, but instead of traumatizing the family by removing the children and bringing them into the system, the parents could be helped through voluntary family preservation services.

Family preservation programs can be very effective for everyone involved. They save parents and children the trauma of being separated from each other and save the county the cost of court proceedings and expensive foster care. Workers are able to spend time providing services rather than filing court papers. It is also much less cumbersome to provide voluntary services, because once the child is in the system, it becomes a legal contest. As Craig McCracken explains, “San Francisco is one of the most litigious counties. Attorneys for the parents act like having services ordered for a family is the same as finding them guilty of a crime.”

The problem with combining emergency response with family preservation and the court is that workers are forced to make court work the priority. “Given the choice between providing voluntary services to a client and risking being found in contempt of court because you didn’t do your court work, guess what is going to give,” McCracken states. The result is that workers are not able to provide voluntary services and instead they are having to bring children into the system who might otherwise have been helped at home.