Reply #254: Sorry, but I too would object to meeting with a social worker as a condition of my housing

[Oak2004]

The vast majority of the social workers who prey upon poor people (and "prey" is the kindest thing I can say about people who make a middle class living humiliating poor people) are worse than useless. The problem with poverty in America is not individual failings -- it is structural. Social workers can do nothing to change the economic system. They can't make more jobs happen. They can't make those jobs pay enough to get people out of poverty.

Even if every homeless person in America were mentally ill or on drugs, and social workers were capable of magically curing each and every one of them, we would still have homelessness, joblessness, and poverty. Even if poverty income was managed perfectly through the very best possible budgeting, the perfect budgeter still would be unable to afford a home. Even if every poor person who was depressed ceased to be depressed immediately, the same number of poor people would exist in America.

It is is structural. It is not personal. There is nothing a social worker can do in a monthly meeting other than to rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic and get sadistic with their clients, which is exactly what I've seen happen time and time again with "helping professionals" in a hopeless setting. The sadism is no doubt a coping mechanism -- they quickly see they don't really help anyone, and rather than admit there's nothing they possibly can do and that their salary could have been better used in direct assistance to their clients, they blame the people they work with. But if you don't know that's what happens in exactly that kind of setting, you have either been lucky or you were not poor long enough.

Programs that impose those sorts of requirements on poor people are based on the assumption that poor people are poor because they have moral failings. For example, twice a year I have a housekeeping inspection. Why? I live in a public housing project, and the people who wrote the law assumed that all poor people are voluntarily dirty. As it is, there are people in this building who can't keep up with their homes, because they have inadequate supports (this is a project for seniors and the disabled). Throwing them out on the streets because they can't pass inspection will not improve their presumed bad character. More funding for home care will.

It makes plenty of sense to provide a social worker for those who need and want one, for the duration they need one. It makes no sense, unless of course one is assuming poverty is a personal moral failing that needs repair, to mandate regular meetings with a social worker for everyone.

My guess is that if we eliminated all the presumed moral failings requirements and spent the money saved in direct assistance, there would be a good few people sitting at home rather than sleeping under a bush today,