Fall 2024 Issue

It’s Time to Talk About Money
By Sue Coyle, MSW
Social Work Today
Vol. 24 No. 4 P. 10

While social workers don’t enter the profession for the pay, without better compensation, some, if not many, may leave because of the lack of it.

In 2023, a user posed a question in one of the social work communities on Reddit. “Any brutally honest tips you guys learned on surviving on a social worker’s salary?” they asked. “I am planning on moving out from my parents’ house soon, and I am curious on how people live on a SW income, especially in major US cities.”1

Some of the responses were from social workers doing well financially. They offered insight into what path they had taken—government jobs, private practice, and hospital social work, for example. However, other Redditors were less positive. They suggested that the new social worker consider multiple jobs, live with a partner or a roommate, be constantly prepared to switch to a higher paying position, and accept a lifestyle that was as frugal as possible.

While there was humor in several of the replies (particularly the ones with dating advice), the many and varied answers revealed, if not confirmed, a stark truth: making ends meet as a social worker is not easy. Yes, there are social workers at all degree levels earning substantial livings, but there are also social workers living paycheck to paycheck if that.

Social work salaries have not kept pace with the cost of living or even the cost of a social work degree for a long time. Though there are many fighting for change, the implications of this financial stagnation could prove damaging to the profession in terms of recruitment and retention.

The State of Pay
No social workers begin their schooling with the hope of a higher-than-average salary. “You’re not in it for the money” is a common and true mantra within the profession. “I was one of those people who had gone into this with the mindset of ‘I might not be rich as a social worker, but I’ll be happy.’ I knew [the projected salary] wasn’t that much,” says Pilar O. Bonilla, MSW, a social work advocate for Payment for Placements, the Social Worker Equity Campaign, and other organizations. Bonilla, one of the founding members of Payment for Placements, is based in New York.

She says that as she got further into social work, she started questioning why the profession was accepting the status quo. The book The End of Social Work: A Defense of the Social Worker in Times of Transformation by Steve Burghardt and other literature had her further contemplating why social work, in general, doesn’t even talk about money. “Then I went to the Department of Labor website, and I looked at the statistics, and I was just like, ‘Oh no.’”

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for social workers in 2023 was $58,380 per year or $28.07 per hour. In contrast, a Smart-Asset analysis estimates that an individual would need to make $96,500 annually to live in sustainable comfort in a major US city.

While it is true that employees in all sectors of the US economy do not believe their earnings are keeping pace with inflation and the cost of living, a study released in February 2023 sheds further light on how true that is for social workers. The Wage Equity Study compared salaries for human services employees in nonprofits to the salaries of employees in other sectors and industries in Seattle and King County, Washington.

The study found, among other things, that “Holding constant worker characteristics such as education level or age, human services workers are paid less than workers in other care industries (education and health care) and at least 30% less than workers in noncare industries. For human services workers in the nonprofit sector, median annual pay is 37% lower than in noncare industries.”2

Jennie Romich, PhD, a professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work and director of the West Coast Poverty Center, says the difference between social work pay and that for other care professions was most surprising to her and her colleagues in the study. “The other thing that stood out was what all goes into [a social work] job. It really underscored the complexity that a lot of social workers deal with. Lots of them do not have routine work. The nature of social work involves a lot of having to adapt and change.”

The discrepancy in pay does not mean social workers have not seen some increase in salary over time. They have, but the degree to which it has increased has not been in line with other professions or with the economy. “Has it slowly progressed? To a certain degree, yes, but even if you’re making $70,000 coming out of graduate school, it’s not sufficient in terms of the student debt load, in terms of the cost of living, in terms of paying for licensure, and everything that comes with it. There has been a stagnation. It’s been a slow stagnation, especially in the times that we’re living,” says Rosita L. Marinez, MS-NPL, ADV-CSW, MSW, senior vice president of Supportive Housing at the Institute for Community Living in New York and a member of the Social Worker Equity Campaign.

Contributing Factors
There’s no single reason why social work salaries have remained low. Rather, it’s a combination of many. “It’s like picking your favorite child,” Romich says when asked to identify the biggest factor influencing pay. “I don’t think you can easily separate them out: gender discrimination, the way racism operates in our labor market, the devaluation of care work, the general devaluation of people who need care. All those things.”

Social work, though widely needed throughout the country and facing a shortage of professionals, is not valued in the same way that other professions are. Programs are developed with budgets—whether grant-funded or not—that do not factor in adequate pay raises and often start with lower salaries or hourly wages than other professionals. Many point to the fact that social workers are predominantly female as one of the pivotal reasons for this, not only because male-dominated professions are still better compensated but also because society’s view of the female social worker appears to remain rooted in the origins of the profession as well.

“It goes back to the history of social work and the way it was founded as rich white ladies doing charitable work. Because that’s the foundation of the profession, that mindset that if you’re a rich white lady and you want to help people, you can afford to go to social work school. We need to chip away at that mentality that the caring professions don’t merit the kind of compensation that the noncaring professions get,” says Amy Allen, a student in the MSW program at the Boston University School of Social Work.

Romich agrees. “I don’t want to get into blaming the victim,” she cautions, “but I think our profession has a long history of its visible members not relying on it for the majority of their family income. Many prominent early social workers were women from wealthy families in an era when women were not expected to earn their keep.”

Beyond that, the United States often does not recognize the value of supporting and uplifting the communities struggling most for a variety of reasons, including those Romich mentioned, and thus, funding for programs within those communities is limited by the funders.

Unpaid Work
Another factor that may affect salaries is the degree to which social workers are expected to work beyond their job description and without pay—something that starts before many have even earned their degrees.

“In our field, we are expected to do a lot of unpaid work—not just students but professionals,” says Alejandra Luis, MSW, a part of the national leadership team for Payment for Placements and a recent MSW graduate in Georgia. Payment for Placements is an advocacy group with chapters at colleges and universities throughout the country fighting for paid internships for social work students.

Unpaid internships, with the expectation that students will complete 1,200 hours per school year, for example, are exhausting for MSW students and limit the individuals who are able to complete the program. Many social work students must work while at school but are unable to do so to the degree necessary because of the requirements, making it difficult for them to make ends meet or complete the program. Allen points to recent findings that show that 28% of social work students at Boston University are receiving at least one form of government assistance, such as SNAP, and 72% are often or always worried about expenses.

Additionally, the lack of pay in school can influence the salaries social workers receive once they graduate as well as the opportunities they may have, first and foremost because some positions are being filled by the unpaid interns, according to Elise Colquitt, MSW, a social worker in Georgia who helped establish the first Payment for Placements chapter at the University of Georgia. “We have found that at times, new social work graduates are competing for positions that many agencies choose to fill with an unpaid student instead. These agencies have found that it’s easier to take on an unpaid graduate-level social work student than trying to fill a position that needs a full-time social worker,” she explains, adding that “having social work students complete unpaid field practicums conditions them to accept lower salaries upon graduation.”

And in some cases, the lack of paid experience can lower the starting salary, says Luis who is currently job hunting. She says she’s been in interviews where the interviewer asks if her internships were paid. When she says no, they reply “Well, if you had gotten paid for them, our recruiter would be paying you something differently. This literally just happened to me two weeks ago,” she says.

Outside of internships, social workers often put in more hours than expected and take on additional tasks in an attempt to serve their clients better. However, it’s rare for these extras to be paid or even recognized.

If Nothing Changes
Should the salaries in social work continue to stagnate, what’s next for the profession? Romich sees a return to a workforce that doesn’t represent those served. “There have always been wealthy white women doing this, and I think we’re in an era now where we realize that’s one part of the population, but you don’t want that to be the only part of your human services workforce. People who have limited life experiences aren’t going to be perhaps visionary thinkers or the most effective workers in this area. If we don’t get better paying positions, we’re going to return to a profession where it’s not a viable career for people, and that would be to the detriment of the profession. We also run the risk of people leaving social work and trying to do the things they would have done as social workers with a different career training,” she says.

All interviewed agreed—worrying about a lack of retention in the field as well as decreasing diversity. Bonilla and Luis also worry about the profession as a whole continuing.

“I don’t think that social work will have a future if nothing changes,” Bonilla says.

Luis adds, “I see our profession going away if it doesn’t fix its issues. The social work profession is always worried about how are we comparing to mental health and counseling? How are we comparing to MEds? How are we comparing to clinical psychology? These are programs where the rate of return of the degrees is incredibly high.

“The fact that students are no longer seeing the appeal for this degree [is telling]. Class sizes are decreasing. Our retention rates are down,” she continues. “It’s scary to think about because there are so many people out there doing incredible work as social workers, doing so many things that are changing their communities. But once those people are gone, there’s nobody who is going to fill their shoes.”

Advocating for Change
Even with such a grim outlook, many social workers, including those interviewed, are working hard to change the state of the profession, a challenging task given how varied social work is.

Allen, a former teacher, reflects on a recent teachers’ strike in her local school district, noting that that type of organizing is unlikely in social work. “It’s the sort of thing that I wish social workers could do because striking is so effective, but social workers are so separated—all in different agencies, different aspects of the profession. That’s why Payment for Placements, the Advocacy Alliance, and groups like the Social Worker Equity Campaign are crucial,” she says. The Advocacy Alliance is an offshoot of Payment for Placements, cochaired by Bonilla. It encourages social work alumni to advocate for the needs of students.

These campaigns are all growing. Marinez notes that the Social Worker Equity Campaign has nearly 12,000 members, and Luis counts more than 55 chapters across 25 states of Payment for Placements. And through it all, the social workers—seasoned and incoming—have hope that better compensation, as well as other changes, are on the way.

“If I didn’t have any hope, I wouldn’t even bother doing this interview. I wouldn’t bother being a part of SWEC [Social Worker Equity Campaign]. I wouldn’t bother being part of P4P [Payment for Placements]. I still have hope,” Bonilla says. “Social work is an amazing profession, and we can do great things. I want to light a fire and get people moving. One of the ways to do that is to start talking. Let’s stop making this taboo. We need to talk about this. And not just talk—act. Let’s do something about it.”

— Sue Coyle, MSW, is a freelance writer and social worker in the Philadelphia suburbs.

References
1. Reddit user Queenme10. Surviving on social worker’s income? Reddit website. https://www.reddit.com/r/socialwork/comments/12f48zr/surviving_on_social_workers_income/. Published 2023.

2. Wage Equity Study Team. Wage equity for non-profit human services workers: a study of work and pay in Seattle and King County. https://www.realchangenews.org/sites/default/files/UW_SocialServicesWorker_WageStudy.pdf. Published February 2023.