Politics for Social Workers: A Practical Guide to Effecting Change

255 Pages·2021·2.947 MB·English

by  Professor Stephen Pimpare

POLITICS FOR
SOCIAL WORKERS

POLITICS FOR
SOCIAL WORKERS
A Practical Guide to Effecting Change
STEPHEN PIMPARE
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Pimpare, Stephen, author.
Title: Politics for social workers : a practical guide to effecting
change / Stephen Pimpare.
Description: New York City : Columbia University Press, 2021.
| Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021022070 (print) | LCCN 2021022071 (ebook)
| ISBN 9780231196925 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231196932 (trade
paperback) | ISBN 9780231551892 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social service—Political aspects. | Social workers.
Classification: LCC HV40 .P546 2021 (print) |
LCC HV40 (ebook) | DDC 361.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022070
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022071
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design: Elliott S. Cairns
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
1 The U.S. Constitution Is Undemocratic 7
2 Our Representative Institutions Are Not Representative 17
3 We’re Terrible at Conducting Elections 23
4 We Are Exceptional—but Not in a Good Way 33
5 Most of Us Will Be Poor and on Welfare 43
6 Everything Is Political 49
7 Conservatism Is Not Conservative and Some of Us Are
More Polarized Than Others 55
8 Cruel and Unjust Policies Serve a Purpose
for Someone 65
9 Where You Can Go Depends on Where You’ve Been 69
CONTENTS
10 Look at What’s Not Happening 77
11 People Learn Lessons About Their Value from Their
Interactions with Government Agencies 81
12 The People Who Benefit Most from Government Are
Most Likely to Claim They Don’t Benefit at All 91
13 People Like Lice and Cockroaches Better
Than Congress 97
14 The Thing They Say About Making Sausage Is True 103
15 Presidents Are Weak and Command Too Much of
Our Attention 107
16 It Really Is the Economy, Stupid 115
17 Judges Are Players, Not Umpires 119
18 People Aren’t Dumb but They Sure Are Ignorant 127
19 There Is No Public 133
20 There Is No View from Nowhere 137
21 You Will Not Change Anyone’s Mind 145
22 Social Work Is Conservative 151
23 Throw Sand in the Gears of Everything 161
Conclusion: We Can Do Better. There Are Solutions. 169
References 193
Index 231
(cid:81) vi (cid:81)
PREFACE
POLICY HISTORIANS write about the two “big bangs” of U.S. wel-
fare state development—the New Deal programs of the 1930s
and the Great Society programs of the 1960s. You might encoun-
ter others describing these moments as “critical junctures.”
Could March 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pan-
demic have marked the beginning of a third big bang? Did
we enter another critical juncture in our political and policy
history?
In that month alone, so much of what for years we had been
told could not be done was done almost overnight. Congress
enacted a national paid sick leave policy (albeit a temporary
one), ending our status as the only rich democracy without one.
It instituted a national emergency unemployment insurance
program to supplement the state-run plans, and a relatively
generous one at that, sending an additional $600 per week to
people who could not work (and expanding the definition of
PREFACE
who was eligible), then extending it at $300 per week at the end
of the year. It suspended student loan payments for six months
(and later extended that for an even longer period) and autho-
rized the federal government to send a cash payment of up to
$1,200 per adult and $500 per child to almost every family in the
country (subsequently doing it again at half the amount). These
initiatives were bold enough that household income actually
rose and poverty rates declined (J. Han, Meyer, and Sullivan
2020; Parolin, Curran, and Wimer 2020; DeParle 2020) even
though the most comprehensive official unemployment mea-
sure exceeded 20 percent at one point that year (U.S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics 2020). And even if it was short-lived, many
of Washington’s reliable deficit hawks (people who worry a lot
about the size of federal deficits, or pretend that they do) rec-
ognized the urgent need for action and debt-financed spending.
Meanwhile, states eased eligibility for their own unemploy-
ment programs, suspended work requirements for Medicaid
and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP,
what we used to call Food Stamps), expanded SNAP eligibility
and increased benefit levels, created emergency funds to sup-
port day-care facilities, opened up new shelter spaces for people
who were experiencing homelessness, and released people who
had been incarcerated for trivial offenses or who had served a
significant percentage of their sentence. Nonviolent offenders
were issued warnings instead of being arrested. Governments
encouraged (or required) localities to suspend evictions and
eliminate penalties for late property-tax payments, directed
public utilities not to cut off water or power for people who fell
behind on their bills, and advised local authorities to equip the
(cid:81) viii (cid:81)
PREFACE
camps set up by homeless people with portable bathrooms and
washing stations. Many cities reconfigured their public spaces,
closing more of them to cars and making them available to
pedestrians, cyclists, diners, and children at play.
Businesses raised workers’ wages (although making sure to
note that such increases were temporary), and people started to
earnestly thank grocery store clerks, delivery people, and health-
care workers for their service just as they had previously done
for veterans of the U.S. armed forces. In some places, homeless
people claimed and occupied vacant, abandoned properties that
were owned by the city. A smattering of strikes by frontline
service and delivery workers spread throughout the country,
causing still more businesses to raise wages, provide protective
equipment, and promise safer working conditions. And in what
may be one of the greatest acts of mass solidarity of the era,
untold millions of us remained sequestered in our homes in
order to stop the spread of the disease and protect our neigh-
bors from illness or death.
To be sure, even this crisis was not enough to get Congress
to enact the more radical proposals that were before it in those
early months—a permanent national unemployment insurance
program guaranteeing that people receive 100 percent of their
former wages, abolition of student loan debt, a nationwide rent
and mortgage moratorium, expanded access to Medicaid and
Medicare, or stricter occupational health and safety regulations
for the most at-risk occupations. Farmworkers and meat-pro-
cessing-plant employees, many of whom were undocumented,
continued to feed the nation while being ineligible for any
of the expanded relief programs. Immigration and Customs
(cid:81) ix (cid:81)
PREFACE
Enforcement (ICE) continued to capture and imprison immi-
grants and refugees (kidnapping and then losing track of their
children in the process), and, even with state, county, and munic-
ipal action, by midyear the COVID-19 death rate for prisoners
was 5.5 times higher than the overall rate (Saloner et al. 2020). By
May 2020 that sense of urgency and solidarity seemed to have
left Washington, D.C., even though more than 100,000 people
had already been officially counted among the dead at that point.
Then, yet another Black man was killed by the police—this
time, his name was George Floyd—and a massive wave of
sustained protest swept through the nation, inspiring compar-
isons to the “unrest” of the 1960s and generating concern that
the United States was slipping into irredeemable chaos. As has
historically been the case, much of the violence that occurred
was instigated by agents of the state, not those protesting the
aggressively racist practices of its institutions (Chenoweth and
Pressman 2020). In response to those events, states and locali-
ties started what in some cases were serious conversations about
reducing the portion of their budgets allocated to police forces
(“Defund the Police” became a rallying cry). Citizens toppled
statues and defaced monuments erected to the Confederacy,
and many finally came to recognize the Confederate battle flag
as an inherently racist symbol; NASCAR and the U.S. Navy
even banned its display. These were the largest sustained mass
protests the United States had seen since the peak of the Black
rights movements of the 1960s and perhaps the largest in our
history (International Council for Diplomacy and Dialogue
2020; Putnam, Chenoweth, and Pressman 2020)—another
extraordinary instance of mass solidarity.
(cid:81) x (cid:81)