Social worker appreciation day: Workers want funding, not ‘thank you’s

At a committee meeting held as part of Social Worker’s Day in the Knesset on Tuesday, social workers told Knesset committee participants that their appreciation would be more meaningful if it also came with funding. “It would help if the pats on the back came with a few extra shekels,” said Israel Union of Social Workers Chairwoman Inbar Hermoni after hearing thanks from committee participants, including Welfare and Social Affairs Minister Ya’akov Margi.

“When you hear all the congratulations, you might think that everything is great, but that isn’t the case,” said Hermoni. “There are good plans put together by the ministry in cooperation with us, and they have just been left there for four years and are not progressing.

“There is a reason that social work positions are unfilled. The social workers need to know when they will get the money,” she said, referencing hundreds of unfilled positions for social workers.

Some 88% of positions for social workers in social services departments in local municipalities are filled, said Ministry Director-General Yinon Aaroni, adding that there are 800 unfilled positions.

“Today, around 70% of social workers leave the department within two years, and that is maybe our biggest challenge,” he said, describing plans in place to invest in improving conditions for social workers.

Increased workloads

“I spoke with social work students, and they don’t want to come to the departments,” said Shoshana Bertman, a social worker in Efrat. “They want to be professionals and not punching bags.”

Bertman works part-time in the department and part-time in the private sector, where she says she has many more resources and the ability to use her professional skills. “It would be much more worthwhile for me to work exclusively in the private sector, but I stay because it is important to me. “I was in three different [municipal] departments, and there was not a single month when we were not missing staff,” she said.

Unfilled positions are causing increased workloads for current staff. There is “a worrying situation where social workers are caring for a massive number of people, some of whom they have never met,” said Sheli Ratz, a social work student and project manager at social work student NGO Osim Shinui.

“The workload must be capped, and there should be training and incentives to bring back social workers to the social services departments.”