New York: Strike in a Welfare State

• Share

New York City is, among other things, a small welfare state. It carries no less than 500,000 people on its welfare rolls—a number roughly equal to the whole population of Denver-ranging from homeless children to the helpless aged to mothers of large broods with absent and often unknown fathers. To support these people the city spends more than $1,100,000 every day in funds contributed by the federal, state and city governments. A hardy local economy scarcely benefits these chronically poor; instead of decreasing, the list of welfare cases grows by about 200 names a day.

Administering money and various other social remedies to these families is a massive, complex and thankless undertaking for the 12,600 people in the city's Welfare Department. Though most of the 6,000 workers classified as investigators are not trained specifically in social work, the state requires them to be college graduates. They handle a minimum of 60—and as many as 100—cases apiece, and each of these "clients" should ideally be getting weekly attention, an obvious impossibility. "If you try to be conscientious," says one investigator, "you go crazy." Says another, who quit: "Sometimes I was even glad when a client died, because then I had one case less."

Nightmare Landscape. The investigator is expected to process a never-ending mass of forms and applications, interview families to explore their situations and backgrounds, locate errant husbands, head off trouble-bound youngsters, find quarters for those evicted by landlords or tenement fires, worry over tardy or stolen relief checks. In between, he is supposed to provide his clients with whatever social services and counseling he deems necessary to get them off the dole and to keep them and their children from becoming "welfare addicts." Says one welfare-worker: "If I had the time, I could get a third of my cases off relief."

For such efforts, carried on much of the time in a nightmare slum landscape filled with vermin and violence, the pay is poor. The top salary for an investigator with nine years' experience is $7,190 a year—just a little more than a city-employed laborer gets after only one year and only $1,000 more than his top client gets for no work at all. As a result, the Welfare Department is forced to hire untrained and inexperienced hands who never stay around long enough to do much good. Obviously, New York's welfare workers need improved wages and working conditions. But if the improvement is not forthcoming, should they go on strike—against the city and, in effect, against their clients?

City officials generally assume that the social workers' dedication transcends such matters as salary scale. During months of conflict with the city over their grievances, the welfare workers' unions demanded a probably excessive $950 raise in starting salaries, a maximum of $9,000 a year after six years' service, and a reduction in case loads. The city offered a probably niggardly increase of $300 a year and little else. Result: fortnight ago the investigators called a strike.