NASW Social Work Talks - EP26: Increasing Social Work Salaries in NYC

Episode Date: March 12, 2019

Social work has the highest debt-to-salary ratio of any profession. Robert Schachter, DSW, LMSW, describes how social workers in New York City advocated for pay equity in one of the highest cost-of-living cities in the country. Dr. Schachter served for 27 years as the Executive Director of the NASW New York City chapter.

Welcome to Social Work Talks. I'm your host, Greg Wright. Social work is a growing profession. More than 100,000 more people are expected to enter the field in the next seven years. Despite the valuable services that social workers do, pay levels tend to lag behind that of other helping professions such as nursing and teaching. This Social Work Month, we are having a conversation about the social work pay issue. Our guest today is Bob Schachter, the former executive director of the NASW New York City chapter. That chapter launched a campaign to raise social work salaries.

Bob is here to talk about that campaign, how well it worked, and if social workers in other parts of the nation can adopt it. Welcome to Social Work Talks, Bob. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Why is it that social work salaries tend to lag behind that of other helping professions like nurses and teachers? Well, that's a really good question, and I think for social workers, it's actually a painful question. One of the reasons has to do with the fact that social workers often work in institutions, what we often refer to as host settings, where the primary purpose is something much other than social work. Social work is an ancillary service. So nurses get paid more very much because they are trained specifically to really have a direct impact on medical care in hospitals and other kinds of health care facilities.

With teachers, very similarly, they're working in educational institutions, and they are the ones providing the teaching and the education. Social work within educational institutions is, once again, a very important but ancillary service. For these reasons, they're not prioritized by the people who are in charge. But there's also other reasons. Like, for example, social workers are the largest number of mental health professionals in the country. Yet in programs, in mental health programs, psychiatrists and psychologists with PhDs are considered more prestigious, but also recognized in law as having greater weight in their expertise. So that's another reason why social workers are paid less.

The final reason is that one of the major employers of social workers are not-for-profit organizations. And not-for-profit organizations historically have been underfunded. they have to pay their staff many staff believe it or not who are not professionals are barely making the minimum wage and given that they're so dependent upon government funding and the funding is always so tight and uncertain it's hard to be able to generate the amount of money that would be really appropriate for paying social workers so not-for-profits overall are are very squeezed but squeezed in particular around personnel costs of which social workers

is a primary uh aspect uh those are a lot of very challenging issues but yet despite all that your chapter launched an equitable salaries campaign what was the reason for that launching this We've always known that salaries is one of the greatest concerns of social workers. Yet figuring out how to take that on has always been very daunting. And I think that that's been experienced across the country and historically. We're not a labor union. NASW is set up very differently from a labor union. So we're not able to like call a strike. And if we did call a strike, if that were even feasible, it doesn't mean that we would even be successful because there's been a great tendency to replace

social workers over the years with people who have less qualifications they just rearrange the job description there's a lot of challenges to taking on something like this so there was a reticence to try to take on the salaries issue because of the feeling that well what could we do what could we accomplish but I think that over the last good number of years in the New York City chapter, at least, and I think for other chapters, there's been a lot of successes around a whole range of issues. And one of the successes for us was that it took us 10 years to get social work licensed. And there was a certain degree of opposition to that. And we overcame that opposition. And then another success that came on the heels of that was getting loan forgiveness for social

workers on their graduate school loans. And that was funded for over 10 years and still going on. So we felt very good about that. In the social justice area, we took on racism and poverty, knowing that we weren't going to obviously end it, but we felt that it was our responsibility to address the impact of racism among our clients and within the agencies and the extent of poverty in New York City. But what we learned from that is that we have to be bold. And we took that feeling of audaciousness in a certain sense, that we could advocate almost as an economic justice issue, along with poverty of New York City citizens, and address the economic considerations of social workers, even without the ability to definitively influence the outcome. We felt we could speak to the issue, and that's what we really needed to do. But it took us really to feel emboldened in order to do that. Bob, what year was this campaign launched? I hesitate to say, but I think it was around 2013 or 2014. And we had it going for a considerable while.

Well, what was the salary situation like for a social worker working in the New York City area? We had a good sense over the years of what social workers were making, but we launched a very simple survey asking social workers we knew in different kinds of agencies what they were paying entry-level social workers. and if they could give us more information about social workers in the agency longer term that was collected as well and i'll tell you agencies were very reluctant to share this they felt very protective about this information but we went to social workers we knew and we weren't naming the agencies and we found that the highest paid social workers were in the public schools they were making the same amount as teachers with equivalent amounts of education but they were in a very powerful labor union. So they were starting off at over $60,000 a year. The second highest

paying field is hospital social work. And they were paying anywhere from $49,000 a year to start up to about $56,000 a year to start. And very often, again, they were represented by labor unions in health care. The irony is that RNs without master's degrees were often being paid over a hundred thousand dollars a year so even though health care and hospitals were paying social workers more than in other areas they were still being paid much less than equivalent or even less than equivalent staff within that setting but the big thing is that the not-for-profit agencies that do provide services to the elderly addiction services mental health homeless services youth programming, child welfare services, are the biggest employer. There's hundreds of agencies

in New York, but they're all not-for-profit, and they were paying basically on average between $42,000 and $46,000 a year, and sometimes less, and they were basically struggling to hire social workers and to keep them. They're squeezed financially because they're dependent upon state, local, and federal funding which is very uncertain from year to year that's a really big problem for the not-for-profits to pay social workers the only ones to really get paid high are the executives in the agency explain to us how this campaign actually ran what kind of activities did you end up doing in order to raise social work salary levels in the new york city region first of all We had discussions with our board of directors and our membership committee because we knew that this was a concern for our members.

So we really wanted to make this work to the best way possible. So we had a collective discussion going on for a while about how to do something. A lot of good thinking was brought to bear, thinking from people who are social justice advocates, bringing their collective experience to bear on us. And we decided that we were not going to focus on low salaries. We were going to focus on the need for equitable salaries, that it just had a more positive ring to it to make this a positive campaign, but that we should be paid equitably based on the value of the services we render and the education we have. One of the underlying principles of this, since we couldn't definitively influence directly

the salaries we were looking at this from the point of view that an organization like nasw often its fundamental role is to set expectations or set standards for the field in this country and actually where nasw does this globally with the code of ethics it's it's something that people when they understand what it is they're supposed to adhere to it and so by speaking out we believe that we could be at least creating an expectation for what should be done and it would create that would might create with employers a healthy tension between the social work profession and the agencies not to be adversarial but to speak to what really needed to happen so we drafted an open letter to the social work and human services community of new york city

and we wanted to publish this widely and the open letter basically is a statement of our case about why we need equitable social work salaries and starts out by laying out the value of social work that social workers make a major contribution to social programs and very very intractable issues to the benefit of clients and that social workers get a world-class professional education in order to do this work totally different from just having good intentions and wanting to help and social workers over time become quite specialized and quite effective with very very difficult issues and the effectiveness is really the bottom line so we should be paying people for this

kind of value and contribution part of that statement then went on to talk about the problem of salaries being low this is all in the context of equitable salaries but you have to name the problem within New York City in particular is probably the highest one of the highest costs of living cities in the country I'm sure like San Francisco Seattle but New York City has always been very very expensive so how do you live on a social worker salary in New York City and we need them to be in New York City. The other thing is is that we discovered quite a number of years ago from a report on the impact of student

loans on professionals that social workers suffer the highest debt to salary ratio of any professional, especially because of the low salaries and yet tuition in school is as high as it is for anybody else. Social workers not only have low salaries, but then they're burdened with their social work school debt, which diminishes then the amount of money they have to live on. So it makes it very difficult.

So we felt that laying out these issues in the statement was very, very important. And we also laid out the long-term implications of low salaries, which really has policy implications. The Federal Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics projects, and this is a brand new projection, that the need for social workers is going to grow 16%

over the next 10 years. But I believe it's going to be even more in certain areas, like in aging, with the aging of the population. And we have to imagine that many, many very well qualified and desirable people to come into this field will forego careers in social work because of those salaries. There'll be other social workers in the field

who will leave because they can't afford to be within this profession. So the long-term implications are important given the projections for the need for social work to grow over the next 10 years. And we also laid out within this statement, the goals of the campaign. And we started with the first goal besides us

just speaking clearly as to what the issues are, was that call for a groundswell of support among social workers for us was in New York City. We want to get everybody to the extent possible on board to support this, that we're all in this together. But we also made it very clear that we needed employers to join with social workers, that this be a joint responsibility.

Even if the employer didn't believe that they could afford to raise the salaries, let's acknowledge that this is a problem and to see how we could work on this together. Were there agencies and nonprofit organizations after they looked at all of this that ended up raising salary levels? I'll talk about raising salary levels in a second.

Let me just say that we turned the open letter into a petition on the internet and invited social workers to come and read the open letter and then to sign on that you agreed and you support this. So we could see that we could generate a groundswell. So within a number of months, we had 5,000 social workers sign onto this, which was unprecedented.

We had never seen that kind of response, and people were commenting when they signed on to how important this was to them and that they felt that this was a really important thing for NASW to be taking on. But in addition, we sent out over 100 personalized letters to the CEOs of the largest not-for-profit organizations, human service organizations in New York City, pulling from the open letter why we were writing to them that we were having this campaign, that we have this groundswell of agreement among social workers, and that we understood, we said in the letter, we understood that they didn't have complete command of all of their finances. They had a lot of things they had to juggle. But regardless of that, we all need to join together. But we heard back primarily from the CEOs who are social workers who said they couldn't have agreed more with the importance of this. They were very, very pleased that we were

taking this on and they felt that this was a very important thing. Now, in regard to that, I was on the board of an advocacy organization on behalf of human service organizations. And it was a very well-regarded, respected organization that advocated for funding for human service programs. And members of their board spoke to the mayor's office at a meeting about our campaign and about the need for social work salaries to be increased and to be addressed in the contracts they get. So that was an impact that this was being picked up by the agencies themselves as part of their advocacy for greater funding for human service programming. So that was very satisfying as one point along the way with this. A member of our board of directors at NASW took this issue to her own agency and then immediately raised the social work salaries in her agencies. It wasn't a large agency, but it was a significant number of social workers.

And our own board raised the salaries of the staff at NASW who were not being paid at the level that we felt was really necessary. And that was a big step because we had our own budget, which a lot of things that we had to cover. So raising the salaries was not something that we could just take lightly, but we did it. We also found an agency in domestic violence programming. Domestic violence agencies often paying social workers $42,000. One agency took this up as a priority. They had a consultant actually helping them figure out what they could do to raise social work salaries. And they did it. They raised salaries to like $52,000, commensurate with what they were paying their legal staff, people who are attorneys. So we took a lot of this information and then sent it out to agencies and let them know what other agencies were doing that were successful in raising salaries. Now, here's two more things that we didn't know about until a little bit later.

We have right now a very progressive mayor, and he made it a priority to expand mental health services in homeless programs and not-for-profit agencies. And he allocated a lot of money to hiring 200 new licensed social workers to go to work in these agencies. But he set the salary at $52,000 instead of the $42,000 the agencies were already paying. it created a little bit of a dilemma for the agencies because they'd have eight staff at two tiers of salaries but that was something that they could figure out we have salary guidelines in new york city and the incoming salary that we we recommended was like 52 or 53 000 for somebody entering the profession which was higher much higher than most of the not-for-profit agencies so the mayor's office had taken this up now a little bit later in a meeting

with one of the commissioners in another sector shared with us that she had quietly advocated within the mayor's budget office to raise the salaries of all of the contracted agency social workers in the city i didn't i had known from a previous time that that agency had 600 contracts so 600 agencies the may this mayoral agency had 600 contracted agencies and she was able to get the salaries of social workers raised so all of these individuals in government had also been alerted to the fact that we had this salary campaign and that we needed to raise the salaries of social workers. So I have to say it was very gratifying to see these results even though a lot more over time could have been done. Now is this a campaign that can be duplicated on a national

level. It works pretty well in a New York City region, but I mean, if you're in a more rural place, is this a workable approach? Let me just be very honest about this. So many leaders or administrators in the field, whether they're human services more generally or social work more specifically, often have a mindset, and for good reason, on looking at what can we accomplish, What's going to be the outcome? And they look at the issue of salaries and they say, we don't have control over the salaries of what other agencies are going to pay. So if we're going to take this on nationally, we have to get beyond that mindset, whether it's in NASW or elsewhere, that if you're going to do a campaign, it's not about whether you're going to be able to control getting salaries increased. it's about speaking out it's like speaking out on racism speaking out on poverty but speaking out on our own behalf as well we have to be able to in effect speak truth to power

that phrase could be uh considered in this context so i think we have to have the courage of our convictions about the importance of social work if we have that ability to stand up for social workers making a decent living so the profession is strong then my answer is yes this could be done everywhere because it's about speaking to the importance of the profession it's speaking to how clients are helped it's speaking to how difficult the issues are that our clients are facing that society is grappling with these issues and if you really want to make a difference you need professional social workers there and you need to be able to treat them

with respect. And the first evidence of respect is to pay them in an equitable way, comparable to what other professionals are making with comparable education. If you're feeling compelled enough to be able to say those things out to the public, out to employers, to the government, then this will be a great success, especially if social workers then are part of this and they join it. Then everybody's going to be benefiting from it. We'll be empowering each other. We'll have the backs of our members and our members will be supporting our doing this. Wow. Dr. Schachter, thank you so much for being our guest on Social Work Talks. It was my pleasure. I'm so pleased that NASW is focusing on this issue, the Social Work Month, and I hope it goes beyond that. So it was my great pleasure

to be able to share our experience. Thank you. You have been listening to NASW Social Work Talks, a production of the National Association of Social Workers. We encourage you to visit NASW's website for more information about our efforts to enhance the professional growth and development of our members,

to create and maintain professional standards, and to advance sound social policies. You can learn more at www.socialworkers.org. And don't forget to subscribe to NASW Social Work Talks wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next episode.