Employment Transition Model RUNNING HEAD: EMPLOYMENT PROBLEM

The Employment Transition Model: Social Work Best Practices for the Employment Problem

Ray Woodcock Indiana University School of Social Work

Employment Transition Model Contents

Abstract.......................................................................................................................................... 3 The Red Herring of Unemployment............................................................................................ 4 The Meaning of Employment ...................................................................................................... 8 Employer-Employee Relationships Historically ...................................................................... 10 Introducing the Employment Problem ..................................................................................... 15 Employment-Related Code Provisions ...................................................................................... 17 Basic Human Needs and Empowerment................................................................................. 18 First clause: Basic human needs........................................................................................ 18 Second clause: Empowerment. ............................................................................................ 20 Oppression and poverty. ....................................................................................................... 21 Vulnerability. ........................................................................................................................ 24 Social Justice and Social Change ........................................................................................... 25 Social justice......................................................................................................................... 25 Social change. ...................................................................................................................... 28 Diversity. ............................................................................................................................... 29 Dignity and Worth of the Person............................................................................................. 30 Relationships among People.................................................................................................... 32 An Interpretation of Employment-Related Code Provisions .................................................. 33 The Employment Transition Model .......................................................................................... 34 First Step: Identify Imminent Threats in Particular Spheres ............................................... 38 Physical Threats ....................................................................................................................... 38 Psychosocial Threats................................................................................................................ 40 Economic and Political Threats .............................................................................................. 42 Review of Threats ..................................................................................................................... 43 Second Step: Determine the Underlying Cause of Imminent Threats .................................. 46 Third Step: Empower Employees............................................................................................. 48 Worker Empowerment through the Permanent Strike........................................................... 49 Examples of Permanent Strike ................................................................................................ 50 Worker Empowerment through Unemployment Education .................................................. 52 Worker Empowerment through Questioning the Corporation .............................................. 58 Summary...................................................................................................................................... 60 References .................................................................................................................................... 62

Employment Transition Model Abstract

Unemployment is often considered a problem. But the meaning of unemployment is derived from the meaning of employment. Analysis of the latter suggests that, for social workers, it not unemployment is often the real problem. The central problem of employment is its tendency to prioritize goals other than the human well-being that lies at the core of social work ethics. A review of relevant ethical principles suggests that a priority response to the problem of employment is to intervene on behalf of employees in instances of significant physical, psychosocial, economic, or political threat to well-being. Unfortunately, the non-human priorities of employment are deeply woven into everyday life. Social workers do not appear to possess interventions sufficiently powerful to change that directly. A potentially more effective strategy may be to proceed, meanwhile, with empowering workers (1) to remove themselves from the workforce wherever possible (so as to confer greater economic power for change on those who remain) and (2) by education, to destigmatize unemployment and to question the corporation.

Employment Transition Model This paper provides an evidence-based approach to the problem of employment. Employment has not been broadly recognized as a problem, however, so there has not been a concerted effort to collect evidence on how to treat it. This paper necessarily approaches the subject in a pioneering spirit, then, one step removed from the straightforward application of clinical data regarding the treatment of individuals. Here, the emphasis is upon identifying the problem, beginning to understand its permutations, and determining what might qualify as appropriate responses to it. The available evidence is thus varied. Depending upon the particular point, it may range from randomized controlled research to professional precedent to logical argument (see Cournoyer, 2004, p. 191). As such, it is presented immediately, in the context of the considerations that suggest its relevance, rather than being deferred to a later

section. The plan of the paper is thus, in brief, to identify problematic elements of employment, to suggest a model in response to it, and to trace through the applicable steps of that model. The Red Herring of Unemployment Is employment a problem? It may seem natural to assume, as many social scientists do (e.g., Robertson, 1931, p. 76; Wood & Middleman, 1989, p. 26; Williams, Soydan, & Johnson, 1998, p. 200), that unemployment is the problem. According to the Code of Ethics of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) (1999) (referred to as simply the Code in this paper), Social workers social change efforts are focused primarily on issues of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and other forms of social injustice.

As a convenience to the researcher, page references are sometimes included in this paper, particularly where the reference is to books or complex articles, to facilitate location of the relevant passage. In similar spirit, the explanatory e.g. is used, as in this parenthetical, to clarify that the cited works are not asserting what is asserted in the text, but are rather examples of it. In this case, Robertson (1931) is cited, not as a direct supporter of the proposition, but rather as an example of someone who adopts the assumption. Elsewhere, the explanatory see is sometimes parenthetically used to indicate that the cited source contains relevant information but, again, is not necessarily echoing what the text of this paper claims.

Employment Transition Model Then again, unemployment appears to be a relatively minor problem for social workers. Otherwise it would not be virtually absent from so many social work textbooks and reference works (e.g., Roberts & Greene, 2002; DuBois & Miley, 1999; Bruggemann, 1996; Adams,

Dominelli, & Payne, 2002; Popple & Leighninger, 2008; Figueira-McDonough, 2007). Searches in online databases likewise tend to turn up far fewer articles on unemployment than on other subjects that figure more prominently in the books just cited.2 Unemployment appears to occupy a sort of shadow status. For one thing, it is not consistently treated, within the social work literature, as being in the nature of a disability, else social work publications that follow the rules of the American Psychological Associations (2001, p. 75) Publication Manual would presumably insist that authors refer to e.g., persons experiencing unemployment rather than unemployed people or the unemployed. Yet unemployment is also not usually treated as a valid and ongoing phase or type of existence, in the way one might treat age or race, but is instead usually expected to change eventually. Like the young woman whom a traditionalist may describe as being not yet married (reflecting a presumption that of course she must become married at some point), the unemployed individual appears to be viewed as a person who does not yet have a job, but surely must get one soon. Continued failure to do so may prompt observers to speculate as to what may be wrong with the person, or with employers attitudes, sufficient to prevent him/her from proceeding on to the nearly universal destiny of having a job. It is not surprising that unemployment thus appears to occupy a sort of shadow status. After all, it is, by definition, an absence of employment. The very terminology tends to suggest

To give one example, a search in Google Scholar for allintitle: "social work" unemployed OR unemployment finds no articles published between 2003 and the present; but a search for allintitle: "social work" gender finds 40 articles in that time period.

Employment Transition Model the question, Why are you not employed? as if to confirm that employment, not unemployment, is the primary issue.

That implicit question Why are you not employed? is quite revealing. In practice, it often means, Why are you not working to help make someone else wealthy? It is an odd question, reminiscent of slavery, and not likely reflective of what most people want to achieve in their lives. The more important question, one would think, would have to do with the denial of opportunities to learn, discover, travel, raise kids, improve the neighborhood, and otherwise seek to help people, be happy, and/or experience fulfillment. All other things being equal, the question one would expect to be asked is, Why did you have to take a job? In American society, of course, all other things are not equal. Working for other peoples benefit is not merely the norm; it is the panacea. Without it, people often encounter numerous difficulties. This is how things are structured, and social workers have to deal with it. But this would not be the first area of life in which social workers could also conclude that the traditional response to a persons condition is not necessarily the most logical or appropriate. To cite one obvious feature of unemployment, people who lack jobs may run out of money. Strictly speaking, however, that is a money problem, not an unemployment problem. If people are given jobs without money, the problem remains; but if they are given money without jobs, that particular problem goes away. Certainly there is some logic to the idea of providing money in exchange for work. But that is a separate point, and it is a complex one. Some people get lots of money for little work, and some get lots of work for little money. The money-work link is not at all as tight as one might wish. Indeed, the money-work logic quickly becomes illogic when some market fad or distortion rewards those who provide a poor or trivial product or service.

Employment Transition Model As with money, so also with other claimed drawbacks of unemployment. For instance, Winefield et al. (2002) state that unemployment has negative effects on mental health, and that

one lost benefit of work is that of providing the worker with a sense of identity. Again, however, that is a problem of identity, not of unemployment. Give people some other form of identity (through e.g., their role in church, family, political activism, or sporting club), and then ask how much of their identity comes from their work of cleaning toilets or delivering pizzas. A social worker might reasonably ask why people should find themselves in the paradoxical position of having to derive their own identities from tasks assigned by someone else. People should not need jobs in order to feel that they belong somewhere. As a rule, they do belong in their homes, for example, and in their communities. If a deep sense of belonging does not emerge from those places, then the first priority may be, not to pass the buck to the employer, but rather to take a closer look at the home and community environments. Among other things, it may turn out that the sense of belonging would grow if people had the time to participate more extensively there. Raising ones children or grandchildren, for example, or leading a local Girl Scout troop or softball team, is not necessarily less significant than fixing potholes. If the latter is not where the person finds that s/he is most needed, perhaps social workers should take that into account when deciding upon the appropriate responses to unemployment (and, for that matter, to the building and maintenance of roads). Such observations suggest, on a conceptual level, that unemployment is a derivative issue. Employment commonly consumes far more of an adults working years; employment is said to be the source of benefits; and the meaning of unemployment depends upon the employment alternatives. The primary task, then, is to sketch out the nature of employment and to provide some guidance to social workers who must deal with various aspects of it.

Employment Transition Model The Meaning of Employment The definition of employment is an important threshold issue. The term is grossly unreliable. It lumps together too many divergent kinds of activities and situations, and it also excludes some kinds of activities and situations that are of interest to social work. The first essential response to this state of affairs is to recognize it and to adapt ones thinking and phrasing accordingly. It seems unwise and unnecessary for social workers to get bogged down in constructing an appropriate definition. Definitional difficulties have occupied philosophers for centuries (Robinson, 1950). The more productive conclusion may be that the social workers response to an employment-related issue must be contextually informed that employment can include a wide variety of situations that call for differing responses. Employment is overinclusive in the sense that it extends beyond any one unifying characteristic. It includes people who work to earn a paycheck, and also those who do not. For

example, in recent years the co-founders and chief executive officer (CEO) of Google have been paid salaries of $1.00 per year (La Monica, March 5, 2007). People who can afford to do so (and some who cannot) devote countless hours without compensation to volunteer activities. People who have jobs who are employed include prostitutes, ministers, judges, and contract killers, along with people who are self-employed or underemployed. Employees are employed, and so, often, are their employers. And yet, part of the problem is that this overinclusive word is not inclusive enough. It is not ordinarily used to include activities that people undertake for the purpose of saving money as distinct from making money (e.g., shopping for bargains, bartering services, growing ones own food in a garden, defending against a lawsuit), even though such activities may be both time-

Employment Transition Model consuming and financially essential. It does not ordinarily include time and effort devoted to formal education, self-training, reading, hobbies, sports, and other activities that may be critically related to a persons plans, priorities, confidence, capabilities, or other traits. It also

traditionally excludes people who work outside of the traditional labor force, including not only homemakers but also those who are paid under the table or off the books. Those who seek a term that would encompass these various possibilities may prefer occupation which, as defined in the field of occupational therapy, includes the countless activities that fill ones waking hours (Neistadt and Crepeau, 1998, p. 5; USC, n.d.). Construed thus, occupation includes not only employment but also unemployment, leisure, imprisonment, hospitalization, and other ways in which people sometimes pass years. Employment is difficult to pin down for another reason: it is a political word. As an illustration, Baxandall (2004) describes a four-year period (1945-49) in which Hungary experienced, in sequence, (1) a strong communist emphasis upon paying aid to workers whenever the government failed to provide work opportunities; (2) declarations that workers found such aid repugnant, and that what they really wanted was work; (3) reduced governmental attention to unemployment; and (4) a declaration that unemployment had been eliminated (pp. 18-19). Porket (1995) distinguishes the open unemployment of capitalist economies (in which a jobless person visibly appears in the labor market, looking for work) from the hidden unemployment of command socialist economies. In the latter instance, people may be promptly assigned to a new task when the old one dries up, but may be grossly underutilized there. In the official U.S. definition of employment, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, 2001), Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work. The definition

Employment Transition Model excludes inmates and military personnel. People who have not been actively looking for work within the past four weeks are considered not in the labor force. Thus Dooley and Prause (2004, p. 228) are able to contrast the official 1994 U.S. average unemployment rate of 2.2% against an alternate measure that would have put unemployment, in that year, at 10.9%. These objections to the term do not provide a tight, robust definition. It is not clear that

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one is possible. Therefore, this paper takes employment in the ordinary, vague sense in which Americans often use the term, and in which social workers are most likely to encounter it. In the large majority of cases, employment of this nature is roughly synonymous with having a job in which the worker typically has a supervisor and coworkers who, together, usually seek to achieve something by legal means. The specific goal is not necessarily important; it may include profit, production of a competitive product, enhanced market share, performance of an expected (e.g., governmental, medical) function, providing charitable aid, or achieving some other goal that is seen as being rationally related to the organizations purpose. This approach to the definition of the term will not support the kind of fine-grained analysis that may be most useful in specific employment contexts, but it will facilitate a general examination of employment as a problem warranting social work attention. Employer-Employee Relationships Historically Employment, as it exists today, began under harsh circumstances that a social work profession of the time, had it existed, could not have supported. According to Dickinson and Emler (1992), Working for a wage is a relatively recent innovation in the history of the human species. When first introduced on a large scale only 200 years ago, as part of the

Employment Transition Model factory system of production, it was considered so unnatural that only criminals and paupers could be induced to accept it. (p. 19)

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At that point, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the agrarian lifestyle in which most people lived did not mesh naturally with the demands of the industrialized workplace. Factory work was monotonous and unpleasant. It was best done by workers who could submit to long hours of stationary, confined toil. Those who had been trained to think for themselves were not necessarily right for this sort of thing: the skilled apprenticed man was at a discount, because of [his relatively empowered] working habits acquired before entering a factory (Pollard, 1963, p. 255). One should not underestimate just how much human existence can vary from what may now seem normal and universal. That point, and the strangeness of todays lifestyles when viewed from the perspective of long human experience, emerges sharply when one considers the subject of sleep. At present, many Americans do not sleep very well (National Sleep Foundation, 2007). But according to Ekirch (2001), throughout the millennia before artificial light, the biologically natural pattern appears to have been to go to bed not long after dusk; lie awake for an hour or two; sleep approximately four hours; get up for a while, or talk, or think about things, or drowse half-awake again for another couple of hours; and then sleep for another four hours more in the winter, less in the summer, but generally more than Americans sleep now. The modern experience of (ideally) eight hours of continuous sleep may result, not from any natural pattern, but from exhaustion. But it has become ingrained in the modern economic system. Reversion to the natural pattern would radically alter the structure of the typical workday. Taking the point further, Robb (2007) says,

Employment Transition Model In 1900, the British Medical Journal reported that peasants of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia adopt the economical expedient of spending one-half of the year in sleep: At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. . . . The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself and goes out to see if the grass is growing.

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Robb reports a similar practice in France in the 1800s. To recognize how difficult it would be to reconcile 20th-century workplace expectations against these sorts of seemingly natural sleep patterns with, that is, the basic physiological realities of many worthy human beings one need only reflect upon unwelcoming corporate attitudes toward the siesta or the brief midafternoon nap (see Baxter & Kroll-Smith, 2005). These remarks may enhance the readers sense of just how alien the industrial life might have seemed to post-medieval Europeans. Yet many were compelled to adapt. The forces of discipline employed against workers could be harsh: In the Scottish mines, serfdom was only just being eradicated . . .; opposition, including the inevitable rioting, was met by transportation and the death penalty . . . as late as 1783 (Pollard, 1963, p. 262). So it was not surprising that, in the 1800s, many felt that a factory worker was a wage slave. S/he was unlike the chattel slave of the plantation, in the sense of not being owned outright; but his/her unquestioning service to an industrialist was much like the chattel slaves service to a slavemaster. Indeed, the wage slave was worse off than the chattel slave in an important sense: the latter constituted an investment in property. As such, economic rationality

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dictated keeping him/her alive and in good working condition, whereas industrialists could treat the unskilled factory worker as entirely expendable (Persky, 1998, p. 641). It was possible to impose coercive demands upon workers, in terms of both the nature of work and the amount of pay, because their situations were so desperate. Crouzet (2001) describes the Malthusian trap in which, from the 11th through 18th centuries, population tended to grow faster than food production, while peasant [land] holdings became smaller and smaller (p. 88) as the available land was divided up. Sometimes the effects were dire. Crouzet mentions a famine in France, at the end of the 17th century, when 7% of the nations population died of starvation within a three-year period (p. 93). According to Clarks (2007) analysis of documentary evidence, there was a Darwinian process underway, in which children of the poor would tend not to survive and prosper in which, on balance, the evidence is that the poorest individuals in the [pre-industrial] era would typically not reproduce themselves at all. Instead preindustrial England was a world of constant downward mobility. Given the static nature of the economy and of the opportunities it afforded, the abundant children of the rich had to, on average, move down the social hierarchy. The craftsmen of one generation supplied many of the laborers of the next, merchants sons became the petty traders, large landowners sons ended up as the smallholders. (p. 113) Treatment of the poor was not genocidal de jure; there was perhaps never a conscious desire to exterminate them. It did amount to socioeconomic genocide de facto, however, in that the children of the poor were deliberately denied the means of survival. There was not enough for everyone; choices had to be made.

Employment Transition Model Once the agricultural and industrial revolutions got underway, though, things changed. Now there was enough for everyone (Crouzet, 2001, p. 93). Yet the metaphor invoked by Rousseau (1762/1968) Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains (p. 49) continued to have relevance, to such an extent that Marx and Engels (1848/1998) could draw a great deal of attention not to mention the eventual implementation of their ideas by a large portion of the worlds people by proclaiming, Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist

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revolution. Proletarians have nothing to lose in it but their chains (p. 37). By the 1880s, in the United States, workers demands for fair treatment were being met by private armies, hired by employers and used for purposes of violent strikebreaking and unionbusting (Smith, 2003). Workers repeatedly found it necessary to fight for the right to organize and to be paid a reasonable share of what they were producing, not only in the years up to and including the turbulent 1930s (e.g., Kimeldorf & Stepan-Norris, 1992) but throughout the more prosperous postwar period (Morris, 2003; Cowie, 2005). For many employees around the world today, workplaces have improved greatly from the workplaces of 50 or 100 years ago. For many others, however, things are not necessarily better, and may even be worse. Certainly this is true in sweatshop employment within developing nations, where workers endure wages insufficient for basic human necessities; extremely long working hours; hazardous conditions; mental and physical abuse; sexual exploitation; and vigorous suppression of unionization (Rosenstock, Cullen, & Fingerhut, 2005; Polack, 2004; Sidhu, 2004). Such concerns are no longer limited to developing nations, however; they are also reemerging in developed nations, in the payment of wages so low as not to represent a living wage and in an ever increasing gap in earnings between the rich and the poor (van Wormer, 2005, p. 2; see Heathcote, Storesletten, & Violante, 2004).

Employment Transition Model Certainly there have been different kinds of employers, and it goes without saying that employers of many kinds have been engaged in their own survival struggles, as they deal with the costs of doing business and the difficulties of staying ahead of their competitors. It is also undeniable that employees have been capable of abusing employer trust in their turn. The purpose of these remarks is simply to state the reality that, for their own survival and prosperity

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and/or that of their shareholders, in historical terms employers have tended to create and enforce an adversarial relationship by restricting wages, providing objectionable working conditions, and otherwise making life hard for workers. Introducing the Employment Problem The NASW states that, among codes of ethics, social workers should consider its Code of Ethics their primary source. That Code, in turn, says, Ethical responsibilities flow from all human relationships, from the personal and familial to the social and professional. Employment involves and creates many varieties of relationships. As such, it raises numerous ethical responsibilities. The Code contains many provisions that touch upon those responsibilities. The overall scope of those provisions appears in Ethical Standard (ES) 6.04(a): Social workers should engage in social and political action that seeks to ensure that all people have equal access to the resources, employment, services, and opportunities they require to meet their basic human needs and develop fully. In addition, ES 6.04(b) provides, Social workers should act to expand choice and opportunity for all people, with special regard for vulnerable, disadvantaged, oppressed, and exploited people and groups. As those standards say, the ethical responsibilities imposed by the Code exist for the benefit of all people, not merely for the social workers clients or coworkers. When one

Employment Transition Model considers employees, customers, vendors, and the myriad other individuals who become involved with or are affected by the worlds assorted enterprises, it becomes plain that employment in a harshly competitive global economy is capable of rendering vast numbers of people vulnerable, disadvantaged, oppressed, and exploited of taking advantage of them, as one might summarize those several concepts to such an extent that they lack equal access to the things they need to meet their basic human needs and develop fully. Employment, like poverty, is a single problem that takes many forms and has many

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ramifications. At its core, the employment problem is that the time-for-money deal (exemplified by, but not limited to, the traditional employment setting) is a bad one. It may be bad for the employer, for the employee, for other interested individuals (e.g., family members), for the purposes of government agencies or not-for-profit organizations, and for the community and society. The problems with the deal vary from one situation to another. In a given context, the problem may be that people do not get paid what they should, or that they should not be doing what they are getting paid to do, or that they should be getting paid to do what they do, or that they should be doing something for which they can get paid. It would be premature and impractical to attempt a comprehensive taxonomy, now, of these assorted flaws in the time-for-money deal. A phenomenon as large and vague as employment admits innumerable perspectives upon its meaning and operation. For social workers, however, it would be especially difficult to ethically endorse any concept of employment that sweepingly disregards the professions priorities. Most employment situations are not fundamentally oriented toward achievement of social work goals. That is, employment situations tend to operate somewhat in conflict with social work ethical principles.

Employment Transition Model Therefore social workers face a choice. They can (and, no doubt, they sometimes must)

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yield, for practical reasons, to the way of the world. There will be people at work tomorrow, and social workers will have to deal with them. But while this goes on, social workers can also bear in mind a contrasting perspective that provides guidance in a different and better long-term direction; and to bring day-to-day realities more in line with that long-term direction, social workers can inform themselves on particular ways in which employment, as it is presently known, diverges from the better path. As Beckett and Maynard (2005) say, We suggest that a social worker who is committed to social justice or even one who is simply committed to respect for persons needs to cultivate a degree of scepticism about the agendas she is expected to implement. (p. 108) On that level, the problem of employment is not best phrased in the sweeping terms just utilized. Helping the oppressed is great, but what does that mean, specifically? What is more helpful is to translate those sweeping terms into everyday guidance. Fortunately, the Code provides some such guidance. No code could anticipate all of the possible ways in which people might take advantage of other people. But examination of specific Code provisions can generate considerable insight into the nature of ethical employment. The employment problem confronting social workers can thus be expressed as an indeterminate but approachable set of incompatibilities with specific ethical provisions, and a set of best practices suggestions for social workers can arise from a review of those provisions. Employment-Related Code Provisions Most employment situations probably contain some mix of good and bad. Decisions on what needs to be changed immediately, eventually, or not at all may be complex. Employment is thus a problem in the sense that an old house is a problem: within its inevitable combination of

Employment Transition Model advantages and drawbacks, the decision to fix it up or abandon it may ultimately depend upon opinion, judgment, and guesswork as to what seems best under the circumstances. This paper

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cannot substitute for judgment. It can, however, reduce the role of mere opinion and guesswork. To that end, the following subsections develop a careful interpretation of employment-related Code provisions. Basic Human Needs and Empowerment The Codes Preamble begins with a sentence consisting of two clauses separated by a comma. That sentence is as follows: The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human wellbeing and help meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty. This sentence introduces several concepts that are important to social workers. To determine how those concepts apply here, it is important to clarify and distinguish them. The following analysis does so by examining the two clauses of that block quotation. First clause: Basic human needs. The first clause of the block quotation contains a grammatical error. It states that there is a primary mission, in the singular, and then proceeds to list two items, plural, joined by an and. That is, it is not clear whether the Code meant to say that there are primary missions, or whether, instead, both human well-being and help meet the basic needs are intended to indicate just one primary mission. A commentary on this and other points is available from Reamer (2006a), who chaired the NASW Code of Ethics Revision Committee (Brill, 2001). According to Reamer, the basic

Employment Transition Model human needs cited here refer to the professions fundamental preoccupation with peoples most essential needs, such as food, clothing, health care, and shelter (p. 6).

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One interpretation of Reamers (2006a) comment would be that social work is fundamentally preoccupied with peoples basic material needs. That is, social work is preoccupied with such needs to the exclusion of other needs. This interpretation would result in a false statement, since social workers are eminently preoccupied with all sorts of things other than material needs. An alternate interpretation of Reamers (2006a) comment would be that basic material needs are the sorts of things to which social work has an enduring dedication and historically has given particular attention (p. 6). Basic material needs are thus contrasted against a second set of concerns that the Code Revision Committee considered: The committee recognized that many legitimate and important forms of social work address the needs of middle- and upperincome people (p. 7). The alternate interpretation is, in other words, that social work has traditionally emphasized basic material needs, but has also grown to address other needs as well. In that case, the reference to basic human needs in the first clause should have been dropped, unless it means something other than Reamers (2006a) list of most essential (i.e., material) needs: food, clothing, health care, and shelter (p. 6). Legitimate and important forms of social work (p. 7) now extend well beyond basic material needs. Basic was retained, it seems, in order to emphasize that the legitimacy and importance of services to middle- and upper-income clients do not, and should not, displace the professions original and continuing commitment to the needs of disadvantaged clients. But that emphasis already appears in the second clause of the block quote, where it is addressed more carefully. Repetition of the emphasis in the first clause is potentially confusing.

Employment Transition Model Without basic, the grammatical error in the first clause appears to exist because enhance human well-being and help meet the human needs of all people are considered identical. Human well-being is enhanced by helping to meet human needs. It is not so much a grammatical error as a redundancy. To rephrase, then: The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being by helping people meet their needs. Yet that is not quite right either. All sorts of professionals (e.g., corporate attorneys, prostitutes, travel agents) try to help people meet what they consider to be their needs. Social work focuses on a subset of human needs. The needs that interest social workers are those universal human needs that all people must meet in order to survive and thrive. Such needs receive more detailed attention in the block quotes second clause. Social

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works particular attention is reserved for people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty. Pending a closer look at that second clause, then, the first clause might be tentatively understood as saying, The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being, by helping people meet those universal needs that all people must meet in order to survive and thrive. Second clause: Empowerment. Unfortunately, the second clause of the Preambles first sentence that is, the clause beginning with the words with particular attention refers, not only to needs, but also to empowerment. It could initially appear that yet another top priority is being introduced. But here, too, there is an alternate reading that seems closer to the Codes intent. Reamer (2006a, p. 7) quotes Barker (2003, p. 142) for the proposition that empowerment means helping clients increase their personal, interpersonal, socioeconomic, and political strength and to develop influence toward improving their circumstances. Of course, personal

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strengths may mean either physical or psychological strengths, and interpersonal strengths may include both psychological and social strengths. So empowerment apparently means helping clients increase their physical, psychological, social, socioeconomic, and political strength. Again, there is a redundancy, between the social and the socioeconomic. Also, in a discussion of employment, the economic may require special attention. To keep the list at a manageable length, reference here will be simply to physical, psychosocial, economic, and political strengths. (Influence seems to be one kind of competence that may emerge in psychosocial, economic, and political spheres alike.) As that quote from Barker (2003) indicates, all such strengths can empower clients to improve their own circumstances. Empowerment, however, is not the exclusive focus. As stated in the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Preamble (in the form in which it appears online), social workers work both with and on behalf of clients with clients, when they can be empowered, but on behalf of clients, when the social worker considers it necessary to take charge of the matter directly. As Reamer says, social workers should not always act for others; when possible, social workers should engage clients and others as partners (p. 14). The second clause of the Preambles first sentence might thus be rephrased as saying, Social workers empower people. That is, social workers seek to help people develop physical, psychosocial, economic, and political abilities to meet their own needs. To the extent that people are not yet sufficiently empowered to meet their own needs, social workers intervene on their behalf. Oppression and poverty. The first sentence of the Preamble closes with a reference to those who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty. Based on Reamers (2006a) comments, the word and is not intended to imply that social workers concentrate only upon those persons who meet all three

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requirements. Rather, the phrasing appears to be shorthand for those who are vulnerable, those who are oppressed, and those who are living in poverty. Meeting any one of these three conditions suffices. The meanings of those three terms are not immediately clear from the Code. First, oppression and poverty seem to be somewhat commingled. For example, Reamer (2006a, p. 7) refers to people living in poverty and who are otherwise oppressed. On pages 244-245, he quotes Gil (1994, p. 233) as follows: Oppression refers to relations of domination and exploitation economic, social, and psychologic between individuals; between social groups and classes within and beyond societies; and, globally, between entire societies. . . . Oppression seems motivated by an intent to exploit (i.e., benefit disproportionately from the resources, capacities, and productivity of others), and it results typically in disadvantageous, unjust conditions of living for its victims. It serves as means to enforce exploitation toward the goal of securing advantageous conditions of living for its perpetrators [emphasis in original]. Reamers (2006a) use of this quote implies that its concepts were relevant to the selection of language for the Code. Oppression, in Gils (1994, p. 233) formulation, requires the existence of relations of domination and exploitation. Yet domination and exploitation are two rather distinct concepts. According to Gil (p. 233), exploitation is the disproportionate benefit, for one person, group, class, or society, from the resources, capacities, and productivity of another. Such exploitation results typically in disadvantageous, unjust conditions of living for its victims. This phrasing seems directed toward economic forms of exploitation. As such, this appears to be the form of oppression that Reamer (2006a) links to poverty. By contrast,

Employment Transition Model domination, in dictionary definitions, tends to involve the abuse of a position of power or

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control. Thus Buchanan (2005) speaks of domination in terms of race and gender; Healy (2000) discusses domination as it arises in the inequities between social workers and their clients; and Pierson (2002) describes cultural domination. In short, when Reamer (2006a, p. 7) refers to people living in poverty and who are otherwise oppressed, he appears to mean (a) economic exploitation resulting in poverty, which is a form of oppression, and (b) noneconomic exploitation or dominance, not necessarily resulting in poverty, which is a separate form of oppression. The use of the single term oppression to refer to both is potentially confusing and obscuring especially since its use in the Code is often accompanied by references to poverty and other conditions. The approach taken here is, instead, to seek clarity by dropping references to oppression in favor of more specific references to the distinct concepts that seem to have been intended. To respond to that last quote from Reamer (2006a), then, it is suggested that economic exploitation can be objectionable to the point of inviting social work involvement, regardless of whether it has yet resulted in poverty. The official poverty line can be construed as a politically influenced dividing line that may understate the actual hardship people experience. Moreover, one need not wait until people reach poverty or even approach it in order to determine that they are being exploited, that they deserve protection, and that the source of their exploitation should be identified and in some sense reformed, quarantined, or eliminated. According to Reamer (2006a), poverty has traditionally been, and should continue to be, a focal point for social workers. This seems to be the case regardless of whether it results from identifiable exploitation. Natural and macroeconomic events (e.g., drought, recession) can also

Employment Transition Model bring it about. References to poverty and exploitation are thus somewhat distinct from one another and, again, from domination, which requires no economic content to be objectionable.

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While poverty may be construed as a purely economic issue in a money-based economy, it is only derivatively that. As the example of natural disaster illustrates, people can be impoverished, in material terms, whenever their physical environment becomes inhospitable; and the attempt to alleviate disaster-induced poverty entails reduction of misfortune regardless of whether it stems from the behavior of a human actor. As the Code says, Fundamental to social work is attention to the environmental forces that create, contribute to, and address problems in living. To return, then, to the block quote (above) from the Preamble, social work appears to be concerned with the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, exploited, dominated, or impoverished. Vulnerability. Vulnerability, as Reamer (2006a, p. 7) uses it, is distinct from poverty and oppression, and is related to clinical mental health services. In what appears to be a similar understanding, Ingram and Price (2003) speak of vulnerability to psychopathology, where the attack upon the client comes from an internal pathology. The Code also contemplates, however, that people may be vulnerable to undue influence, manipulation, or coercion (ES 4.07(a)), where the attack comes from another human being. An example arises in the study of vulnerability of high school women to sexual coercion by Johnson, Morgan, and Sigler (2007). The effort to clarify the language of the Preamble thus seems to call for a distinction between vulnerability to pathology and vulnerability to domination. Having already included a specific reference to domination, a rephrasing of the Preamble might therefore drop vulnerable

Employment Transition Model

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and instead add a more specific reference to pathology. To summarize, then, the first sentence of the Preamble appears to mean this: The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human wellbeing, by helping people meet those universal needs that all people must meet in order to survive and thrive, including material goods, services, and a hospitable physical environment. Social workers empower people. That is, social workers help people develop physical, psychosocial, economic, and political abilities to protect themselves against pathology, poverty, misfortune, exploitation, and domination. To the extent that people are not yet fully empowered to develop such abilities, social workers intervene on their behalf. This is what the introductory language of the Code seems to be saying. If this is a fair interpretation of that language, then the Code calls for something very different from what exists in the world of employment today. And the Code does not stop there. Social Justice and Social Change The second paragraph of the Codes Preamble begins as follows: Social workers promote social justice and social change with and on behalf of clients. . . . Social workers are sensitive to cultural and ethnic diversity and strive to end discrimination, oppression, poverty, and other forms of social injustice. Social justice. It thus develops that poverty, exploitation, and domination and the belated addition of discrimination are forms of social injustice. The rephrasing just offered should be amended to say so. That amendment, and others, will be added shortly.

Employment Transition Model This excerpt from the Preamble meanwhile declines to mention pathology, and the reference to discrimination arises in a sentence that refers to cultures and ethnicities. Plausibly, social injustice occurs between people, not purely within them. Reamer (2006a, p. 8) quotes Barker (2003, p. 404) for the view that, in a condition of social justice, all members of a society have the same basic rights, protection, opportunities, obligations, and social benefits. The word basic, appearing again, presumably again means

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fundamental. As such, it is a dubious qualification. An important or meaningful right, benefit, or duty should not be withheld on the grounds that it is somehow not fundamental. The Code says, here, that social workers promote social justice, and also that they strive to end social injustice. The struggle against injustice was already mentioned in the rephrasing offered above. The new addition at this point seems to be just that social workers promote equal rights, protection, opportunities, obligations, and social benefits for all members of a society. Reamer (2006a, p. 8) quotes Barker (2003, p. 404) for the characterization of social justice as an ideal condition. That characterization implies that there is some doubt as to whether it will ever actually be achieved, and also that such doubt is acceptable, else the term would not have been included in the Code. A condition may be held as an ideal even if it is not achievable in practice, although one could quibble that an unachievable ideal is not very ideal. Either way, it is not clear that social justice, as described here, is an ideal condition. For instance, equality of opportunity or benefit seems questionable. Opportunities are commonly and reasonably restricted to persons who have the experience, skills, or other attributes needed to make the most of them. Schools of social work, for example, hire faculty who have social work degrees. Appealing back to the word basic merely commences a long regression: social work programs admit those who have made

Employment Transition Model

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the most of high school and/or college; high school opportunities are best explored by those who got a good start in grade school; that good start, in turn, tends to depend upon good parents and good communities; and so forth. Basic does not draw a clear line; and even if it did, it would be irrelevant at the stage of qualifying to teach social work. Opportunities at that level are well beyond basic. Similar considerations apply to equality of obligations. People have diverse physical, mental, social, economic, and other capabilities. It would make no sense to require them all to carry the same weights, solve the same problems, or otherwise perform equal duties. Full acceptance of diverse kinds of individuals presumably means, not that their duties are equal, but that they all adhere to the same work ethic, or pursue a common goal, or something of that nature. Thus, it may be appropriate to drop the reference to obligations from Barkers (2003) formulation not because obligations are presently balanced or unimportant, but because the equal allocation of rights, opportunities, and social benefits implies an equal allocation of duties. One might also infer a right to receive equal protection. Barkers (2003) list, shortened, might thus refer simply to equality of rights and social benefits; and these, in turn, might be added to the list of things that people need in order to survive and thrive. Doubts about the feasibility of social justice may arise, not because it is an ideal condition, but because it is a vague one. It is a philosophical idea with a pedigree (Guttmann, 2006). But that pedigree does not necessarily determine what social workers can make of it. Social workers may entertain ideals that can be explicated and whose achievement can be imagined. But if social work is indeed a practical profession, it will not compromise its practicality by dedicating itself to purported ideals that do not actually point toward any intelligible ideal condition.

Employment Transition Model To refine Reamers view, the suggestion here is that social justice is not an ideal

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condition, but is, instead, a process. As conditions improve in a society, behaviors come to seem unjust that might have been accepted previously. A useful rule of thumb might be that social injustice calls for attention, as a practical matter, if it comes to be recognized as acute and/or chronic. In this proposal, progress is measured, not by the achievement of universal equalities, but rather by the continuing reduction and elimination of objectionable inequalities. Social change. The reference to social change in this section of the Codes Preamble is clarified in one of the Codes six Ethical Principles, which accompanies a statement that social justice is a core value of the profession. This Ethical Principle says, Social workers pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people. Social workers social change efforts are focused primarily on issues of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and other forms of social injustice. Social change appears to be the social workers response to social injustice. As such, it is apparently equivalent, in practical terms, to the effort to reduce or eliminate objectionable inequalities. In that sense, the first sentence of this Ethical Principle does not appear to add anything to the foregoing interpretation of the Preamble. This Ethical Principle does enlarge upon the Preamble by indicating that social change is pursued on behalf of persons who experience social injustice, and is not restricted to those who might formally be considered clients. The Principle also adds another item, unemployment, to the list of social injustices. The suggestion in this paper is that unemployment does not, in fact, appear to be one of the issues on which social workers social change efforts are primarily

Employment Transition Model

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focused, and that a reason for this is that a perceived problem of unemployment is derivative of a larger problem of employment. The Ethical Principle just quoted concludes by saying, Social workers strive to ensure access to needed information, services, and resources; equality of opportunity; and meaningful participation in decision making for all people. Equality of opportunity was discussed above. Since information and services to which one has access may reasonably be counted among ones resources, the gist of this statement is that social justice requires that people be given access to relevant resources and opportunities to participate meaningfully in decisionmaking. Diversity. The Ethical Principle on social change says that social workers social change efforts seek to promote sensitivity to and knowledge about oppression and cultural and ethnic diversity. This essentially repeats the Preambles statement, Social workers are sensitive to cultural and ethnic diversity. With the reference to oppression, and the Principles social justice title, it appears that insensitivity to diversity, and ignorance of it, are considered types or traits of social injustice. These several remarks about social justice, social change, and diversity suggest that the interpretation offered at the end of the preceding section of this paper might be revised thus: The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human wellbeing, by helping all people acquire the resources they need in order to survive and thrive, including material goods, services, information, rights, social benefits, and a hospitable physical environment. Social workers help people develop their physical, psychosocial, economic, and political abilities to protect themselves against private pathologies as well as objectionable inequalities in resources.

Employment Transition Model Objectionable inequalities may arise via misfortune, exploitation, domination, discrimination, ignorance of or insensitivity to cultural and ethnic diversity, and denial of meaningful participation in decisionmaking. To the extent that people are not yet empowered to develop such abilities, social workers intervene on their behalf. Dignity and Worth of the Person One of the Codes six Ethical Principles says, Social workers treat each person in a

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caring and respectful fashion, mindful of individual differences and cultural and ethnic diversity. Social workers promote clients socially responsible self-determination. This provision adds an individual dimension to the preceding comments (Reamer, 2006a, p. 14). The promotion of individual self-determination seems to indicate that the concern with private pathologies is not merely a loophole carved out of an profession that otherwise cares for people only as representatives of large problems like poverty and discrimination to suit those social workers who want to address the needs of middle- and upper-income people (Reamer, p. 7). Rather, the concern with personal mental health needs is consistent with a central recognition of people as having their own inalienable worth. The idea that social workers would treat people in a caring fashion has two somewhat distinct meanings. It implies, first, that the social worker should take care of people even if they personally dislike them. In this relatively weak sense, the term calls for basic professionalism: a social worker has to serve the client except where other ethical principles forbid doing so. A stronger sense is that social workers should actually care about people should strive, perhaps, to get past that point of disliking some of them, and should instead have a desire to be of help (Sommers-Flanagan, 2007, p. 75). Reamer (2006b) cites several core virtues that, he says, are

Employment Transition Model critically important in the work carried out by professionals (p. 31). Those virtues include

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compassion and beneficence. The latter, according to Reamer, means acting to benefit others, in acts of mercy, kindness, altruism, and love. A more familiar term for beneficence might be kindheartedness, which means not merely being kind but having a kind disposition. On the topic of self-determination, ES 1.02 says, Social workers respect and promote the right of clients to self-determination and assist clients in their efforts to identify and clarify their goals. Social workers may limit clients' right to self-determination when, in the social workers' professional judgment, clients' actions or potential actions pose a serious, foreseeable, and imminent risk to themselves or others. Foreseeable, there, seems superfluous, insofar as social workers would not be thinking of intervening if they did not foresee a problem. Clients undertake serious and imminent risk when they are about to invest their efforts or money speculatively, but that is surely not the sort of risk against which social workers would routinely seek to provide protection. The risk to be product against is a risk of harm. Another word for that is threat. Reamer (2006b, p. 98) quotes Barker (1991, p. 210) as saying that self-determination means the rights and needs of clients to be free to make their own choices and decisions. The alternative, Reamer says, is paternalism, in which social workers interfere with clients rights for their own good. Paternalism is a problem, he says, when interference with clients goes beyond what is absolutely necessary or is used as camouflage for actions that are really motivated by individual or agency self-interest (Reamer, p. 102). The last half of that statement seems redundant, since interference motivated by self-interest rather than client needs is interference that goes beyond what is absolutely necessary.

Employment Transition Model Relationships among People Another one of the Codes six Ethical Principles says, Social workers recognize the central importance of human relationships. The accompanying explanation states, Social

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workers seek to strengthen relationships among people in a purposeful effort to promote, restore, maintain, and enhance the well-being of individuals, families, social groups, organizations, and communities. Relationships may be considered a resource, and the foregoing interpretation of Code provisions might be modified accordingly. It could be argued that, if people wanted relationships, they would have them that, in other words, the introduction or strengthening of relationships may call for intervention of a kind that clients have not explicitly endorsed. What appears to be needed, in that case, is clarification of the interpretation offered above: paternalism may arise, not in instances of mere inconsistency with clients inclinations, but only when social workers decisions unavoidably contradict clients expressed preferences. Thus, for example, a family social worker whose angry client says he wants no contact with his brother would not necessarily be prevented from exploring the brothers willingness to reach out. As indicated above, the Code is concerned with all human relationships. This Ethical Principle is therefore not restricted by the Codes preoccupation, elsewhere, with professional relationships involving the social worker. Some of the clients relationships may be useful for purposes of social work practice, to help bring about desired outcomes, and others may be detrimental to such outcomes. Social workers would understandably prioritize the former and seek to reduce the latter. But there does not appear to be an implication, here, that social workers should prioritize only those relationships that are useful for the social workers purposes. Even from a utilitarian perspective, relationships that are not providing present benefits are often latent

Employment Transition Model resources of potential future value. The Ethical Principle thus appears to place a value on relationships per se, aside from whatever use the social worker can make of them. An Interpretation of Employment-Related Code Provisions The foregoing discussion yields the following interpretation of several Code provisions that appear to be related to employment: The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human wellbeing, by kindheartedly and compassionately helping all people acquire the resources they need in order to survive and thrive, including material goods, services, information, rights, relationships, social benefits, and a hospitable physical environment. Social workers help people, individually and otherwise, to develop their physical, psychosocial, economic, and political abilities to protect themselves against private pathologies and against objectionable inequalities in resources. Objectionable inequalities may arise via misfortune, exploitation, domination, discrimination, ignorance of or insensitivity to cultural and ethnic diversity, and denial of meaningful participation in decisionmaking. To the extent that people are not yet empowered to develop such abilities, social workers intervene on their behalf. Such intervention contradicts clients expressed choices only when absolutely necessary to protect clients or others against serious and imminent threats. This interpretation does not purport to exhaust the ways in which the Code may be relevant to employment, much less to speak to the other codes, legal obligations, and other

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sources of guidance that may influence how social workers approach employment-related topics

Employment Transition Model (see Freud & Krug, 2002). The point here is simply that the social worker who would comply

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with the Code should expect his/her behavior to be generally compatible with this interpretation. There is no indication, in the Code, that social workers should adhere to this interpretation only within their professional practice that, for example, a social worker who does not encounter poverty in his/her daily work would be excused from taking any efforts to mitigate it. To the contrary, the annotation accompanying the first Ethical Principle in the Code says, Social workers elevate service to others above self-interest. Social workers draw on their knowledge, values, and skills to help people in need and to address social problems. Social workers are encouraged to volunteer some portion of their professional skills with no expectation of significant financial return (pro bono service). Likewise, ES 5.01(b) says, Social workers should uphold and advance the values, ethics, knowledge, and mission of the profession, and ES 6.01 states, Social workers should promote the general welfare of society, from local to global levels . . . . [and] should promote social, economic, political, and cultural values and institutions that are compatible with the realization of social justice. The Employment Transition Model The interpretation just given presents relevant guidelines regarding the promotion of the general welfare of society and of values and institutions compatible with social justice. Except as the Code or other authorities may otherwise indicate, then, social workers are ethically obliged to implement that interpretation throughout their service to others, and to prioritize that service before self-interest.

Employment Transition Model Employment settings commonly generate a variety of relationships. For instance, there

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are employer-employee, employer-customer, and employer-stockholder relationships. These, in turn, often impact others, such as the relationships between such second parties (i.e., employees, customers, stockholders) and the members of their families or communities. To continue with those three examples, social workers may be employers, employees, customers, and/or stockholders. Such relationships arise whenever they have a job, hire a plumber, go shopping, or decide where to put their retirement savings. Social workers also impact such relationships in the lives of others, as when they recommend or facilitate a clients decision to spend his/her money or allocate his/her time in some way that pertains to a job, product, or service. The impact of such observations emerges when one changes the phrasing of the foregoing interpretation to accommodate some of those kinds of relationships: The primary mission of the social work profession, with respect to employment, is to enhance the well-being of employers, employees, customers, and stockholders, by kindheartedly and compassionately helping them acquire the resources they need in order to survive and thrive, including material goods, services, information, rights, relationships, social benefits, and a hospitable physical environment. Social workers help employers, employees, customers, and stockholders, individually and otherwise, to develop their physical, psychosocial, economic, and political abilities to protect themselves against private pathologies and against objectionable inequalities in resources. Objectionable inequalities may arise via misfortune, exploitation, domination, discrimination, ignorance of or insensitivity to cultural and ethnic diversity, and denial of meaningful participation in

Employment Transition Model decisionmaking. To the extent that employers, employees, customers, and stockholders are not yet empowered to develop such abilities, social workers intervene on their behalf. Such intervention contradicts the choices expressed by employers, employees, customers, and stockholders only when absolutely necessary to protect them or others against serious and imminent threats. Stockholders (or, in not-for-profit settings, stakeholders) are directly implicated in the employment relationship, insofar as they facilitate the creation and maintenance of the relationship, and do so in order to achieve ends that they desire. Customers, likewise, provide

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the funding or other rationale for the existence of the employing organization. Stockholders and customers cannot be excluded from the picture. For simplicity, the following discussion concentrates upon employers and employees. But that simplification does not erase social workers ethical obligations toward the employment relationship arising from their entanglements with it as stockholders, stakeholders, or customers. The foregoing revised statement of the interpretation should not be construed as ironic; there are indeed employers and stockholders who suffer deprivation in some of the ways just listed. Generally, however, the mere statement of this interpretation is sufficient to highlight the commonly accepted inequities within the world of employment. Because the imbalance is generally so egregious, the focus here will be upon equalizing matters in the employees favor. To that end, the foregoing interpretation may be reduced to a set of several propositions regarding social workers ethical obligations toward employees: 1. Resources. The primary mission of the social work profession, with respect to employees, is to enhance their well-being by kindheartedly and compassionately helping them acquire the resources they need in order to survive

Employment Transition Model and thrive, including material goods, services, information, rights, relationships, social benefits, and a hospitable physical environment. 2. Empowerment. Social workers help employees develop their physical, psychosocial, economic, and political abilities to protect themselves against private pathologies and against objectionable inequalities in resources. Objectionable inequalities may arise via misfortune, exploitation, domination, discrimination, ignorance of or insensitivity to cultural and ethnic diversity, and denial of meaningful participation in decisionmaking. 3. Intervention. To the extent that employees are not yet empowered to develop such abilities, social workers intervene on their behalf. Such intervention contradicts the choices expressed by employees only when absolutely necessary to protect them or others against serious and imminent threats. Efforts along these lines certainly could have implications for stockholders and customers. Again, however, for simplicity, the situation is treated primarily in employeremployee terms. Those three steps may be construed as a logical sequence. Social workers seek to help employees acquire needed resources. Unfortunately, employees do not always know how to acquire needed resources, so social workers seek to empower them to do that. Unfortunately,

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empowerment does not always occur on a schedule, so sometimes social workers must intervene directly to provide the needed resources. Unfortunately, sometimes employees do not want that kind of intervention, and in that event social workers may proceed with it only if it is absolutely necessary to protect against serious and imminent threats.

Employment Transition Model The logical sequence implies a somewhat reversed practical sequence. Social workers would ordinarily determine, first, what resources are needed in order to protect against serious and imminent threats. If employees saw their own danger clearly, and if they were empowered

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to acquire those resources, they would already have done so. Therefore social workers are likely to intervene immediately in connection with those absolutely essential resources. Secondarily, as attention turns from surviving to thriving, social workers determine what other resources are needed to facilitate well-being; and for these, except for the occasional barrier, the social workers contribution emphasizes empowerment rather than intervention. People tend to become aware of additional needs as time goes on, so the direct intervention phase is apt to be immediate and abrupt, while the empowerment phase will likely be evolving and ongoing. First Step: Identify Imminent Threats in Particular Spheres The first step called for by the Employment Transition Model (ETM) is, as just described, to identify serious and imminent threats. According to the Code, such an inquiry should be guided, not by automatic deference to employer preferences, but rather by a kindhearted and compassionate concern for what is best for employees. Physical Threats Workplaces often impose physically detrimental work conditions. Jackson and Schuler (2006) list a number of results of such conditions, including back pain, repetitive stress injuries, accidental death and injury, cardiovascular disease, cancer, emphysema, bronchitis, and arthritis. The relative lack of concern for what the Code calls individual differences also results in unrealistic expectations that people of varying physical conditions, ages, and sizes will sit, stand, crouch, walk, talk, and even think in the same ways or places or for the same durations; sleep or not sleep during the same daytime or nighttime hours; and exhibit the same levels of eye-hand

Employment Transition Model coordination, balance, or weight-carrying capacity. Some large corporations may be able to recruit relatively similar individuals for certain highly specialized tasks. For the most part, though, human difference remains the norm rather than the exception in the workplace. Physically detrimental employment-related conditions extend beyond the traditional

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parameters of employer-employee relations. For example, every day, people die in automobiles, and many others are badly injured. Many of those people are on their way to or from work, or are attending an appointment or running an errand related to their jobs. According to Jackson and Schuler (2006, p. 541), the automotive industry is also responsible for the highest number of workplace injuries. Such deaths and injuries (not to mention the costs borne by families, organizations, and communities disrupted by loss) result from resource allocation decisions. There are alternative decisions that could reduce such losses (e.g., Schneider, 2007). A long view, prioritizing the years of lost life over the short-term profits of employers, might allocate resources more beneficially. Another example involves the physical environment. It is not just that workers must breathe toxic workplace air and work with poisonous or carcinogenic materials. It is that those materials frequently stay behind when the workplace goes bankrupt, or is bought and closed by a rival, or is moved to a lower-cost region or nation. In essence, employers pay workers to poison themselves and their families. Irresponsible employers have created tens of thousands of hazardous waste sites around the nation, often leaving communities and taxpayers to clean up after them where possible (EPA, 2007). It does not seem necessary, at present, to develop a full list of physical threats related to employment. The examples just provided are sufficient to permit progress to the next step in the analysis.

Employment Transition Model Psychosocial Threats The workplace is also filled with psychosocially detrimental conditions. Noon and Blyton (2007) observe survival strategies used by employees who try to cope with alienating traits of the modern workplace. Those strategies include various efforts to beat the system or manipulate the rules; pilfering or otherwise using the employers property; workplace humor, subversive or not; sabotage (including whistleblowing); and escaping (physically or mentally) from otherwise unbearable tedium or distress imposed by the job. Psychosocial conditions can also have physical effects, as in the example of the employee who uses alcohol or other prescription or non-prescription drugs to cope with the job and its after-effects (Jackson & Schuler, 2006). Akabas (2000) describes the workplace as a place of exclusion and discomfort,

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and cites employer practices that generate workplace stress and erode worker loyalty. Likewise Pulley (1997, p. 64) talks of people who hate their jobs, and Bruggemann (1996) says, People bring into organizations not only skills but also feelings, values, and personal problems. In addition, staff are affected by the general dysfunctions, stresses, and cultures that organizations themselves create (p. 324). In the psychosocial area, as with physical threats, some important threats arise from situations that are not necessarily considered part of the typical employment relationship. There is, for example, the decision not to hire. Each such decision carries a message of rejection and exclusion. Repeated many times, the cumulative effects can be debilitating, as shown in the Bureau of Labor Statistics description of those who have ceased to look for work as discouraged workers. As McKee-Ryan, Song, Wanberg, and Kinicki (2005) point out, active jobhunting is linked with lower mental health, perhaps because of the stress and rejection inherent in that process or perhaps, as Taris (2002) says, because active jobhunting is

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associated with feelings of powerlessness. The felt need to portray oneself as an ideal employee also encourages job applicants to inflate their achievements and conceal their imperfections, when truthfulness and self-improvement (and, for that matter, economic efficiency) on the job would call for exactly the opposite. The obligation to impress, both before and after hiring, also leads to the expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes extreme pursuit of credentials (in e.g., higher education) that may produce a distorted impression (based on e.g., a few points difference on a standardized exam) of the persons superiority or inferiority. The employers typical freedom to fire the employee, for any reason or no reason, can generate a sycophantic and disempowering workplace culture in which employees may feel compelled to praise the supervisor who rather deserves criticism, to observe a speak-no-evil ethic regarding moral and legal violations, and to shun or be shunned by coworkers in keeping with the employers perceived disfavor. Managerial spying on employees, invasions of worker privacy, recording of mistakes in preparation for possible litigation to make the employees discharge hold up in court these and other managerial behaviors cast the employee in the role of prey for a fault-finding, predatory employer that constantly seeks to identify and cull out the slowest and weakest members of the flock, thereby inciting chronic anxiety among workers. Such remarks create the impression that, in the psychosocial as in the physical sphere, employment generates overwhelmingly numerous and complex threats. As with physical threats, it would be possible to develop the discussion of psychosocial threats at length. Again, though, the examples just provided are sufficient to give a sense of what is at issue in this area.

Employment Transition Model Economic and Political Threats Although the western concept of employment is often admired for the prosperity it imparts to workers, that prosperity appears in a different light when one takes into account its temporal dimension. In those terms, even the employees very basic economic needs extend beyond the ability to afford food, clothing, and shelter. Over the course of a career, the worker quite commonly must find a way to finance food, clothing, and other needs, not only for him/herself during weeks of full employment, but also during downturns, extended illnesses, layoffs, loss of the spouses paycheck, and retirement and also for his/her children, without interruption, for decades. Even a continuous poverty-level standard of living will ordinarily require considerably more than a poverty level of income during periods of employment, especially after factoring in inflation and the inevitable risks (over the decades of changes in national and international politics and finance) to ones personal, corporate, or governmental savings or pension plan. One example that currently resonates with many employees is that of health insurance.

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The problems insured against are physical and mental, but the unaffordability of the insurance is an economic matter. It is instructive to compare the current situation against Quigleys (19961997) statement that, within the feudal system of medieval England, serfs had coverage against disaster. Insurance against unemployment, sickness, old age was theirs in the protection of the liege lords (p. 75). Unlike the automobile and pollution examples, physical and mental health care are not intrinsically employment-related. They were made a part of the employment picture because many people looked to their employers for health care insurance. But it would also have been possible for the government to take primary responsibility for providing it, just as government

Employment Transition Model does or could play a role as ostensible and sometimes effective representative of concern for

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employees in the automobile and pollution examples. The employment problem, in that sense, is not just a matter of what employers do, or fail to do; it is more accurately a product of a complex, ongoing interaction between governmental and employing organizations. Thus, when the ETM expresses concern for employees economic and political self-protection abilities, it may take into account the possibility that weakness in one can be offset by strength in the other. It should be observed, moreover, that strength in one area can yield strength in another. If employees had enjoyed the benefit of laws written in their favor over the centuries, as employers have done, then perhaps employment contracts would now be drawn up by employees rather than employers; perhaps it would be workers rather than employers who would have the most ready access to legal recourse; and perhaps it would be recalcitrant employers, not employees, who would most commonly experience financial penalties (e.g., reduced compensation, changed work conditions, negative notations in the relevant file) for failing to live up to their obligations. Indeed, the policing capacity of politically empowered employees might have been such as to render the governmental role virtually unnecessary: instead of having to plead for protective laws, people could have just gone to court when problems cropped up in the employment relationship, and the faith expressed by politicians would have been an equalizing belief in the private person rather than a socioeconomically discriminatory and frequently unwarranted faith in private enterprise. Review of Threats The examples just provided are sufficient to indicate that serious and imminent threats to employees exist in the physical, psychosocial, economic, and political spheres. The examples also suggest that, in each of these spheres, the employment problem is enormous.

Employment Transition Model In the physical sphere, Bohlander and Snell (2004, pp. 502, 509) state that an entire

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federal bureaucracy, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was created in 1970 to achieve workplace safety. Unfortunately, that agency, more than 30 years later, has not succeeded in preventing the loss of approximately 75 million workdays each year due to workplace injuries. Enforcement of OSHA provisions remains uneven. Workplaces are undeniably safer than they were for earlier generations of industrialized workers. That safety is driven, however, by legal compulsion and the threat of lawsuits. As Maiden (2001) indicates, a primary role for social workers in this area is to steer clients toward the OSHA, but few social workers are presently working in this area. It does not appear, in short, that a program of mere reaction to existing conditions driven by economic and legal forces will enable social workers to make much of an impact. The numbers of physical injuries are, if anything, dwarfed by the magnitude and complexity of employment-related psychosocial issues. The latter extend, moreover, into the heart of the empowerment concerns expressed in the Code. According to Dickinson and Emler (1992, p. 19): The wage relation is only one of the peculiarities of modern ways of organizing work. Another is the degree to which work is specialized. . . . In the UK today more than 20,000 distinct kinds of job are recognized in official statistics. Work roles and relationships in the employment sector tend to be formalized and impersonal . . . . A third peculiarity of work is the operation of power and control. The organization of large-scale production involves chains of command in which position determines the amount of control over both the task and other members

Employment Transition Model of the workforce. The problem of control in large and complex organizations has given rise to both professional management and trade unions. . . . [C]hildren may learn that pay varies as a function of job characteristics such as skill or responsibility, but also that these contingencies are in some degree right and just. The moral preparation also involves an understanding of the kinds of authority relations that prevail in the workplace. . . . As Bruggemann (1996) says, citing Freire (1992, pp. 31, 46): Leadership in social administration [for example] has tended to be reduced to management of individuals who must be motivated to [be productive] . . . . [M]anagement applies techniques of overt control . . . . Organization itself is a system of domination that transforms individual human beings into things. This . . . is a form of oppression. (p. 299) In a similar vein, Mars (2001) comments on managerial literature on the subject of workplace sabotage. Typical works in that area, he says, assume that the workplace possesses a unitary system of legitimate authority, thereby implicitly defining alternative authorities as not fully legitimate; they also emphasize individual personality traits (e.g., frustration), ignore social dynamics, and overestimate the ability of management to influence behavior (p. xxii). As in the physical sphere, it would be possible for social workers to attempt to treat the symptoms (e.g., Straussner, 1989); but doing so does not appear likely to suffice as an immediate and effective response to the continued generation of threats from the employment situation. The examples from the economic and political spheres, above, suggest similar complexity and depth of problems. It appears that enormous systems of beliefs, traditions, and institutions have grown out of a business ethic whose priorities are substantially incompatible

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Employment Transition Model with employment-related Code provisions. The incompatibility, as described above, is so deep

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as to raise the question of whether todays courts, employment, health care, and other institutions and systems would have reached the 21st century in recognizable form, had their development over the generations been guided by a social work ethic. In each of these several spheres, the attempt to identify urgent needs requiring social work intervention appears open-ended and indeterminate. Numbers aside, the nature of these problems is such as to suggest that social workers will find it difficult to make a significant impact as long as they respond reactively, to symptoms, rather than proactively, to causes. Second Step: Determine the Underlying Cause of Imminent Threats While some social workers may respond to the many threats that employment poses in the physical, psychosocial, economic, and political spheres, others may agree that such threats will continue to be generated as long as employment is based upon an ethic that is alien to social work values, and that the generation of such threats will probably continue to far outpace the capacity of the social work profession to respond effectively. Under such circumstances, the most appropriate response may be to seek out and neutralize any underlying causes of such persistent phenomena. The engine that drives these various threats is the employment problem itself. As noted above, the gist of that problem is that the time-for-money deal is a bad one. It leads to the beliefs that employees can and should be expected to do work that is physically and psychosocially harmful, to them and to their families and communities; that they should do so at or near the lowest possible cost, relative to profits; and that their attempts to protect themselves through confrontation, unionization, litigation, or legislation should be vigorously suppressed.

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What makes the time-for-money deal bad is that, at its core, it fails to balance means and ends. It prioritizes ends profits, typically, but sometimes recognition, power, or other objectives at the expense of means. The remedy supplied by the ETM is a focus on people, through a Code-based emphasis on human needs in both the process and the outcomes. What work produces, under the ETM, are effects on people. Those effects are eventual, in the products or services generated by the work; but they are also immediate, in the experiences and relationships among participants in the employment relationship and those related to it (e.g., customers, shareholders, families). The ETM calls for social workers to identify serious and imminent threats and to determine what resources are needed to protect against them. The threats, as shown above, can be construed in piecemeal fashion, as involving physical, psychosocial, economic, and political spheres. But a piecemeal approach does not yield a workable solution because it does not get to the heart of the problem. Therefore, trying again, it appears that the serious and imminent threat is the employment relationship; and, logically speaking, what is needed is to change that relationship. And as just indicated, the nature of the needed change is to recognize effects on people as the outputs of work, and to alter work so that, to the extent possible, positive effects on people are the primary objectives of human enterprise. In the United States, government has attempted to work toward that end, especially since the 1930s, with its many programs and agencies designed to enhance survival and health of all citizens. An important problem with some of those efforts, in terms of the ETM, is that they could engender dependence rather than empowerment. They were typically designed for permanence, not for transition. The conclusion is not necessarily that government should not

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again be involved in some such effort; it is that, if government does become involved, its efforts should be directed toward the creation of arrangements that are self-sustaining. Government may conceivably be able to work in other ways to develop a focus on positive effects on people. Perhaps it would be possible, through regulation or otherwise, to adjust the availability of compensation so that it flows more reliably to those who achieve those sorts of positive effects, and not to those who do not. There may also be forms of economic organization that would facilitate more positive outcomes. For example, Rifkin (1995) anticipates a globalized social economy (p. 275), and Lutz (1999, p. 251) finds an alternative in E. F. Schumachers Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered (1973, p. 70): People can be themselves only in small comprehensible groups; therefore, we must learn to think in terms of an articulate structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small scale units the idea being that, in small units, each participant feels fully invested. With the emergence of the positive psychology movement (e.g., Diener, 2000), it seems entirely appropriate for social workers to follow the lead of the OECD (Boarini, Johansson, & Mira dEcole, 2006) and inquire actively into the availability of leisure and other unorthodox indicia of happiness and subjective well-being on the macro level (see Frey & Stutzer, 2005). This is not a paper on government or economics. Social workers may wish to keep themselves informed in such matters, so as to advocate for helpful changes. Meanwhile, however, there is a need to respond in some real-time way to the problem of employment for affected individuals at present. Third Step: Empower Employees The ETM anticipates, generally, that social workers will intervene on behalf of employees, where they are not yet empowered to protect themselves against the employment

Employment Transition Model problem. In this analysis, however, it has developed that social workers are not presently positioned to provide such intervention in a meaningful and effective way. Therefore, social workers should work toward empowering employees, so that they will be better able to make their own progress toward achievement of a society in which rewards tend to go to those who help to bring about positive effects for people. Worker Empowerment through the Permanent Strike Empowerment, in the ETM, entails development of physical, psychosocial, economic, and political abilities to protect oneself. Without denying the value of conventional efforts in

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these spheres (e.g., voting for politicians who seem likely to work toward appropriate outcomes), current trends in the global workplace do not demonstrate that conventional efforts will significantly mitigate the employment problem. What appears more likely is that some fundamental components of the equation must change in order to generate progress in the desired direction. Strikes and other efforts to hurt employers economically have traditionally been among the most potent tools that employees have been able to wield. A problem with strikes is that they have not been pursued with commitment. The purpose of a strike is, typically, to change wages and working conditions, so that workers can then return to the job at which point the exploitation and domination of employees can resume immediately, in some ways, and gradually, in others. A more committed form of strike would be permanent. The legal profession provides an example. Lawyers in each state have something in the nature of a bar association, which restricts entry into the profession. Restricted entry translates into far higher compensation, because there are not remotely enough attorneys to handle all of the legal needs that people have. Somehow,

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the public is able to live with the outrageous fact that justice, a quality as basic as faith or truth, is parceled out only to those who can or will pay an exorbitant price for it. To achieve power sufficient to bring about a marked improvement in the nature and purposes of the employment relationship, employees may have no alternative but to develop forms of permanent strike behavior to find ways, that is, to stay alive while removing themselves en masse from the workforce for years on end. This has been done in the past, to various extents, and it can be done again. The role of social workers in this development would include self-education in its dimensions and possibilities, counseling clients in its defensible aspects, and advocating means of support to facilitate the project. Examples of Permanent Strike There are parents who would rather be at home with their kids whose kids, to varying degrees, may need them but who presently find themselves required to earn a paycheck. In the American heyday, circa 1960, it was common for a parent (typically, the mother) to remain at home with the children. Doing so had salutary effects upon children, communities, and the formation of social capital via neighborhood organizations supported by these women. There is solid precedent, in other words, for the potential removal of tens of millions of seemingly willing people from the workforce in order to attend to matters at home. The need for that second paycheck is, of course, a deterrent against any such change. It has never been clear, however, why homemakers should be completely deprived of payment for doing what daycare workers, teachers, nurses, and other professionals do for children. Also, to state a fact that may have received a cold reception in more stably prosperous times, in some regards that second paycheck may have been spent unwisely. The record of consumer expenditures in recent years suggests that, when people have more money to spend, they spend it. Some

Employment Transition Model families may have been further ahead, in important ways, with lower net incomes, lower home purchase prices, and fewer reasons to stay holed up inside their McMansions. Education is another area badly in need of attention within American society. Reports

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regularly indicate that American students perform poorly in international competitions in science and math, for example, and that skills and knowledge for many kinds of workers need to be kept current in order to maintain a globally competitive economy. Additional schooling would be very helpful in these regards. It is also dismaying that more creative and inquisitive forms of training (in e.g., the arts, philosophy, and literature) seem to be highly desired but inadequately supported. There are also highly educated individuals who would gladly pursue potentially valuable research at very low cost, if only they could obtain access to small amounts of grant funding. Helping people to obtain the educational support they want and need, in these and other ways, could also keep a large number of people productively occupied outside of the workforce. As another example, present arrangements fail to provide adequate support for many of the Americans who would be willing to volunteer their time, in the U.S. or abroad, to serve people in need. Examples of competitive programs, for which there are not enough funded slots, include the Peace Corps and Teach for America. The variety of American military commitments abroad, ranging from Korea to Kosovo, suggest that there may continue to be a need for military and civilian volunteers in such areas. Supiot (2007, p. 516), distinguishing remunerated from unremunerated work, suggests that the latter is more important for the survival of society, but notes that only the former receives reliable legal protection in the courts and due accounting in economics. Thus, he says, no value is placed upon the existence of healthy, peace-loving, happy, civically aware, tolerant, non-violent individuals, or on the establishment of a good society, that is a just, peace-seeking,

Employment Transition Model closely knit and cultivated society (p. 528). Fox (1998) advocates ending corporate society because the prospect of worldwide socioeconomic change, though unrealistic given mainstream assumptions, is exactly what the evidence in psychology calls for (p. 276).

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There has been research into massive unemployment, starting in the 1950s, when it was projected that economic progress would yield steady reductions in working time (Schor, 1991, p. 4), and again in the 1990s (e.g., Rifkin, 1995).3 There are also historical examples. For instance, state and national parks are presently insufficiently funded, as are myriad public infrastructure projects; yet these are the sorts of needs to which the job-creation efforts of the Civilian Conservation Corps were dedicated during the Great Depression (Johnson, Kantor, & Fishback, 2004). There are, perhaps, many kinds of activities and projects that have gone neglected in recent decades, to which public attention and funding, and renewed recruitment efforts, might very appropriately be dedicated, so as to make employable workers less available and more powerful. Such shifts, facilitated over time in this nation and in others, could be the single most significant step that the worlds workers could take to empower themselves, to save themselves, their families, and their communities from a mutually exhausting race to the bottom. Worker Empowerment through Unemployment Education Employees have contributed to their own disempowerment by adopting and enforcing, against one another, the employers worldview. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the stigma against unemployment. Social workers can contribute helpfully to employees circumstances by promoting a more nuanced and informed understanding of the advantages as well as the disadvantages of freedom from paid toil.

Rifkins (1995) projection is not necessarily incorrect. His focus was on the coming century (p. xv). Valletta (2005) finds an accelerating upward long-term trend in duration of unemployment, conditional on the unemployment rate, beginning in 1976.

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The traditional view of unemployment as largely bad appears, on the theoretical level, in Jahodas (1981) Functional Deprivation Theory, which focuses on the loss of five latent benefits of employment: imposed time structure, regular activity with people outside the family, connection with collective goals, personal status and identity, and enforced activity. But that list may provoke critical reflection. An imposed time structure and enforced activity, for example, may make sense in certain circumstances, or for certain periods of life. But to assume that people should normally spend most of their lives being continually told what to do by someone else could suggest an extreme skepticism about the ability of empowered individuals to make responsible decisions about the best use of their time. In other words, it is reasonable to ask whether a simplistic effort to combat unemployment could ultimately do more harm than good. Does the job provide only a short-term benefit that diminishes the clients motivation toward a superior longer-term solution? Does it impose an unacceptable risk of mental or physical injury? In the Codes terms, is the proposed means of developing client self-determination socially responsible? Are clients interests being balanced against the right of others to be protected from harm and to pursue goals they value (Gambrill, 2006, p. 13)? These are the sorts of questions that might figure into the equation, when a social worker seeks to determine the nature of the unemployment situation, the characteristics of the affected clientele, and the best response under the circumstances. Getting a job often entails onerous requirements that degrade the quality of the workers existence. In the United States, the problem is not as some (Schor, 1991; Wong & Picot, 2001, p. 63) claim that annual hours of work per worker have been increasing in recent decades. That appears not to be the case (Rones, Ilg, & Gardner, 1997; Robinson & Godbey, 1997) although it is also worth noting, in terms of income distribution, Grints (2005) observation that

Employment Transition Model In 1947 an American worker on average wages would have had to work for 62 weeks to earn the median family income. In 2001 that same average worker would have had to work 81 weeks. So although productivity increased threefold over that period, the average worker has to work longer and longer just to keep up with the average. (pp. 331-332, citing Henwood, 2004, p. 23) According to Roberts (2007), the problem is, rather, that a variety of factors combine to increase a widespread sense that work and life are not in balance, or that time pressure has increased. Those factors include work intensification (i.e., pressure to do more within the same amount of time); rising job insecurity; greater work obligations during nonstandard times (e.g.,

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evenings); expectations that workers will use technology to work at times, and in places, outside the workplace; higher rates of labor market participation by women, who often carry disproportionate burdens at home; and increased pressure to work long hours (and/or to publicize the claim to be doing so), especially among the higher-educated with the penalties that excessive nonfamily obligations tend to impose upon families (e.g., Risch, Riley, & Lawler, 2003; Worthman, Mustillo, & Costello, 2003; Boden, 2005; see Gauthier, Smeeding, & Furstenberg, 2004, p. 663). Getting a job is also not the sort of solution that a social worker should recommend without hesitation if there are no jobs to be had (e.g., Feldstein, 1980, p. 351; Robertson, 1931), or if the only available jobs offer inadequate pay. Blank, Danziger, and Schoeni (2006) note that, in 2004, 28% of families with incomes below the poverty line did contain at least one fulltime, year-round worker (p. 1). Boll (2007) suggests that workers now rely increasingly upon part-time work and otherwise precarious forms of employment (p. 579). Finally, in the developing world, Castree, Coe, Ward, & Samers (2004) offer the example of Indonesians who

Employment Transition Model managed to get a job making Nike and Adidas shoes. For $2 per day, they worked overtime,

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could not afford to raise their own children, had no freedom to unionize, and toiled in physically and psychologically abusive conditions (p. 127). In short, the importance of an income is acknowledged, but its sufficiency and other characteristics are case-by-case issues. Unemployment may have mental health ramifications. But just as social workers would not require years of psychoanalysis for all clients with mental health issues, on the rationale that perhaps psychoanalysis did benefit some clients, so also social workers should beware the temptation to assume that uninterrupted decades of employment are a panacea for everyone who lacks a paying job. According to Havitz, Morden, and Samdahl (2004), numerous researchers agree that simplistic identifications of work as good and unemployment as bad are manifestly inadequate as explanations of observed variations in the effects of unemployment on mental health (p. 145, quoting Ezzy, 1993, p. 41). In a meta-analysis, Paul and Moser (2006, p. 612) found that psychological distress is associated with incongruence between the persons employment commitment (i.e., work expectations, as measured by e.g., work involvement scales) and his/her actual employment situation. Significantly, that association works both ways: unemployed people who are strongly committed to employment are in a state of psychologically disturbing incongruence, but so are employed people who are not strongly committed to employment. To a similar end, Winefield et al. (2002) cite research indicating that a bad job can be worse for mental health than no job. Because of such variations, McKee-Ryan (2005) offer this recommendation at the end of their meta-analysis: [T]his set of findings . . . suggests that generalizing the impact of job loss according to particular demographic characteristics is not appropriate. The focus

Employment Transition Model should instead be on identifying sets of individuals at risk on the basis of psychological variables. For example, those with high work-role centrality, low levels of personal coping resources, and a high degree of stress appraisals or low reemployment expectations are appropriate populations to target for specific interventions. (p. 69) Similar complexity emerges in other aspects of the unemployment experience, such as the points at which people seek and find new employment. When people do find new jobs, the psychological effects appear to depend upon what they have found. Among older workers who had experienced involuntary job loss in the first two waves of a data collection effort (in 1992 and 1994), Gallo et al. (2006) found that only those of low financial net worth displayed significantly higher depressive symptoms in the next two waves (1996 and 1998); and this, it seems (as Bjarnason and Sigurdardottir, 2003, concur), may have resulted from those persons haste in acquiring potentially unsuitable new jobs. Gash, Mertens, and Gordo (2007) find, too, that the positive health effects displayed upon acquisition of a new job are smaller when the job in question is a fixed-term position that will expire after a certain date. Even in the case of long-term unemployment, it would be a mistake to infer that the

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situation is consistently bad. Engbersen, Schuyt, Timmer, and van Waarden (1993) identified six types of long-term unemployed people in the Netherlands. By way of illustration, their enterprising type tended to be educated, wanted to return to typical employment and lifestyle, and engaged in some work on the side while receiving welfare payments, whereas the autonomous type tended toward rejection of ordinary work and consumption, preferring instead to do their own thing (p. 156).

Employment Transition Model As a matter of principle for purposes of envisioning what employment is, and what it might be it would be possible to make some benefits of education, medical care, and other

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modern advances available to persons who opt for other lifestyles. In Levines (2001) phrasing, The idea that it would be unjust to provide idlers with public support is at odds with another intuition about justice and justifiable institutional arrangements that is emblematic of liberal political communities: the idea that states ought to be neutral with respect to competing conceptions of the good (or at least with respect to conceptions that are compatible with the ideal of a well-ordered liberal constitutional regime). (p. 321) What is needed, perhaps, is not always attacking unfair terms of trade in society (Leonardsen, 2006, p. 6), as if all persons do or should aspire to the middle class. In some instances, the goal might be, rather, to respect the right to live ones life at a heterodox pace. Given the evidence that todays American lifestyle does not produce happiness in proportion to the effort that we all collectively invest in it (Oswald, 2000), it is conceivable that most people would eventually find it comfortable to revert to a more natural state of reduced employment, especially if one could mitigate artificial and potentially destructive social expectations to the contrary. That is feasible: as Clark (2006) observes, unemployment hurts less the more of it there is around (p. 2). More formally put, there is macroeconomic evidence that unemployment levels vary, among seemingly similar regions, because of social interaction effects because, that is, people in one region perceive the social and psychological costs of unemployment differently from people in another region (Hedstrm, Kolm, and berg, 2003). In short, unemployed individuals vary greatly from one another. It would seem unnecessary to make such a point employed people differ from one another, so why would unemployed

Employment Transition Model people all be alike? but this point is not always appreciated. The literature summarized in the preceding paragraphs illustrates that unemployment is a highly variegated experience that calls for nuanced and flexible attitudes, and that it may be a very appropriate intervention for some. Worker Empowerment through Questioning the Corporation The global macroeconomy as we know it is well on the way to imperiling the natural environment and, with it, the lives and comforts of billions. Moreover, the costs of natural

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resources essential for continued growth are rising rapidly. For these and other reasons that have long been evident (e.g., Nordhaus & Tobin, 1973), the macroeconomy cannot continue to grow forever (see Hinterberger, Omann, & Stocker, 2002). As that reality becomes increasingly evident on the everyday level, changes in the common perception of suitable employment become likely, if not inevitable. Generally, corporations are not formed, and their tasks are not selected, according to what employees would like to do, nor according to the things that employees consider most important to achieve in their lives nor, as this paper shows, according to the things that social workers value. It therefore seems advisable to qualify jobseeking advice and assistance with a clear sense of the long-term drawbacks of employment. In typical employment, people have to be paid to do what top management wants them to do; and too often, when they are paid or otherwise acquire a sense of obligation to perform the expected duty, they find it necessary (or, worse, they become willing) to adopt attitudes and take actions, for the benefit of the corporation, that abuse laws, ethics, people, and the environment (see Milgram, 1975). Indeed, the mere involvement of payment may have regrettable effects upon workers. Vohs, Mead, and Goode (2006) find that people who are primed to think in terms

Employment Transition Model of money tend to adopt a self-sufficient orientation in which they are more likely to isolate themselves from others, make fewer requests for help, and display reduced helpfulness.

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Top management typically selects its priorities according to what will enrich stockholders or top management itself, as measured predominantly in financial terms. Yet financial calculations substantially fail to incorporate the things that are most important in life. For instance, finance permits a calculation of the difference between earning $500 per day and earning only $100 per day; but not a calculation of the difference between earning $100 per day and spending the day with ones child. Employers set their priorities, in many cases, in pursuit of deplorable objectives. According to Passas and Goodwin (2004), Britains National Criminal Intelligence Service stated that an organized crime group meets the following criteria: contains at least three people; criminal activity is prolonged or indefinite; criminals are motivated by profit or power; serious criminal offences are being committed. In principle, there is no reason why this definition would not apply to big corporations with established records of repeated felony convictions (e.g., General Electric). (p. 1) But the focus of their book, say Passas and Goodwin, is upon misdeeds whose consequences are even more threatening than what is legally designated as crime (p. 2). The industries they examine, employing many thousands of people, include cigarettes, the arms trade, firearms, private security (i.e., mercenaries), legalized gambling, the trade in antiquities, industrialized agriculture, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and lobbying. Had they written more recently, they might have included the various parties that profited from the subprime mortgage boom.

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It would be possible for social workers to be on the wrong side of this issue. They could serve, in essence, as cheerleaders for features of the existing order that may disserve human needs and priorities including especially, but not only, those of disadvantaged people who are least likely to compete successfully. The point is not that social workers should strive to separate people from their means of subsistence. It is simply that, while helping people make it through another day, social workers should keep an eye on long-term priorities that are denied, not only to unemployed people, but to employed people as well. Summary A common impression, among American social scientists and members of the public alike, is that unemployment is a problem, and employment is the solution. If unemployment is a problem, however, it is only a problem derivatively: it is, by definition, the absence of employment, and its meaning therefore depends upon what employment is. Employment means many things. It includes contract killers and ministers. Its official definition is, to some extent, politically determined. In ordinary usage, and in the sense used in this paper, employment vaguely means having a job, typically with a supervisor and coworkers. Employer-employee relationships have been rocky, historically speaking. Wage labor was an alien concept at the start of the Industrial Revolution it was, in fact, sometimes called wage slavery. The whole idea of living by the dictates of a machine departed dramatically from agrarian lifestyles in which, in some cases, rural people would literally sleep for the entire winter. But those industrial dictates were enforced ruthlessly, to the point of eliminating those who resisted. The metaphor of a worker in chains has recurred; an adversarial, sometimes mutually exploitative employer-employee relationship has persisted.

Employment Transition Model The problem with employment is, in essence, that the time-for-money deal is a bad one. It is not consistently bad for everyone, nor is it bad in all ways. But it is generally bad for most people, in important ways. It is bad in the view of social work, in particular, because it is generally incompatible with core values of the profession. The incompatibility is, in brief, that, in the employment context, social work prioritizes the enhancement of employees well-being, while most employment relationships are dedicated to other goals. Because of that divergence, employment commonly generates multiple significant physical, psychosocial, economic, and political threats to employees well-being. These threats tend to be both complex and deeply interwoven into everyday life and institutions. While there are ideas for long-term changes that could rectify this enormously powerful but dysfunctional situation, there do not appear to be practical steps that social workers can take to intervene directly with the employment problem at present on behalf of employees. The primary course of action, for those social workers who wish to alleviate the employment problem, appears to be to empower employees. One means of empowering

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employees is the permanent strike, that is, the deliberate removal of masses of workers from the workforce, over time, into other activities that they would prefer (e.g., volunteering, parenting, obtaining higher education). This step would increase the scarcity and potentially enhance the power of those who remain in the workforce, so as to facilitate a long-term shift, in the focus of work, toward the generation of well-being for people. Other means of worker empowerment entail the education of employees, toward eliminating the stigma of unemployment or reduced employment and toward increasing the willingness of employees to question the legitimacy of corporate decisions.

Employment Transition Model References

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Adams, R., Dominelli, L., & Payne, M. (2002). Social work: Themes, issues, and critical debates (2nd ed.). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Akabas, S. H. (2000). Practice in the world of work: Promise unrealized. The handbook of social work direct practice (P. Allen-Meares & C. Garvin, Eds.) (pp. 499-517). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. American Psychological Association. (2001). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (5th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Barker, R. L. (1991). The social work dictionary (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: NASW. Barker, R. L. (2003). The social work dictionary (5th ed.). Washington, DC: NASW. Baxandall, P. (2004). Constructing unemployment: The politics of joblessness in East and West. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Baxter, V., & Kroll-Smith, S. (2005). Normalizing the workplace nap: Blurring the boundaries between public and private space and time. Current Sociology, 53(1), 33-55. Beckett, C., & Maynard, A. (2005). Values & ethics in social work: An introduction. London: Sage. Bjarnason, T., & Sigurdardottir, T. J. (2003). Psychological distress during unemployment and beyond: Social support and material deprivation among youth in six northern European countries. Social Science & Medicine 56, 973-985. Blank, R. M., Danziger, S. H., & Schoeni, R. F. (2006). Working and poor: How economic and policy changes are affecting low-wage workers. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Employment Transition Model Boarini, R., Johansson, A., & Mira dEcole, M. (2006). Alternative measures of well-being. OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers No. 33. Retrieved February 12, 2008 from http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/13/38/36165332.pdf Boden, L. I. (2005). Running on empty: Families, time, and workplace injuries. American Journal of Public Health, 95(11), pp. 1894-1897. Bohlander, G., & Snell, S. (2004). Managing human resources (13th ed). Mason, Ohio: Thomson South-Western. Boll, P. (2007). What is the future of work? Ideas from a French report. In J. M. Servais, P. Boll, M. Lansky, & C. L. Smith (Eds.), Working for better times: Rethinking work for the 21st century (pp. 567-584). Geneva: International Labour Office.

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Brill, C.K. (2001). Looking at the social work profession through the eye of the NASW Code of Ethics. Research on Social Work Practice, 11(2), 223-234. Bruggemann, W. G. (1996). The practice of macro social work. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Buchanan, N. T. (2005). Nexus of race and gender domination: Racialized sexual harassment of African American women. In J. E. Gruber & P. Morgan (Eds.), In the company of men: Male dominance and sexual harassment (pp. 294-320). Boston: Northeastern University Press. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). (2001). How the government measures unemployment. Retrieved February 9, 2008 from http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm Castree, N., Coe, N. M., Ward, K., & Samers, M. (2004). Spaces of work: Global capitalism and the geographies of labour. London: Sage.

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