Czech social worker: The oligarchy is capturing our state - a critical view of social work today
I see more and more staffers in the social work field around me who cannot reconcile themselves to their dismal state. They no longer want to be just cogs in the system and are doing their best to differentiate what is essential from what isn't and to fight for their clients' rights.
After 1989, social work became a specialized discipline here and developed in a relatively positive direction. Over time, however, its sole avenue became case work, which focuses on support for clients designed to keep them active in their difficult situations so they will not succumb to passivity while waiting for the structural transformations which are sometimes unattainable.
Throughout my entire professional life as a social worker, I have followed different aid models because I believe that using just one method is the road to hell. Social work today has become dependent on the political representatives of the local power brokers behind the scenes, trafficking in poverty is rampant, and the social welfare departments of municipalities are unable to take it on.
We now face an avalanche of poverty for which the state is absolutely unprepared in terms of its systems, and social workers themselves are frequently coming to the end of their options and their strength, both mentally and physically. Social work has to be based on a social policy that is well-designed, one that works, it has to manage to resist municipal leaders’ power plays, but the bravery required to resist is frequently lacking from middle management.
Social work in and of itself cannot be a bandaid for a dysfunctional social policy, and it seems that in the Czech Republic, social problems are mainly addressed through superficial political marketing and decided on formalistically (today what is often more important, for example, is not the content of a document, but that it be correctly sent through the online records system). The Labor Offices in this country are only still functioning because their staffers are extremely overworked, but they are enormously overwhelmed.
Data is frequently lacking. The numbers of registered unemployed persons do not correspond to the degree of real unemployment, jobs are becoming precarious, business is built on cheap labor, and its agencies open the door to the black market, including for the tens of thousands of people who have come to the Czech Republic from Ukraine as well as for other foreign nationals.
Bureaucracy and its survivors
We social workers have been abandoned, we are the survivors of a bureaucracy that is rewriting the reality of people’s lives through its files. Unfortunately in the social work field, phenomena such as disrespect for those in poverty, a fear of speaking up, hidden racism or prejudice are all fed by many politicians at various levels of government.
Politicians basically tell the Labor Office staffers: “The inadaptable is your enemy, the fact that you are overworked and frustrated is his fault.” On top of that, the courts sentence people to prison for minor criminal activity, so instead of undergoing quality resocialization, the practice of racking up prison time continues unabated.
The bureaucracy is powerful, and it obscures the real problems – a careful, precise individual education plan for a child will never resolve the fact that he or she lives in bad (or unaffordable) housing, a brilliantly planned conference by this or that organization is, for many people, more important than accompanying a single mother to the authorities and aiding her with applying for welfare. Older citizens are living in an atomized environment here, in some places they have all but disappeared from the community, cities are becoming more and more anonymous, so what used to be resolved through aid from one’s neighbors is today being addressed by the authorities in a very complex way.
Senior citizens are experiencing anxiety and uncertainty, there is a lack of beds in the social care system, caregiving services in the field work at different levels of quality, and what’s more, they are of more service to those with more wealth. In Prague it takes eight months for an application for a caregiver benefit to be processed and the field of geriatric psychiatry is understaffed.
The collections agents’ mafia, which has pushed an enormous group of people beyond the bounds of the welfare system, the massive privatizations and the real estate business are a catastrophe for the excluded regions where these people end up. Drug use persists as an unfortunate way to cope with a difficult life.
The list decidedly does not end there. An overwhelming number of people get into difficult life situations which are not just complicated to resolve, but for which there is frequently no solution.
Hope?
Casework with individual social work clients is not enough for such a situation. The system is so overburdened that any effective aid is more a matter of accident or luck.
Be that as it may, I would like to close this reflection on the situation in the social area and social work with a certain amount of hope that all is not yet lost. I get this hope from the approach and the methods of critical social work, which can also encompass case work with individuals but is not based on classic management methods and does not avoid the necessary critique of social conditions which do not allow for a client’s difference, or difference among the people already caring for the client, to be tolerated.
Social work has always been about aiding concrete people. One way to do this is by showing solidarity, connecting people from different social bubbles with each other and having the bravery to take on the political powers which, together with the oligarchs, are capturing our state before our very eyes.
This commentary was first published in Czech in the magazine Romano voďi.
