Some Comments on the Notion of Social Work as a Human Service Cartel

Truth is more handsome than the affections of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it or else, there is none.—Ralph Waldo Emerson

You cannot solve anything that you do not admit exist, which could be why some people don’t want to talk; it might get solved. — Isabel

It is now over 1 year since the start of a national and indeed global shutdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As essential workers and those highly visible during the pandemic, there was a consistent demand for social work services, along with major cash transfer and public benefits expansion, to address a broad spectrum of human service needs. Positive publicity followed the many stories within multiple forms of media documenting a seemingly societal acknowledgment, finally understanding the value, meaning, and depth of social work professionals as more than so called “do-gooders,” child welfare workers, or as people who take children from homes—the classic stereotype. Unrehearsed, the period spotlighted the values, knowledge, skills, and elasticity of social worker services in areas such as hospice care, long-term care, tackling food insecurities, working with the homeless, seeking health insurance, policy formation, public health, and as part of interdisciplinary teams and crisis intervention. Probably the professions’ biggest boost was in the area of teletherapy, which has become a more viable option since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. While there were many challenges, the pandemic highlighted social workers as prepared for the challenge, dependable, valuable, and ready to answer the national outcry for human services (Abrams & Dettlaff, 2020).

But the undergird of this silver-lining during this turbulent and pressing period for the social work profession was also bound in the growing call for not just reform; but a reimagining of our purpose, gatekeeping functions, and our role in addressing social and racial inequalities, particularly those that social work contributes to through its cooperation with the carceral state. With tensions mounting due to past and ongoing racial injustices both inside and outside the social work profession, the Maylea, 2020 murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, became a tipping point that resulted in an outpour of calls for professional change—if not a professional revolution. The National Association of Social Workers and the Council on Social Work Education were inundated with communications from many within the profession, particularly from social work students, seeking not just change in the professions’ practices, but a more overt and visible commitment to racial justice along with a divestment from the systems that perpetuate racial injustice. Already disillusioned by the value set taught in social work education programs and its lack of emphasis on social justice, many students discovered that they belong to a field of human services that at best manages poverty populations and at worst participates as agents of the police state itself (Schram & Silverman, 2012). Social work education programs enamor students with images and examples of highly touted (albeit mainly White) pioneers within the profession who were agents of change during their era (albeit for mostly White people). At the same time, today’s student experience is an introduction to a human service profession steeped in clinical entrepreneurship with little education on policy and organization analysis and change.

Angered by a lack of professional leadership and the chasm between social work values and its response to continued racial injustices, calls for defunding the police were accompanied by calls for defunding social work organizations, as well as carceral systems that social workers have historically supported such as child welfare. Some went as far as calling for an end to the social work profession entirely. Consistent with these outcries is the continuing emergence of strong professional criticism within social work literature. For example, focusing primarily on the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, Maylea (2020) argues that “the core of social work is beyond saving and unfit for purpose, irrespective of any past successes it might claim” (p. 2.). Citing that the profession has not lived up to its touted image as change agents and advocates, the author writes the professional practice of social work is “stuck” between the need to uphold structural norms and the need to confront and change structural inequalities. Further, Maylea contends that the profession has over time, irredeemably failed its central mission, achieving “no great social change, universal human rights, or social justice” (p. 6). Maylea follows a long line of critics from within and without, from Flexner (2001) to Specht and Coutney (1994), in forcing us to reckon with our purpose, our evidence, and our future.

Stoesz’s (2020) Human Services Cartels: The Soft Repression of the Mediocracy falls into the category of a critical critique sounding the alarm on the social work profession’s failure to live up to its professional mandate. According to this critique, licensed human service professionals have over time created a rather unassuming cartel through objectives that amplify and leverage “their membership’s influence, income, and benefits” over those of citizens (p. 2). In a brief critique of Stoesz’s article, we contend that this view has some key points to offer, and we agree with some of his assertions, expand on some, and we disagree with others. Without creating a binary discussion, we contend that there are alternative explanations that further facilitate understanding beyond the proposed conspiracy of “cartels” who are supposedly serving their own best interests over the clients they serve.

To be clear, we do not feel human service professionals should be ashamed of collective bargaining within corporate capitalism—it is one thing about getting ahead and another thing about sheer survival. Nevertheless, human service professionals should be more than ashamed or concerned with the aggregate outcomes of their professional efforts, as outlined within Stoesz’s article. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge that social workers are underpaid and have had little success in bettering their wages. For example, in the area of Medicaid reimbursement, it is only for mental health counseling for social work intervention with no reimbursement in their role and intervention with clients on the social determinants of health. Perhaps a missing question to pose is why is social work consistently underpaid and undervalued? On par with our “sister” profession of teaching, which somehow—and this was a planned political strategy—became the poster child for all that is wrong with public schools, forgoing the problem of gross education inequality, mainly based on race. Here, Stoesz overlooks some key structural factors at play, including a legacy of what is considered “a woman’s profession,” and the undervaluing of work with those who are most disadvantaged in our society, very often, women and children.

Stoesz explains that through state granted professional monopolies, professions affiliated with the cartel include school counseling, social work, marriage and family counseling, probation, and parole among others. Proof of this claim lies in the funneling of low-income, public school students to psychiatrists for medication management; the development and proliferation of the pre-K-to-prison pipeline; the arrest of people with mental health conditions and their placement in jails and prisons; and the seizure of children living in poverty and placing them in foster homes, among other problematic outcomes from the gurus of social justice among human service professionals. We have no general disagreement with these claims, as indeed, these racialized patterns and racist outcomes exist and are part of the playing field that social work operates within and contributes too. However, in speaking as social work professionals, we probe further as to motives behind these professional monopolies, not only as professional entities vying for stability and longevity, but as a central component of the social contract and its predication on White supremacy, racialized exclusion, and maintenance of the poor. Stoesz presents these structures as a given rather than part of a larger social policy agenda that social work ought to amplify.

Throughout the article, Stoesz provides examples demonstrating the continuing problem of racial inequality in society and the social work profession’s lack of attention to clear and present oppressive practices. His main contention is that among other human service professions, the social work profession has emerged as a human service cartel who seemingly acts as agents of their own destiny. However, from our perspective, he does not capture the a priori of human service organizations, which is their maintenance of racial capitalism. Throughout its history, social work has advanced the goals of racial capitalism through its maintenance and perpetuation of an exploitable working class. Through its role in disproportionately separating children of color from their families and collaborating with the police state, social work has ensured the continued oppression of Black and other non-White Americans, which is essential for racial capitalism to persist. That said, notions of social work as a cartel are hard to swallow given that, other than the Association for Social Work Boards (ASWB), leading organizations do not own their occupied building space and currently rent commercial building space—no cartel safe houses here. Sadly, there are no public policy priorities undertaken by the profession that tackle oppressive social welfare practices, and the profession has failed in developing a major federal infrastructure. Conversely, there is ASWB and its continued reliance on a national licensure examination that has no public accountability in the form of public access to the psychometric properties of its licensing examine and access to on basic demography information on test takers. For over a decade, ASWB has rebutted requests to change its practices and to be transparent in providing normative information on test takes and examine properties. Mobilization against the continuation of current ASWB practices needs to be a priority for the profession.

From our perspective, Stoesz misses an opportunity to speak truth to power on the larger point dictating the condition of social welfare in the United States: racial capitalism. The term racial capitalism refers to the link between capitalism’s dependency on the marginalization and oppression of racialized groups permeated throughout Western societies. The theory suggests that capitalism was not a break from feudal society but instead consistent with European subjugation thorough invasion, settlement, expropriation, and the enforcement of a racial hierarchy (Mill, 1997). According to Melamed (2015):

Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups—capitalists with the means of production/workers without the means of subsistence, creditors/debtors, and conquerors of land made property/the dispossessed and removed. These antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities that capitalism requires (p. 77).

This is the larger point beyond systemic and organizational participation in the so-called soft cartel of human service organizations. It is rather easy to speak truth-to-power—or should we say to lack of power—in examining the formation of the social contract and the positionality of human service professionals. Racial capitalism involves the use of the racial contract, which is in essence an epistemological set of formal or informal agreements that provide differential privileges to Whites over non-Whites based on a pre-existing objectivist morality established as a moral code in Westernized societies (Mills, 1997). It is the byproduct of “whiteness”—an ideology developed during the European Enlightenment that is characterized by its unmarked, universal, “normal” qualities and, perhaps most powerfully, its links to intelligence, beauty, goodness, and innocence. Historically, the idea of the European miracle is predicated on the racial contract as a system of contractual orders arranged to upholding preferential truths that legitimize privilege of one group over another. From this line of thought, the racial contract resulting from racial capitalism is part of the social contract as it gives legitimacy to the longstanding claim of economic exploitation of subgroups based on the superior status of those known as White. Suffice to say, modern human service organizations are conduits of the nation’s social contract (Feagin, 2020).

As part of these organized systems, social workers act as agents of the state and make decisions that result in people becoming involved in systems that are known to cause harm—foster care, prisons, juvenile detention, etc.—this has happened throughout the history of our profession, as discussed by Stoesz, and continues through today. When social workers do this disproportionately to the poor and minoritized populations, the profession becomes an agent of social control in the maintenance of oppressive practices in its tacit honoring of the racial contract. Even if professional social workers claim no direct responsibility for involving people in these systems, support and collaboration with these systems means professional complicity in their outcomes (Mills, 1997).

Stoesz further argues that a potential solution to the substandard professional performance of human service professions could be addressed through an increased accreditation requirement for rigorous research methods and RCTs. We view this as both unimaginative and potentially harmful. A reliance on evidence generated solely through RCTs reinforces the White supremacist constructs that devalue the lived experiences of minoritized populations that are captured through qualitative inquiry and other forms of scholarship. A great deal of research investigation is needed within this area. Further, a solution to the history of societal failures to successfully combat concentrate poverty and minoritized inequality proposed as identifying research that is more rigorous by social work professionals distracts from the larger problem of racial capitalism that undergirds all of the oppressive conditions outlined in Stoesz’s article. As long as social work and other human service professions continue to serve the interests of racial capitalism and perpetuate racial oppression, poverty and racial inequality will continue to exist. Just as fear and hope are connected to the belief in heaven and hell, capitalism is connected to the belief in race and the practice of racism.

Finally, a central challenge with Stoesz’s harangue against the social work profession is the unfortunate binary position that seems to be the personification of intellectual discourse with the United States. There seems to be no middle ground or indication that there is some “good” in society created by social work professionals. Dichotomous arguments benefit the status quo and do little to move the needle on reform or change. Again, we view the social work profession as lacking the sophistication to form a “soft cartel.” We suggest reform—although many have given up on this approach given the profession’s historical record—or even revolutionary change in many standing institutional structures and practices that continued the maintenance of oppressive practices that do not reflect the stated social work professional value set. We lean more toward revolutionary approaches in the abolishment of the carceral state, and we strongly believe the social work profession should rebel against its continuation. Albeit the grounded reality is that because of real deficits in power relations, the social work profession cannot dictate the circumstances in which it engages in client services. Yet, undeniably, the profession must do a better job of harnessing power though mobilization, activism, and a greater focus on translational and implementation research in the preparation of practitioners to work with the poor and minoritized populations.

Reform means the social work profession must stop its status quo positionality as a cog in a racialized capitalist system that claims freedom for all on the backs of the oppressed. The racialized caste system within the United States coincides with an economic and social system where one group always trumps over another group, and those of darker skin tone continue to be faces at the bottom of the well (Wilkerson, 2020). Reform also means discontinuing a professional reliance and education based on clinical entrepreneurship for a more balanced approach to micro, mezzo, and macro skills development and practice. This is a major grand challenge for the social work profession. Growing expressions of professional discontent have caught-up with the reality that, as agents of change, social work needs change itself.

If the social work profession wants to end the growing discontent with the failure of the profession to live up to its ethical stance, as expressed within the work by Stoesz and a growing body of critics (Maylea, 2020; Schram & Silverman, 2012), it must grapple with the reality of its professional location inside of racial capitalism. Like a great deal of American society and its de facto and de jure institutional support of racial capitalism, the social work profession must solve its relationship with “whiteness” as the quintessential standard of measure of what it means to be an American of worth, and therefore who deserves access to resources. This discussion has yet to permeate the profession. Whiteness is at the foundation of racial capitalism and is at the heart of anti-blackness (Feagin, 2020; Mills, 1997). From an ideological perspective, anything short of its demised as de facto value within the profession will not suffice and will be more of the same. Undoubtedly, the profession and its constituent organizations must commit to the abolition of whiteness and its self-aggrandizing forms of freedom and social justice. If the social work profession takes necessary steps towards a fuller form of freedom for all Americans, only then can it begin to fully live up to its ethnical stance and claim as a steward of social justice.