Quick! Notify all the pro-life folks to start fostering and adopting!!!

crickets

On a serious note, the starting pay is terrible for the things a case worker will witness. Even in California, the starting pay is around $40k, 1st year is a trainee. This isn't a field for a lot of people because of the abuse and neglect you witness and it'll stick with you.

Your case load will always be higher than the expected amount without the increase in pay to compensate.

You can't hire people who are competent on a burger king salary. Who knew?

What this article glaringly leaves out are the working conditions that drive so many recent hires to quit within several months. As the article states, it’s challenging to find people who are willing to take a $40k salary with a college degree for a job that in the best of circumstances is challenging, stressful, very high stakes, and emotionally and physically exhausting. But from what I know from my sibling who until recently was a social worker in a related field, funding for these programs is repeatedly slashed, resulting in each caseworker is saddled with more cases than can humanly be managed. So much of this kind of job means being present in the field for their clients who are usually in crisis, while simultaneously obligated to be in court for another, and multiply that into dozens, or even more. Now add mountains of paperwork. People burn out and get demoralized because they’re not given the tools to succeed on behalf of their clients.

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Privatizing positions is not a way to solve the problem.

Yeah. Everyone loves children until it comes time to pay taxes to protect them.

They don't love children. They love forcing harlots to give birth.

Not only that but in some states if something happened to the child and you didn’t get to the case you can be held liable. This lead to a lot of people getting out of social work on top of shit pay which just added more cases to the ones that stayed.

... as long as conservative state legislators continue to cut funding for social programs so that they can brag about saving money for taxpayers, this will continue! Taxpayers are having the nearly impossible task of surviving on the current wages being paid in many sectors; a solution would be to raise the minimum wage, & support labor unions who can negotiate better wages, allowing to take some of the 'sting' out of a tax increase which would be directed at 'skeletonized' social programs. Will these same conservative legislators vote for an increase in minimum wage & support labor unions to reverse this situation??? You already know the answer...!

It drives me nuts to see the same people who posted SAVE THE CHILDREN distraction bullshit in 2020 pull the handbrake on the actual work involved with helping kids.

Infuriating, really. And there are a lot more of those psychopaths than there should be.

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It's amazing that cops are rarely held accountable for intentional actions that harm another person under the guise of qualified immunity. Same for prosecutors, etc. People who have the tools and resources at their disposal, but are just bullies.

But a social worker, actually trying to help those most in need, not given the necessary resources to accomplish those tasks, can be held accountable as a result of being seriously overworked? Why am I not surprised?

Our system and country are beyond help at this point.

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You know, that is an excellent comparison, an excellent way to put it. Thank you.

Maybe if you didn’t cut their budgets year in and year out, and realised their importance we wouldn’t be here.

Even now, the current proposal is to ONLY increase salary from 40k to an AMAZING 45k?

… are you fucking kidding me? Why would someone get a college degree to work in an extremely high stress line of work that likely will heavily affect their mental health even beyond their employment only to then deal with constant budget cuts left and right.

Everybody loves parading about how they care about the kids until it comes to actually caring about the kids.

Ah yes, my lord. Tennessee certainly was a fantastic place to begin operation Hell on Earth. Shall I proceed with fooling the poor ones into demonizing social services further and have them flood the offices with complaints and -ooooh, we could start another pandemic and tell the poor ones the government made it up so they can storm into the ss offices demanding even more while giving the social workers disease!! Ah yes, a fantastic plan! I'll contact our Earth side contact Mitch McConnell and advise him to start slashing budgets immediately so they'll be at their weakest when the next plague hits! Hahahahahahahaha!!!

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Tennessee has over $1billion in a state slush fund. The money exists to help fix DCS. The governor just refuses to care.

Tennessee ended FY 2022 with a $1.6billion surplus.

The problem in DCS is literally a conscious decision by the governor to NOT care.

Fuck Bill Lee.

Awww...is that "no state income tax" situation not working out?

I'm shocked.

/s

Also, you should definitely continue to force women to have children that they aren't prepared to care for, after all, it's working great, isn't it?

Then republicans say the system isn't working and apply more budget cuts.

And we just re-elected him! Huzzah!

Edited to add /s because I just realized it might be necessary.

I work at the local youth shelter. I get paid more because I've been here the longest, but my coworkers are hired at $14-15 an hour. We are in contact with social workers, dhhs, probation, and parents while our youth wait to be transported to treatment or have come to us from treatment and are transitioning back home.

They aren't supposed to be here for more than 3-4 weeks. They are often here for months because the folks I mentioned above are overloaded on cases. Most of them make a little bit more an hour than the rest of us. I get a whopping 25-cents more for having my bachelor's degree. I've been here 3.5 years and I'm the longest serving employee. I've only been able to stay so long because 1) I work the night shift, 2) I get a $3 differential in pay because I work nights, and 3) my husband is a teacher with two masters degrees and his pay makes it so I can afford to stay.

My coworkers have been here 1.5 years and the rest have less than six months. We just got a new boss, who has never worked in such an environment before. I suspect she'll burn out soon enough on her $45k salary.

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This is sort of an insult to the people that are leaving these terrible jobs. It's more like "you can't get people to stay at one of the most high-stress jobs in existence for pay which is less than a fast food manager."

Competency is hardly an issue when they throw 80 clients at once and you are expected to do work equivalent to spending an hour a week with each client.

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But, you know...protect the children and all that shit, right Republicans?

Cops don't have a legal duty to protect (seriously. Fucked but true. Actual case law on this) but social workers, care givers, doctors, and nurses do. A cop can legally stand and do nothing.

When the conditions suck so bad, the only social workers applying are gonna be the ones who couldn't get hired at burger king for same pay less stress.

By "save the children", they really mean "beat the disrespect out of them and teach them to hate gays".

Now does it make sense?

That's just one of the many lovely things that those local yokels meant during that campaign, yes.

Might callnit something different. But people with skills are not going to sit in a job like that for long. They will bounce in under a year because they can get a better job.

>Quick! Notify all the pro-life folks to start fostering and adopting!!!

Quite a few already do this, actually. Which is not a good thing IMO, as they tend to be abusive households. I used to work in public housing and can tell you that there are a fuckton of religious nutcase families that earn their living off the stipends they get for fostering kids.

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Cops have a union.

It’s exhausting and traumatizing work. I have my masters but worked in community mental health. I lasted 3 years. The truth is that the pay and workload is so horrendous that people who truly love to do it burnout so quickly.

It’s not sustainable for workers but government agencies will cycle through new graduates because most often they are in these sites for internship (unpaid) hours while doing their degree. It’s a required part of the graduate programs so you’re adequately prepared to care for clients and patients.

Add on top our ethical codes means that when you’re burnt out realistically you need to scale back your work or step away entirely to ensure you don’t harm your clients and are effective at your work.

All that to say, I’m a huge proponent of single payer healthcare, better pay for workers, and training up the next generation of social workers and therapists.

Yeah, that sounds like a risk I want to take for a $27k starting salary.

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Governor HVAC will handle this, the same way he handled charter schools; shitshow all the way!

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I'm aware and that's irrelevant here. Cop unions have too much power and aren't there to gain better working conditions, but rather to strong arm the communities the cops are supposed to serve into toeing the line.

My point is that the people making these decisions are selfish, egotistical and power hungry. They care for nothing beyond their own group and will stomp all over you to get it.

Former mechanic here, us too, I can be held liable and even sued if I let a car drive on the road with an obvious defect/safety issue and they hit someone because of it. (In my state at least).

I'm aware of the reasons and that cops only have a duty to protect the government, not individuals themselves. These rulings are made by those in power who want to maintain the divide between social and economic classes.

The standards necessary for being in law enforcement are too low and the lack of accountability furthers authoritative abuse. Being a cop should absolutely require more education and training, being licensed, being insured and accountability. When a 'civilian' is expected to know the law better than the cops who are paid to uphold those laws, it furthers the power imbalance. When a cop can arrest you and turn your life upside down because they are having a bad day or simply want to bully you, even when illegally detained, you have almost no recourse. I'm glad that there is a little accountability happening now, but it's the tip of the iceberg for a massively corrupt institution and needs serious reform.

The deplorable (and purposefully unsustainable) condition that you describe is grotesquely by design.

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Having a friend who was in the system and another who did DCS work, just typing up the reports, not even having to see the child victims of abuse in person, I can't emphasize enough that some of that shit is traumatic. Maybe it's just hate the world, can't eat or sleep until you can block it out. But that shit piles up.

The helplessness of not being able to do anything to give those hurt and neglected children the kind of life and circumstances that would help them heal or even just close to normal is brutal.

Having a friend who was in the system and another who did DCS work, just typing up the reports, not even having to see the child victims of abuse in person, I can't emphasize enough that some of that shit is traumatic. Maybe it's just hate the world, can't eat or sleep until you can block it out. But that shit piles up.

The helplessness of not being able to do anything to give those hurt and neglected children the kind of life and circumstances that would help them heal or even just close to normal is brutal.

I completely agree with you on this. If more state/county communities like this formed a union a lot of these arguments could be solved at the bargaining table.

Edit: Typo

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Don’t forget about the student loan burden you are carrying after 4-5 1/2 years of schooling to qualify you for that job. I know someone that is like 60k in the whole for there masters degree in this field.

The industry is predatory.

Yeah, let's grab Bachelors and in a lot of cases Masters graduates out of College for $18 an hour and saddle them with a job that generates some of the largest adjacent trauma around whilst saddling them with massive caseloads as no one is hanging around or can live on $18 an hour anyway.

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DCS is one of the most underfunded and understaffed sections of the united states government so yeah no surprise there

Don’t a lot of these positions require a masters degree as well? I remember looking into social work at one point but the amount of schooling bs salary wasn’t worth what I could give at the time with a young family.

Beyond help. Child welfare is the least priority next to education and improved, less expensive healthcare. There are countries getting all of this right. We COULD look to see what they are doing and follow suit. But no. The US is beyond help.

We have plenty of money, they just won't spend it on the people of the state. It's earmarked for some no-bid contracts to Republican buddies

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