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Article Excerpt
Since the introduction of the first neoliberal federal budget in the mid-1980s (Cohen, 1997; Teeple, 1995), cuts in funding, restrictions on entitlements, the introduction of private sector management schemes, and ongoing waves of workplace restructuring have left many social workers questioning their career choices. Along with work practices and philosophies, social work skills have been reformulated under the new lean models of service delivery (Abramovitz, 2005; Clarke & Newman, 1992; Fabricant & Burghart, 1997). Rather than a complex synergy of individual and social knowledge that increases collectively on the job, skills are recast as "competencies" or "human capital" that workers should independently own or obtain (Jackson, 1998). Competencies or skills are measured against "value-added, which means basically contributions to profits" (Jackson, p. 124), or in the case of public and nonprofit social services, contributions to cost savings. Within the competency framing of skills, if activities and interactions in the social services do not contribute to cost savings, they are unlikely to be formally recognized or valued and may be denigrated as common sense or personal techniques. Although a growing body of literature documents the growth of deskilling (Abramovitz; D. Baines, 2004a; Dominelli & Hoogvelt, 1996), little is known about the new skills emerging in the restructured social services. Drawing on subset data from a larger study on the effects of restructuring on frontline social workers, this article explores how the relatively marginalized position of First Nations (a Canadian term of ethnicity that refers to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada) and workers of color within the restructured social services sector and their resistance to this marginalization has generated new, culturally sensitive practice skills. This article also analyzes how the marginalized position of many workers of color and First Nations workers has shaped the kinds of resistance strategies they use within and beyond the restructured social services workplace, in particular, the performance and meaning of unpaid work (unrecognized overtime, volunteer work, social activism).
Differences exist between Canada and the United States, although there are also significant similarities: Both are multicultural societies with significant Aboriginal populations, professionalized social services workforces, shrinking welfare states, and increasingly integrated global economies. Although levels of public funding and entitlements may differ, at the point of everyday social work practice public and nonprofit social services operate in significantly similar ways. Although qualitative studies are not representative of, or generalizable to, larger populations, the data drawn from this study provide an opportunity to flesh out some of the differential effects of restructuring on racialized groups as well as the unexpected outcomes such as the development of new social work skills emerging from widespread resistance to racial inequity, downsizing, managerialism, and cutbacks.
WORKPLACE RESISTANCE
In sociology and labor studies, the concept of workplace resistance does not necessarily involve massive social transformation. Instead, the concept of resistance explores the ways in which workers are involved in "getting back and getting by" in specific workplaces and in workplaces in general (Nichols & Armstrong, 1976). Resistance may involve minor infractions of rules, open advocacy for change, or a combination of both (Buroway, 1979; Edwards, 1979; Friedman, 1977; Lee-Treweek, 1997). Social services workers grapple with a number of themes not present in private sector work, including the following: a strong identification among workers with the social caring mandates of the agencies in which they are employed; a certain amount of professional discretion in how work processes are defined and undertaken; and, often, a gendered and racialized sense of moral and political obligation to provide care for individuals and communities (D. Baines, 2004a; Carniol, 2000; Mullaly, 1997). Given these themes, the target of workplace resistance is not only the management, but also the restrictive funders; the promarket governments; and a wider, uncaring, gendered and racialized society (D. Baines, 2004a). Hence, workplace resistance may target multiple and somewhat abstract powers rather than focusing on work-specific employers as the exclusive or even the primary target. These themes have not been well explored in the literature, as most studies of resistance focus on the strategies of industrial, private sector workers (Buroway, 1979) or provide heroic accounts of resistance but very little in the way of an analysis of "the ways in which intersecting and often conflicting structures of power work together" (Abu-Lughod, 1990, p. 42).
Aptheker (1989) argued that for many women, resistance flows from the conditions and spaces that are available to them, and their resistance strategies must be judged from within the context of women's lives and work as caregivers and sustainers of life.
For most women in the caring professions, caring responsibilities do not end when they leave work, rather they continue in the home and in the community (C. Baines, Evans, & Neysmith, 1998; Meyer & Storbakken, 2000). Often their paid and unpaid work lives contain a startling similarity of caring tasks, content, and intensity, and spill over into other spheres in continuous, permeable and irregular ways; hence, their resistance strategies may take on forms in which paid and unpaid care work overlap. For First Nations workers and workers of color, work-based resistance may also target racist practices, policies, and structures in the larger social environment as well as those in the immediate workplace (D. Baines, 2004c).
Although nonprofit and public social services operate on nonmarket logics, that is, they do not make a profit or surplus, most have adopted increasingly promarket approaches in which new forms of work organization have curtailed the power of workers to control their work lives and activities (Abramovitz, 2005; D. Baines, 2004b, 2004c; Dominelli & Hoogvelt, 1996). Managerial models such as "total quality management" and "new public management" stress continual improvement of work practices and a narrowing of work skills that is posited as reskilling or multiskilling, which for most workers results in...
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