by Stephen Cummings, MSW, ACSW, LISW
I've spent almost a quarter-century in the social work field. Maybe longer. It depends how you count the years. Title protection advocates would probably start that clock when I earned my degree in 2002, or when I obtained my graduate level license to practice clinical level hospital social work shortly after.
For a while, I was in that difficult space many new MSW graduates know well. This is that gray area immediately after graduation when job seeking intensifies. This gray area included the two weeks after the ceremony when I received my diploma in the mail, and the month it took for me to sit for the LMSW exam after that. I knew I had to pass that exam to even be considered for the job I was already temp-working. I did pass, but it took seven more months to be fully hired into a salaried position. I spent those seven months wondering if I had made the right choice. While I waited to find out if I was hired, other résumés went out to other agencies, including one I used to work at when I was an undergraduate student. I got a nice call from the director, explaining gently how much they missed me, but that I was officially over-qualified.
"You're paying your dues. It’ll work out." I heard this a lot.
I suppose I could count those years I spent working part-time hours doing line-staff agency work when I was in undergraduate school. That would add five years, easily, prior to even setting foot in my first graduate class. I worked evening shifts, then overnight shifts. I remember one 12-hour "awake night." At the end of that shift, I was exhausted. The incoming day staff was a person short. Someone had simply not shown up. This happened a lot. The day staff lead implored me to stay another six hours. I felt bad, but I was tired and prone to error by that point. (The house manager worked it out.) I made $6 an hour then.
"Remember, social workers do it for the outcome, not the income." I heard that a lot when I was making those $6 an hour.
Maybe I could count the last eight years as social work. I left the intensive care unit at the hospital and took a position as a clinical professor. For eight years at the hospital, I met with patient families during incredibly difficult moments. I discussed considerations for hospice care. I intervened with difficult family conflicts. Once, I connected a family overseas via Skype who wanted to say good-bye to a family member who was actively dying in our unit. This was 2010. I put that arrangement together in the moment, and I felt essential.
As a professor, I've kept my license and I provide supervision when it's appropriate, but mostly I teach and do administrative service. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I see my social work friends on Facebook sharing updates about their vaccinations, their faces masked and covered in shields, gowned up, getting ready to start their day. They don't have to tell me they are essential. We all know it. I think about what they must have to find within themselves to go into the hospital each day.
What is essential, anyway? Is it the career "dues" we pay? Is it the actual work? Is it the belief of service over income? In social work programs, are we preparing students to accept the nature of social work as a peripheral job, or are we backing these assertions of our essential work with the skills to assert our essential qualities?
Put another way: I never worked harder than when I worked for $6 an hour. I never had more anxiety than when I waited to see if I'd get hired full time, at a wage that could nominally be considered "living." And today, I never bristle more than when students tell me now that they are still being told "this is just how it is."
It shouldn’t be this way. We shouldn’t disenfranchise ourselves as social workers by establishing that we don't deserve what we are worth. If we teach in the classroom or the field that the system is simply intractable, we are undercutting the message that we are essential. Yes, it's fair to be realistic. Wages may be low, and careers will require navigation and change. But accepting the status quo should not be who we are. If we are essential, we need to believe it.
Stephen P. Cummings, MSW, ACSW, LISW, is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Iowa School of Social Work, where he is the administrator for distance education.