Expected to Work for Free: Social Work's Complicity in its Own Devaluation

The U.S. economy depends on unrecognized acts of care to hold together our communities and workplaces (Folbre, 2001). Over time, the economy's simultaneous dependence on and devaluation of care has led to a shortage of care workers to fill the roles society needs to thrive (Fraser, 2016). As the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this shortage, policymakers started to move toward improving job quality for workers providing child, elder, and health care. The community and social service workforce has been neglected in this discourse even though they too provided essential care throughout the pandemic for low pay and at high personal cost. The obligation to perform this work has disproportionately fallen on women of color due to both their social proximity to those with unmet needs and discriminatory barriers to more financially valued jobs (Banks, 2020; Hodges, 2020). This brief explores the ways in which the social work profession is itself complicit in the historical and present devaluation of the field.

The Devaluation of Care Work in the U.S. Historical Context

The years following the American Revolution provided fertile ground for growing essentialist justifications that transformed existing gendered and racialized divisions of labor into gendered and racialized “definition[s] of labor” (Boydston, 1990, p. 55; Roediger, 2007). White men secured a privileged position in new wage labor markets by embracing the essentialist assumptions that women were naturally predisposed to caregiving and that Black people (regardless of gender) were predisposed to enslavement and physically-demanding agrarian labor. The romanticization of the domestic sphere as a feminized retreat from the masculinized alienation of industrial labor contributed to the development of the cult of true womanhood in the nineteenth century, setting expectations of submission and altruism for white women while obscuring the exertion involved in care work (Leotti, 2022). At the same time, a series of controlling images about Black women served to dehumanize them to justify their exploitation, including the depiction of the mammy as a “faithful, obedient domestic servant,” (Collins, 2002, p. 72).

These expectations normalized women's engagement in unpaid and underpaid care work. Trade unions dominated by white men reified labor divisions by excluding women and people of color from much unionized work (Du Bois, 1918; Hartmann, 1979). Even feminist social reformers contributed by embracing the nuclear family ideal and emphasizing the helplessness of women to achieve policy changes (Kelley, 1897/1998; Kemp & Brandwein, 2010; McDonagh, 1999). With few job prospects for middle-class women, many volunteered in charity organization societies, settlement houses, social clubs, and reform movements. The idea that volunteer work is altruistic, while working for survival or wages is corruptive continues to obscure the contributions made by racialized and working-class women to the development of the social work profession (Wright et al., 2021). These contributions include traditions of mutual aid, community leadership, and activism (Carlton-LaNey, 2001), as well as indirect support through devalued domestic labor that afforded more privileged women the time to volunteer.

The introduction of the “family wage” ideal in the early twentieth century further reified the norm of the nuclear family, promising the highest wages to white men. While World War II offered new job opportunities to many women, after the war men again pushed women out of the best paying jobs, aided by the media and reduced childcare supports. Even in the feminized field of social work, men disproportionately assumed leadership positions with scientific expertise displacing maternalism as the profession's dominant rhetoric (Kemp & Brandwein, 2010).

As U.S. factories began to lay off large numbers of workers in the 1970s, the care economy grew to new proportions in response to increasing demands for professional care due to the aging population, the growing number of women in the workforce, and the hollowing out of the middle class (Dwyer, 2013). These feminized and racialized jobs—which evolved not only from volunteer work, but also from legacies of domestic servitude, slavery, and the struggle for community survival (Glenn, 1992; Harley & Logan, 2002) – did not have the same levels of union representation, wages, benefits, and employment stability as the industrial jobs that were lost (Fraser, 2016).

Unpaid Care Work as Both an Essentialist Expectation and a Form of Resistance

Women of color have long engaged in unpaid community care work as a strategy of survival to resist racial oppression and meet the needs of communities disregarded by the larger society (Banks, 2020). This tradition of resistance has carried over to social service workers who often do extra work to make up for gaps in the social safety net (Cunningham et al., 2017; Stacey, 2005). In a study of social workers, Baines and von den Broek (2017) found:

One of the most widespread resistance/coping practices was undertaking unpaid care work such as extending their work hours, taking work home, working through lunch and breaks, and so forth. While these practices involved self-exploitation and extended the capacity of the agency to provide services, most workers ascribed oppositional meanings to these activities such as pushing back at an uncaring management, government and/or larger society. (p. 135)

This quote demonstrates how workers in social service occupations often take on unpaid work to preserve “their own ethic of care” (Stacey, 2005, p. 838). These workers will continue to do so whether the social work profession encourages them to or not. However, encouraging workers to assume these burdens makes the profession complicit in pushing the costs of care onto the most marginalized populations. Without a structural solution, social service workers with the closest proximity to those with unmet needs will continue to bear the brunt.

Social Work's Expectations for Unpaid Work

There are three primary ways the social work profession presently contributes to its own gender, race, and class-based devaluation: (1) through the first ethical principle in the National Association of Social Workers’ (NASW) Code of Ethics that encourages social workers to volunteer a portion of their time; (2) through unpaid student field placements; (3) through stratification in social service organizations.

NASW Code of Ethics

Although NASW introduced the first Code of Ethics for professional social workers in 1960, the expectation to volunteer first appeared in the 1997 revision and remains prominently situated within the Code's very first ethical principle: “Social workers are encouraged to volunteer some portion of their professional skills with no expectation of significant financial return (pro bono service)” (NASW, 2021). On a superficial level this language appears gender and race neutral, especially in its use of the law profession's “pro bono” terminology, which is notably absent from the code of ethics of other helping professionals such as physicians, nurses, and educators (Burghardt, 2021). In the social work context, where median pay is less than half that of lawyers (BLS, 2022), this ask exacerbates the historical feminized and racialized patterns that undergird the devaluing of care work.

The 1994–1997 NASW Code of Ethics Revision Committee made its appeal to voluntarism in the spirit of promoting altruism (Reamer, 2006, p. 14). The sociopolitical context was undeniably influential. The committee drafted and published this revision in the wake of heightened neoliberalism and Clinton-era austerity politics. While the state divested from supporting social welfare, individuals who cared for struggling relatives, friends, and communities were left to accept the financial obligations of supporting them through voluntarism, often by assuming debt through increasing access to credit (Cooper, 2017). Ronald Reagan was one of the staunchest promoters of this scheme, asserting “Voluntarism is a means of delivering social services more effectively and preserving our individual freedoms” (Reagan, 1981). Encouraging social workers to volunteer aligns with this call to reduce government responsibility for social services and assistance. This rhetoric also privileges the freedom of white men by obscuring the feminized and racialized nature of the labor of caring for family and community.

Field Placements

Another way the social work profession embeds the expectation for unremunerated labor is through students’ field placements. Social work students fund their work in these placements by accumulating debt. Over the last several decades, the increased use of student loans for financing post-secondary education has shifted the financial costs of training from the state to workers (Cooper, 2017). Social work graduates coded as Black and Hispanic report especially high debt burdens at $92,000 and $79,000, respectively (Salsberg et al., 2020). Outside of social work, physicians have long been paid during their training as medical interns and residents (Harmon, 1978). Businesses have also moved towards paid internships to promote more equity of opportunity across race and class lines and to comply with the Federal Labor Standards Act, which stipulates that employers must pay interns if they substitute for regular employees or if the business benefits from their work (Keiser et al., 2013). Unpaid social work field placements not only exacerbate the financial burdens of training and promote inequity of opportunity, but also socialize students into a workplace culture that legitimates expectations for unremunerated work.

Workplace Stratification

The social work profession's normalization of unpaid and underpaid labor trickles down from social workers who occupy managerial and supervisory positions to the entire social services workforce, including to workers at the bottom of workplace and identity-based hierarchies who receive little autonomy, stability, pay, and opportunity for advancement (Laubach, 2005; Watkins-Hayes, 2009). To justify expectations that these workers put in unpaid overtime or take on extra responsibilities, employers and clients engage the one-of-the-family concept originally used to justify the exploitation of domestic workers (Nadasen, 2015; Stacey, 2005) in which all staff are expected to “share the same (management) goals” (Cunningham et al., 2017, p. 374) even when they do not reap equitable benefits. This is especially problematic given the increasing polarization of wage distributions in care work occupations since the early 1980s (Dwyer, 2013).

Market pressures to adopt managerialist practices that prioritize productivity, accountability, efficiency, and standardization over social work mission and values exacerbate expectations for unpaid work by increasing work pace, case load size, and documentation requirements while reducing supervisory supports (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020). For example, Stacey (2005) found that home care aides supervised by social workers reported that “the inattentiveness of agencies shifted responsibility–and risk—into their untrained hands” (p. 841). These pressures can also lead agencies to neglect to consider frontline workers’ perspectives on how to best meet client needs, pushing workers to go beyond their job descriptions to fill service gaps outside of work hours or with their own resources (Baines & von den Broek, 2017).

Conclusion & Implications

An historical review of the devaluation of community and social service work exposes problematic practices that remain within the social work profession, impeding job improvement. The roots of the devaluation lie in the race and class-based dehumanization of the communities that social work serves as well as the historical essentialist assumption that care work comes naturally to women. This assumption and division of labor serves the accumulation of wealth, which depends on care work to keep the economy operating, even as it devalues it.

In the context of austerity-induced market pressures, when the social work profession encourages social workers to volunteer their labor it becomes complicit with pushing the cost of providing care on to students and those at the bottom of organizational hierarchies, exacerbating structural inequities based on gender, race, and class. This happens as social service agencies adopt managerialist practices that give the lowest-paid workers and unpaid interns more responsibilities and less supervisory support (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020).

Social work activists are already drawing attention and offering remedies for the issues highlighted in this article. For example, the Social Worker Equity Campaign has proposed language to revise the Code of Ethics (SWEC, 2022), the student-led Payment for Placements (P4P) movement has brought its demands for paid field placements to over three dozen schools of social work (Arrojas, 2023), and social service workers are starting local grassroots organizations to improve their working conditions and organize across the sector (Zelnick et al., 2022).

Schools of social work have varied in their responsiveness to the P4P movement since its emergence in 2021 (Arrojas, 2023). As it continues to grow, schools need to step up to develop funding strategies, such as seeking funds from private donors, university endowments, grants, and public appropriations like the federal work-study program. For example, University of Michigan's School of Social Work formed a student-faculty commission that worked with the NASW state chapter and other schools to successfully support state legislation funding public school social work placements (Michigan Senate Bill 1012) and created a fund to encourage private donations, yet still has more to do to fund all placements (Rich, 2022). In addition, schools of social work should take advantage of and alert incoming students to CSWE's policy permitting students who are working in relevant positions to complete their field placements at their place of employment (Commissions on Accreditation & Educational Policy, 2022). National social work organizations like NASW and CSWE will also need to work with the P4P movement to develop more universal approaches for funding placements.

Social work professional associations, schools, and agencies should also prioritize addressing workplace stratification by (1) actively and explicitly supporting the organizing and collective action of community and social service workers and their clients, (2) encouraging workers to track the unpaid time they contribute to make this labor more visible to funders and the public, and (3) removing barriers to career advancement for workers at the bottom of workplace hierarchies. These issues require the profession's urgent action to better equip social service agencies to commit to social work values over market pressures (Zelnick & Abramovitz, 2020). It is only by recognizing the dignity and worth of students and social service workers that the field will manage to address the crisis of care it currently faces, a crisis that is increasingly evident in agencies’ persistent high turnover rates and staffing shortages as workers refuse to continue carrying the burden of the costs of care through their endurance of poor and inequitable working conditions.