Precarious social work | Systemic errors in social work

In many cases, social workers can no longer do justice to the people they care for. Photo: dpa/ Geisler-Fotopress A daycare child who leaves the premises unnoticed by those caring for him and wanders around alone in a northern German city. A person in integration assistance to whom you have to explain the basic aspects during induction - for example in which order you wash the body of a person being cared for. An employee in the youth welfare office who doesn't take the time to analyze in detail whether she should remove a child from a household or not. It's not the fault of the colleagues, says Stefanie Lehmann from the daycare center in Bremen. "This is a system error."

“The employees can no longer do justice to the people they look after,” said Christine Behle, deputy chairwoman of the Verdi service union, summarizing the precarious situation in social work on Wednesday. Vacancies, absences due to illness and poor staffing lead to permanent understaffing and work intensification.

This not only puts a strain on employees, but also affects the professional quality of care, the realization of the rights of children, young people and families and the reliability of social infrastructure. In many cases, only people in absolute emergencies are cared for, such as child endangerment. Some youth welfare offices are already talking about triage.

“If the social infrastructure is to be reliable, the working conditions must also be reliable.”

The Fulda Professor of Social Work, Nikolaus Meyer, and the Mannheim Professor of Macrosociology, Yalçın Kutlu, collected and evaluated opinions from 373 teams in different areas of social work for the union over the summer. The idea: “To make working conditions visible together,” explains Kutlu. 97 percent of the responses come from West Germany.

According to 79 percent of those teams, the amount of work has increased significantly. 79 percent also report that the quality of their work is often or very frequently compromised. And more than 87 percent of them are worried about not being able to work in their profession until retirement age. The additional work also arises because it is no longer possible to intervene in a timely manner and social workers therefore have to deal with significantly more complex cases.

In the youth welfare offices, workers now assume that tasks are being shifted to their area because other contacts are not sufficiently available. At the same time, the increased responsibility is not adequately compensated. Employees are less concerned about the level of remuneration than the disproportion between the increased complexity and their classification.

In the daycare centers, 84.1 percent of the teams report working despite illness. Employees there particularly criticize the fact that the declining number of children is not being used for smaller groups, but is being linked to group closures, reductions in space or possible job cuts. It was only at the beginning of September that the Paritätischer Wohlfahrtsverband's daycare quality report found that around 550,000 daycare places nationwide remained unused. But that doesn't mean that the shortage of skilled workers has been eliminated.

“Fewer children doesn’t necessarily mean less work,” says Kutlu. According to the Federal Institute for Population Research, the falling birth rate and the aging population are linked, among other things, to unfavorable conditions for potential parents. But you can also see the situation as a historic opportunity to improve the quality of care and relieve the burden on workers, says Kutlu.

Cuts in the social sector, increased work due to the revised child and youth welfare law and additional pressure due to the new daycare quality law would have the opposite effect, criticizes Behle from Verdi. Employees see the best solutions in staffing, additional positions, a smaller amount of work and adequate pay and classification. “If the social infrastructure is to be reliable, the working conditions must also be reliable,” demands Kutlu.

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