Opinion: Responding to social work's unpaid laborers

By its own admission, New York is experiencing a critical shortage of social workers. A 2022 audit by the State Comptroller’s Office found that 80% of public schools in New York City could not meet the recommended client-to-social worker ratio, with over a quarter of schools lacking a social worker altogether. It’s part of why I decided to enroll in social work school myself; I felt called to serve my community, so I chose to heed that call. Incidentally, the spring I was accepted was a time of immense social unrest. In particular, I would cite the “Hot Labor Summer” of striking workers who were tired of being exploited as part of my reason for joining the helping profession. 

But what I didn’t realize at the time was that, by becoming a social work student, I was putting myself in the same position as those workers: an easily expendable, exploitable labor source. And I’m not the only one.

As part of our master’s degree requirements, social work students across the country are required to complete 900 “field placement” hours at sites actively providing services to clients These internships are unpaid, pre-selected by our schools, and a prerequisite for graduation – and as a result, social work students are often caught in the bind of wanting to advocate for themselves and their clients in under-staffed and often-toxic workplaces while trying to preserve relationships with their supervisors in order to pass. During my first month at my current field placement site, an after-school program for young children, my supervisor accused me of planting “the wrong ideas” in the heads of my kids because my tattoos were exposed. That same supervisor later insinuated that I would be unable to serve Jewish children because she had political opinions around the way my university handled Israel-Palestine protests in the wake of October 7, and also suggested that I was projecting my identity as a gay man onto a student I had never spoken to her about – an allegation that, on top of being false, is extremely inappropriate and harmful considering the rise of anti-queer sentiment and baseless accusations of “grooming” lobbed by the far-right. 

But the worst part? As a student, I was paying for this experience. I didn’t feel like I could truly stand up for myself in that environment, because that same supervisor was also in charge of determining whether or not I would pass my first year. Furthermore, because I am not technically employed by that organization, I couldn’t utilize their HR department for help. So I had no choice but to keep my head down. I tried to advocate for myself when I could, and I only stuck around at all because the young people I was working with are bright, kind, and incredibly special – and they deserve better than what they were getting. But that came at the expense of my own mental health and financial stability. And that's a deeply unfair thing for my graduate school or my field placement to take from me or any social worker, student or otherwise. 

According to the National Association of Social Workers, over 90% of new social workers entering the field are women, almost a quarter identify as Black, and almost half are first-generation college students. It’s no secret that women are paid less than men, that Black and brown people are paid less than their white counterparts, and that these identities are more likely to suffer abuse in the workplace. But in the field of social work, it is especially concerning to see how those trends are perpetuated because we don’t have paid experience prior to entering the industry full-time – not to mention the abuse we’re likely to face as interns because we’re unpaid and don’t have access to agencies’ HR departments as non-employees. 

Furthermore, even after we graduate, there’s no guarantee that our wages will make up for the years of working for free we have to endure at school. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, social workers on average make $64,360 a year – almost $30,000 less than the average salary of a speech pathologist, an industry with similar graduate degree requirements and race and gender demographics. It’s no wonder that almost 77% of social workers have reported medium to high levels of burnout. So how are we supposed to meet the need for social service providers that New York legislators acknowledge is critical when we’re being abused ourselves?

National advocacy groups like Payment 4 Placements have fought for years to combat these grim statistics by advocating for paid placements. After all, it is one of the most common aspects of our societal contract that your labor is worth money. But social work students don’t even get that basic dignity. And according to a 2023 research study, that callousness disproportionately harms Black and brown social work students. That’s why P4P has been organizing in social work schools across the country: because institutions that offer M.S.W. degrees have a duty to ensure that they’re improving the nature of the profession, and that starts by paying social workers what we’re owed. We provide mental health services for our community and our city. We are your therapists, your case managers, and your guidance counselors; we connect you to government services, navigate life crises with you, and provide interventions that help your kids grow to become mature, emotionally-intelligent adults. In short, we are actively meeting New York City’s need for new social workers – and right now, we’re doing it for free. 

New York, which is home to four of the nation’s top 30 social work schools, sends thousands of social workers into the country each year. Many of those social workers start off as students providing services right here in our city. If graduate schools won’t offer paid field placements to us – even despite the billions of dollars my graduate institution, Columbia University, carries in its tax-free endowment – then it is incumbent on the cities and agencies we are placed at to pay us for the services we provide in their names. That’s how we can solve both the burnout crisis plaguing social workers while attracting and retaining more social work students in New York: by doing the bare minimum and paying us for our work.