Social Worker Zen Hines

by Richard Bermack

Dec. 2001

When an employment counselor or eligibility worker determines that the problems preventing a client from securing employment are too complex for the counselor or worker to handle, the case is referred to a social worker, such as Zen Hines. She describes the services she provides and some of the difficulties with these hard-core cases:

“You may have a lady who isn’t going to work, and she’ll say, ‘I can’t go to work because my husband is ill and I have to stay home and take care of him.’ If her husband is so physically ill that he can’t work, then we will determine if he is eligible for SSI and work to get him SSI. Then she can be considered his care provider, and that would eliminate some of the hours that she would have to work. She may still have to get a part-time job, but she wouldn’t have to do the whole 38 hours outside of the home.

“Sometimes there are a lot of psychological issues that go back to childhood. We have people who were abused, and a lot of the trauma comes up. We will try to get them behavioral health counseling and determine if they can work while they are getting counseling. If they can’t work, they can get a note from the doctor saying they are not able to work until a certain amount of time has passed to allow them to work on their issues.

“We also have people who have mental health problems who think they can work and want to work, but they go from job to job and they get fired. The employment counselor is called in but can only do so much. Sometimes these people refuse help from us. They refuse to acknowledge that they have a problem. They’ll say, ‘I don’t have this problem.‘ I suggest counseling, and they say, ‘I’m not crazy.’ If someone wants to work and accepts our help, they can be referred to state rehab. We also have shelter workshops set up for people with disabilities who want to work.

“Domestic violence can be another issue. They are afraid to come to work with bruises. They would rather get fired than disclose that they are in an abusive relationship. They are either afraid or ashamed to let anyone know what is going on. Sometimes it is not even the husband who is abusing them. I had one lady whose brother beat her. It was a really sad case. But she went all the way through the court system, and he got convicted.

“It [disclosing abuse] is especially difficult for a lot of women from foreign countries, Mexican, Vietnamese, Filipino women. It is very difficult to get them to disclose that they are abused. A lot of times we have the language difficulty. So now we have domestic violence specialists and people who are fluent in different languages. If we don’t have people of various languages, we use the AT&T phone translator, which is hard, but I’ve done it, and it works.”