‘If You Could Change One Thing’: Social Service Workers and Restructuring

Have more than 15 years of neoliberal restructuring eliminated much of the practice wisdom and social justice value orientation that strongly influenced social work practice in previous decades? In a recent, multi-year, three-province study of social service restructuring in Canada, frontline practitioners were asked about their experience in the context of constraints such as cuts to funding, new philosophies of service and forms of work organisation. They were also asked what they would like to alter about the social services system if they had the power to enact one change. Their answers illuminate the dilemmas in which social services currently operate in many parts of the industrialised, English-speaking world, as well as highlight the indomitability of worker resistance and the social justice ethic that underlies many contemporary approaches to social work practice.