r
Social work: 'You get
no thanks from anyone
Time to compromise
The Council on Student Life faces an uphill battle in
its attempt to negotiate with the Board of Regents on
the coea visitation proposals killed by the Regents in
July. The reason for the pessimism is simple: in recent
years the Regents have unanimously voted down coed
visitation five different times.
Despite the poor odds CSL owes it to University
students to try to arrive at a compromise proposal or
find another approach to the question of coed
visitation. The current program is inadequate in that it is
infrequent and allows visitation for a maximum of only
six hours. r . .
There is a great deal of support for changes in the
present rules concerning coed visitation in campus living
""Last May a Daily Nebraskan poll showed that 77 per
cent of the student respondents favored a more
liberalized coed visitation policy. A survey of parental
opinion showed that 56 per cent of the respondents
favored the student guest rights proposal that the
Regents ultimately defeated in July. However, the
parent survey had an extremely low percentage ot
returns, which indicated the issue is of little importance
to most of the parents.
But the student and parent support must be
vocalized to be effective. The Regents aren't going to
compromise out of altruism.
A good way to put the political heat on the Regents
is for students, acting' as potential voters, to flood the
Board with letters supporting a more liberalized coed
visitation policy. If your parents favor increasing the
student guest rights, then ask them to write to their
Regent. t
Even if the Regents again ignore the rights or
students to entertain guest in their rooms, the question
of coed visitation will still haunt the Board. Subversion
of the present rules is common and probably will
increase. The University will be hard pressed to
crackdown on violators since enforcement is diff icult in
both residence halls and greek houses and any
compliance depends heavily on the students themselves.
Meantime, the University continues to try to enforce
the unenforceable and confuses the issue by linking
coed visitation with promiscuity. The best way out for
the Regents appears to be a compromise with CSL.
Gary Seacrest
"Anytime you're
ready, David!'
by Peter Benchley
Newsweek Feature Service
"Social work is supposed to
be such a noble profession,
right?" says the young man
armed with a master's degree in
social psychology. "You work
long hours for low wages, but
at least you're making a
contribution.
"Well, if this is nobility, you
can have it. The people you
work for have set up a
bureaucracy so incredible that
nothing ever gets done-or
when it is done, it's done
wrong. And as for the people
you're supposed to be
helping-about half my clients
just naturally distrust me
because I am what I am,
another quarter hate me
because I represent the
establishment that they 'think
has enslaved them and the rest
spend all our time together
trying to con me."
The young man is a welfare
caseworker, one of about
85,000 nationwide who are
faced with the impossible task
of administering to the needs
of the millions of poor and
desperate Americans who
subsist on the public dole.
Everyday the country's
welfare rolls swell further and
every day-in cities -as
desperate as Dallas and Boston,
New York and Los
Angeles-the controversy grows
hotter about who should
qualify for welfare, who should
be forced to work, who should
take care of an indigent
mother's children.
Bearing the brunt of both
the growth and the controversy
are the caseworkers, who are
forced to wonder whether they
are actually doing any good or
are in fact merely presiding
over the demise of a rotting
system.
"There's a fantastic amount
of anger among caseworkers,"
says an official of the Union of
Social Service Employes in
Chicago. "They feel they're
pawns in the system, and they
are."
Foremost among
caseworkers' complaints is that
they are overburdened with
more cases than they can
conceivably handle. According
to union vice president Max
Liberies, Chicago's 1,750
public caseworkers each
average 150 separate cases at a
time, and some individuals are
responsible for as many as 220
cases at one.
To protest their staggering
caseloads, Chicago's social
workers have staged three
strikes in the past five years
and the city has the highest
employe turnover (55 per cent)
of any welfare system in the
country.
"We've done a survey of
why caseworkers leave the
job," says Liberies, "and it's
not the salary (ranging from
$665 to $915 per month), it's
frustration."
In many communities,
job-training programs are the
pride of welfare officials, who
cite them as proof that they
are concentrating their efforts
on putting welfare cases back
to work. But the bureaucratic
muddle through-Which a '
caseworker . must slog before
actually placing a man in a
job-training program often
undermines the whole concept.
Los Angeles County
caseworker Mrs. Elisabeth
Baynton-Cox, for instance,
supposedly has access to a
program called WIN (for Work
Incentive), which pays for two
years of job training for
unemployed men. But when
she first referred a client to
WIN, she found that the
program carefully avoided
ex-convicts, ex-drug addicts
and alcoholics-the very
"problem cases" who need
rehabilitation most of all.
Female caseworkers have an
additional problem to contend
with. Mostly white, relatively
young and compared to their
clients-well-off, they find
themselves occasional targets
for violent resentment, hatred
and contempt that welfare
beneficiaries feel for the
system.
Several of Mrs.
Baynton-Cox's clients live in
Los Angeles' Pacoima ghetto,
which is heavily black and
chicano. The pretty 26-year-old
makes a point of visiting
Pacoima early in the morning
because, as she says, "I figure,
whoever's into troublemaking
is going to be sleeping."
Though the $20,000 she
and her salesman husband earn
every year probably puts Mrs.
Baynton-Cox above the
financial norm of caseworkers,
in many ways she is typical.
Most of her training has been
on-the-job. In college, she
majored in French and took
only one sociology course. The
Los Angeles County Public
Scocial Services Department
put her to work full time after
a three-week "orientation"
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course.
And like the majority of
caseworkers, she finds herself in
a painfully ambivalent
position: sympathetic with her
clients, symbolizing aid and
comfort, but at the same time
unable to fulfill promises made
by herself and others. "It gets
pretty embarrassing," she says,
"to keep telling your client, 'I
know you haven't got your
check for six months but the
computer broke down so wait
a little longer.'"
Compounding the
caseworkers' frustrations is the
fact that while their clients
blame them for every broken
promise and bureaucratic
foulup, they themselves have
no villian on whom to vent
their wrath. The villain is the
amorphous, uncontrollable
"system."
Paul Quirk, president of
caseworkers union local 509 in
Boston, sees the problem as a
"corruption of the process by
which the welfare system
works. Through the
mythification of the system,
we have effectively begun to
blame the victims for our
inability to administer the
system." The "elite and the
haves," he says, "really like to
pick on the have-nots. They
like to tell the poor how to
live. It's atrocious, really."
Whatever the source of the
pioblem, caseworkers have
found that their only recourse
is drastic job actions-strikes
or, as has happened in Atlanta,
a curious alliance between
caseworkers and clients. Scores
of Atlanta caseworkers have
joined the militant National
Welfare Rights Organization.
The bond may not accomplish
much, says one, but at least
"recipients will quit hating all
the caseworkers."
According to most experts,
the caseworkers' lot is bound
to get worse and there is little
evidence that it will ever get
better unless the current
welfare system is somehow
dramatically overhauled.
Caseloads will continue to
grow and welfare workers will
continue to quit.
"You feel so far from
reality," says Barbara Babb, a
25 year-old Dallas caseworker
who earned $571 a month last
year for dealing with 200
families. "You get no thanks
from anyone, no raises at the
office, and criticism from
clients and the community."
THE DAILY NEBRASKAN
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1971
PAGE 2
