Politics for Social Workers, by Stephen Pimpare (introduction)

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POLICY HISTORIANS

write about the two “big bangs” of U.S. wel-

fare state development—the New Deal programs of the 1930s and the Great Society programs of the 1960s. You might encounter others describing these moments as “critical junctures.”

Could March 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic have marked the beginning of a third big bang? Did we enter another critical juncture in our political and policy history?

In that month alone, so much of what for years we had been told could not be done was done almost overnight. Congress enacted a national paid sick leave policy (albeit a temporary one), ending our status as the only rich democracy without one.

It instituted a national emergency unemployment insurance program to supplement the state-run plans, and a relatively generous one at that, sending an additional $600 per week to people who could not work (and expanding the definition of

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who was eligible), then extending it at $300 per week at the end of the year. It suspended student loan payments for six months (and later extended that for an even longer period) and authorized the federal government to send a cash payment of up to $1,200 per adult and $500 per child to almost every family in the country (subsequently doing it again at half the amount). These initiatives were bold enough that household income actually rose and poverty rates declined ( J. Han, Meyer, and Sullivan 2020; Parolin, Curran, and Wimer 2020; DeParle 2020) even though the most comprehensive official unemployment measure exceeded 20 percent at one point that year (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2020). And even if it was short-lived, many of Washington’s reliable deficit hawks (people who worry a lot about the size of federal deficits, or pretend that they do) recognized the urgent need for action and debt-financed spending.

Meanwhile, states eased eligibility for their own unemployment programs, suspended work requirements for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, what we used to call Food Stamps), expanded SNAP eligibility and increased benefit levels, created emergency funds to support day-care facilities, opened up new shelter spaces for people who were experiencing homelessness, and released people who had been incarcerated for trivial offenses or who had served a significant percentage of their sentence. Nonviolent offenders were issued warnings instead of being arrested. Governments encouraged (or required) localities to suspend evictions and eliminate penalties for late property-tax payments, directed public utilities not to cut off water or power for people who fell behind on their bills, and advised local authorities to equip the

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camps set up by homeless people with portable bathrooms and washing stations. Many cities reconfigured their public spaces, closing more of them to cars and making them available to pedestrians, cyclists, diners, and children at play.

Businesses raised workers’ wages (although making sure to note that such increases were temporary), and people started to earnestly thank grocery store clerks, delivery people, and healthcare workers for their service just as they had previously done for veterans of the U.S. armed forces. In some places, homeless people claimed and occupied vacant, abandoned properties that were owned by the city. A smattering of strikes by frontline service and delivery workers spread throughout the country, causing still more businesses to raise wages, provide protective equipment, and promise safer working conditions. And in what may be one of the greatest acts of mass solidarity of the era, untold millions of us remained sequestered in our homes in order to stop the spread of the disease and protect our neighbors from illness or death.

To be sure, even this crisis was not enough to get Congress to enact the more radical proposals that were before it in those early months—a permanent national unemployment insurance program guaranteeing that people receive 100 percent of their former wages, abolition of student loan debt, a nationwide rent and mortgage moratorium, expanded access to Medicaid and Medicare, or stricter occupational health and safety regulations for the most at-risk occupations. Farmworkers and meat-processing-plant employees, many of whom were undocumented, continued to feed the nation while being ineligible for any of the expanded relief programs. Immigration and Customs

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Enforcement (ICE) continued to capture and imprison immigrants and refugees (kidnapping and then losing track of their children in the process), and, even with state, county, and municipal action, by midyear the COVID-19 death rate for prisoners was 5.5 times higher than the overall rate (Saloner et al. 2020). By May 2020 that sense of urgency and solidarity seemed to have left Washington, D.C., even though more than 100,000 people had already been officially counted among the dead at that point.

Then, yet another Black man was killed by the police—this time, his name was George Floyd—and a massive wave of sustained protest swept through the nation, inspiring comparisons to the “unrest” of the 1960s and generating concern that the United States was slipping into irredeemable chaos. As has historically been the case, much of the violence that occurred was instigated by agents of the state, not those protesting the aggressively racist practices of its institutions (Chenoweth and Pressman 2020). In response to those events, states and localities started what in some cases were serious conversations about reducing the portion of their budgets allocated to police forces (“Defund the Police” became a rallying cry). Citizens toppled statues and defaced monuments erected to the Confederacy, and many finally came to recognize the Confederate battle flag as an inherently racist symbol; NASCAR and the U.S. Navy even banned its display. These were the largest sustained mass protests the United States had seen since the peak of the Black rights movements of the 1960s and perhaps the largest in our history (International Council for Diplomacy and Dialogue 2020; Putnam, Chenoweth, and Pressman 2020)—another extraordinary instance of mass solidarity.

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As is common during crises (N. Klein 2007), bad actors will seize such moments to enact their preferred policy changes. The Trump administration used the pandemic, economic uncertainty, and outrage over racist state violence as cover for rolling back environmental protections; accelerating anti-immigrant policies and border closures; firing oversight officials perceived as hostile to their autocratic impulses or impeding their efforts to profit from the crisis; continuing efforts to corrupt the decennial census count; delegitimizing absentee-voting methods and undermining the 2020 election; and engaging in increasingly aggressive extraconstitutional efforts to suppress speech and assault protesters, culminating in the deployment of armed federal troops to stir unrest in Democratic-leaning cities and voicing support for right-wing terrorists who murdered protesters.

Many worried about rising authoritarianism and “democratic backsliding” (Ingraham 2020a; Bright Line Watch 2020), concerns that gained added weight as defeated president Donald Trump waged a sustained coup effort after losing to incoming president Joe Biden (Rutenberg and Corasaniti 2020).

Although the presidential transition ratcheted down the immediate threat, the risk remains.

What does this all tell us about U.S. politics and policy making? Do these extraordinary events confirm what we thought we knew about politics and power in the United States, or do they require us to rethink our assumptions? And, most important, what lessons can you, as social workers and others working with and for marginalized populations, take away from this extended series of crises that will help you advocate for and enact policies to improve the well-being of the people and places you care

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about? What are the strategic lessons from 2020 that will help you fight successfully for change into the future? It is my hope that this book will help you begin to answer those questions for yourself and to think strategically about what you can do to effect change.

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A CONCISE , AC C ESSIBLE GUID E T O H O W PO L ITICS A N D POLICY M AKING R EALLY WOR K IN A MER ICA— A N D W H AT S O C I A L W O R K E R S CA N D O T O H E L P THE IR CLIENT S AND C OM M U NITIES .

“Stephen Pimpare has written a book that should be in the hands of every social worker. Much like Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, it provides an indispensable guide for navigating the politics of today in order to create a more socially just world. Insightful and inspiring!”

Mark R. Rank , coauthor of Poorly Understood:

What America Gets Wrong About Poverty

“Pimpare combines his political science background and public policy expertise in an easy-to-read tool kit for social workers seeking to become more strategically savvy when converting their practice-based critiques of inequality and social injustice into action for social change. A myth-busting but well-documented inspection of the inequities baked into the American political system.”

Mimi Abramovitz , author of Regulating the Lives of Women:

Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present

“Politics for Social Workers provides a uniquely thorough explanation and in-depth analysis of the structure and functioning of our political system. Pimpare brings this analysis to bear on policies and political structures that create the inequities and marginalization that social workers seek to alleviate. The book will grant social work students a more critically informed perspective from which to approach their ethical obligations to social justice.”

Mary Hylton , Salisbury University

Stephen Pimpare is director of the Public Service and Nonprofit Leadership Program at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of The New Victorians: Poverty, Politics, and Propaganda in Two Gilded Ages (2004); A People’s History of Poverty in America (2008); and Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen (2017).

Cover design:

Elliott S. Cairns

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NE W YORK C UP.COLUMBIA.EDU Printed in the U.S.A.