Social Work Advocates Research Articles

Examining Experts’ Arguments for Increasing the Minimum Wage

The struggles of low-wage workers have increasingly become the focus of public debate, legislative activity, and widespread advocacy. Advocacy can be viewed from the vantage point of claims-making, that is, how individuals and groups define and shape a social problem to influence policy. This paper describes the wage-related claims posted online by 17 experts who testified to a City Council Wage Review Committee in Pittsburgh. Our primary aim was to understand how experts constructed their claims; secondarily, we were interested in the rationales they offered for raising wages. We thematically analyzed the testimonies to identify how they shaped and defined their claims in favor of increasing wages. Experts described the challenges faced by minimum wage workers and their families as well as by the community. They cited economic considerations, social and economic justice concerns, and moral justifications for raising the minimum wage, often combining arguments. Social work advocates are important claims-makers, yet how they “speak truth to power” is not often systematically assessed. Our analysis suggests social work advocates must be prepared to provide multiple arguments and to put a human face to any data presented. Appeals should be made to both the heads and hearts of decision-makers, while keeping social and economic justice arguments front and center.

Deaf Workers in Restaurant, Retail, and Hospitality Sector Employment: Harnessing Research to Promote Advocacy.

A quarter-century after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990 ), workplace accommodation is still a struggle for deaf employees and their managers. Many challenges are the result of communication barriers that can be overcome through much needed-although often absent-advocacy and training. This article highlights the literature on the employment of deaf individuals in the United States service industries of food service, retail, and hospitality conducted from 2000 to 2016. Exploring dimensions of both hiring and active workplace accommodation, suggestions are made for how social work advocates can harness information and strengthen their approaches for educating managers and supporting workers.

Policing Intimate Partner Violence: Attitudes toward Risk Assessment and Collaboration with Social Workers.

Risk-informed collaborative police-social service interventions are an emerging strategy intended to enhance offender accountability and victim-survivors' safety in intimate partner violence (IPV) cases. These interventions use risk assessment to determine appropriate interventions and enhance the police response for dangerous offenders by engaging in collaboration with social work advocates. Because little is known about the responsiveness of police officers to risk-informed collaborative interventions, this study examines police officer (N=544) attitudes toward IPV risk assessment and collaboration with social workers. The majority of police officers did not believe a social worker would be helpful at the scene of an IPV incident. However, those who agreed that a social worker would be helpful were more likely to be knowledgeable about the dynamics of IPV. Officers who believed risk assessment was important were more likely to believe that the police response to IPV is necessary. Finally, officers' perceived knowledge about risk for homicide was not consistently associated with actual knowledge about IPV. These findings suggest a need for knowledgeable social workers to collaborate with police, particularly in high-risk cases, and to offer training for officers on risk factors for homicide, coercive control, and misperceptions about IPV.

The Rise of Cyberactivism: Implications for the Future of Advocacy in the Human Services

These are hard times for social welfare advocates. Globalization, devolution, and a conservative political climate have challenged our traditional approaches to advocacy. New advocacy methods that use technology to change public policy have been developed and provide us with new avenues to address the changed political economy of social welfare. Collectively called cyberactivism, these techniques can be used to advantage by social work advocates. This article looks at recent cyberactivist campaigns, examines barriers to cyberactivism, and suggests actions that social work advocates can take to use these new tools and ideas. We conclude that these techniques have been widely used by social activists to contribute to policy change and have excellent potential as part of the social work advocacy arsenal.

Medicare: an advocacy perspective for social workers.

Many Medicare recipients and social work advocates assume this program of federal health care insurance for the elderly and disabled to be relatively trouble free and, therefore, not relevant for advocacy efforts. Only when confronted with a reimbursement denial do the internal complexities and contradictions of the Medicare program, and the resultant need for advocacy, become apparent to recipient and worker alike. This paper presents a conceptual framework and advocacy perspective on Medicare's structure, benefits, and appeals procedures in order to aid a social work advocate in deciding whether to deal with recurrent Medicare problems through techniques to maximize benefits, appeals procedures, or legislative advocacy.