Social Work and Violence Work

El Perry

ABSTRACT: This paper is an exploration of the role of social work in the problems posed by modern policing. Centering its narrative around the George Floyd protests of summer 2020, the author identifies the United States as a police state. They address the ways in which popular perceptions of policing do not match its realities and give historical context for the deep corruption and harmful ideological bent of the institution. The theory of the Professional Managerial Class is used to compare and contrast the social work profession to law enforcement, and the conclusion is reached that social workers must engage in an uphill battle to both defund the police and rescind neoliberal policies to truly fulfill their ethical responsibilities to their clients and themselves. Keywords: social work, police state, defund the police, Black Lives Matter, professional managerial class

Social Work and Violence Work

The architects of United States government policy have been deceiving their population since (for the purposes of this paper) 1979. Neoliberalism, which emerged that year as the dominant mode, is an ideology positing that broad freedom and prosperity can be accomplished via the deregulation and privatization of government and industry, yet in reality, the narrow scope of who exactly receives these benefits is clear. Under this ideology, wages have remained stagnant while debt and living costs have gone up for ordinary people, and economic inequality is higher than it’s ever been. Trickledown economics never actually trickled down, but it did achieve its true goal. As Harvey (2007, p. 19) asserts, “we can … interpret neoliberalism as either a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism or as a political project … to restore the power of economic elites.” He concludes in favor of the latter, though the theoretical aspects of neoliberalism are also essential, especially in regard to how it has been marketed. The promulgation of the false dilemma between “big government” and “small government” has been one of the most effective pieces of misdirection in service of neoliberal ideology. Many Americans have been conditioned to be wary of the former as a matter of principle, without examining what exactly it means in practice, issue by issue. Yet, as the Gravel Institute (2020) counters, there

doesn’t seem to be any direct correlation between the sheer size of government and its measured freedoms and prosperities. They go on to offer a fundamentally different critique, that “the problem isn’t the size of government, it’s who controls the government” (The Gravel Institute, 2020, 2:14). But this understanding alone isn’t quite adequate in dismantling misconceptions, given that -- both ironically and not coincidentally -- dogmatic prescriptions against big government tend to be selective with regard to what they decry. Namely, the harshest critics of big government in terms of education, healthcare, and other social services rarely direct their concerns towards police and military power. Yet police are the very essence of government, encapsulated through their use of violence to maintain the function and legitimacy of the state, and it is for this reason that Seigel (2018) bluntly describes them as violent workers. The state maintains a monopoly on violence, predicated on the expectation that it will use this monopoly to protect its citizenry from the violence of others, and that the use will be fair and legitimate as per the rule of law (Vaughn, 2018). Yet the state’s end of this bargain often goes unfulfilled, and George Floyd’s murder by police in May 2020 -- an incident that sparked mass protests across the US (and the world) -- is but one highprofile example. The circumstances surrounding Floyd’s murder perhaps best encapsulate the realities of neoliberalism. Significantly, it occurred amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, a crisis which the government was unequipped and unwilling to effectively respond to. Here was a working-class black man, who, like many others, had been given the freedom to struggle with job insecurity and life-threatening illness, and who was attempting to overcome both, just be killed by government officials in the street over an alleged counterfeit $20 bill. In the resulting outcry, more and more people are expressing dissatisfaction with the current modes of freedom being offered to them. Reexaminations of police power and accountability have been brought to the forefront and calls to “defund the police” have garnered more attention. The basic idea is that -- given their systemic issues of misconduct and corruption -- maybe some of the generous resources allocated to police stations across the country could be better utilized on other, less violent, social services, including social workers and mental health professionals to take over some of the responsibilities unduly placed upon the police. But although the author maintains that this would be an improvement on the status quo, the premise of swapping out law enforcement officials for social workers as an endpoint for said besieged communities is worth examination. When examining the country in its neoliberal political context, it becomes obvious that policing is not an isolated ill or even a fundamental one, rather a symptom of a system that degrades other professional institutions as well. Just as the nature of modern policing must be questioned to upend convenient presumptions, a questioning of the social work profession must follow close behind. Social workers have a responsibility to support the movement for police accountability, but we also have a responsibility to

examine our role in state violence and prioritize changing all aspects of a system built on unjust hierarchies.

The Police State If Past is Prologue

The American criminal justice system serves as one of the most salient examples of institutional racism in this country (Kovera, 2019), and when one incorporates a historical understanding, it’s difficult to imagine that it could have been anything but discriminatory by nature. One of the main predecessors of law enforcement today emerged from the roots of American racial politics: chattel slavery. The earliest police officers in the US South were slave patrollers, who had the goal of catching escaped slaves and -- when the opportunity presented -- free blacks, as well as generally keeping the slave population subservient and atomized. In the postbellum period, they transitioned seamlessly into enforcing Jim Crow laws up until the final firehose was turned on Civil Rights protestors (Vitale, 2017). Additionally, on the Western frontier, proto police existed in the form of vigilante forces dedicated to furthering white interests against those of Mexican and Indigenous populations (Vitale, 2017). Of course, somewhat similarly to how Americans incorrectly consider themselves immune from the atrocities their government commits in other nations or against those of other nationalities, attempts to narrowly center the problem with domestic police as one of racism belie the impact they have on Americans writlarge. The other predecessor of law enforcement today emerged from a system that would come to encompass racial politics along with every other aspect of peoples’ lives: capitalism. Coinciding with its rise, the first police force emerged in the 19th century in Great Britain, in response to the need for a more permanent solution to the social unrest caused by industrialization. Rather than calling in the militia to crush every protest or riot, the government opted for a group of professionals specifically dedicated to putting down such disturbances and protecting property. In other words, the government could have a few dead citizens, as a treat. The permanent presence of police inside of communities also granted them a legitimacy not afforded by the army, which in turn increased their capacity for undercover work and other forms of infiltration (Vitale, 2017). This was the export that made its way to the northern US as the region was dealing with its own issues of industrialization and undesirable (in relation to both their demographic characteristics and desire to be granted human decency, but not in their capability for profit) workers. Even from their earliest days, American law enforcement was characterized by two things: its lawlessness and its inherent hostility towards the working class. Openly accepting bribes from business owners and taking cuts from the gamblers and bootleggers they were ostensibly apprehending, the police acted more like an organized crime operation than

noble civil servants. In other instances, they acted like an occupying army, as many of early policing strategies and tactics were taken directly from military operations in countries the United States was occupying. A major use of police was to spy on and infiltrate worker’s movements, from unions to strikes. Eventually, much of the more blatant aspects of their lawbreaking were curtailed during the progressive era of the early 20th century in a push for more professionalization, but the latter characteristic of the cops, their explicit alignment with the capitalist class, was never nearly as easy to combat (Vitale, 2017).

Neoconservatism is an outgrowth of neoliberalism that has two distinguishing factors: an emphasis on maintaining social order and enforcement of conservative morality as a means of achieving order (Harvey, 2007). This authoritarian bent fits in nicely as the dominant ideological impulse behind policing today (Vitale, 2017). In many ways, the authoritarianism and corruption of modern law enforcement are more insidious than previous iterations. Increased professionalization has justified increased resource allocation and budgetary freedom. Technological advancement means the scope of police oversight on civilians has been increased. Legitimacy -- which has increased not necessarily in a moral or just sense but in the sense of selfperpetuating power -- appears to mean that the ways in which police violate the citizenry are now explicitly sanctioned by the courts. According to Whitehead (2013), a police state is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions. In this regard, the signs of an emerging police state are all around us. (para. 4). As a nation, these characteristics become more relevant every day, as the US government does to its citizens what it condemns with regard to developing governments around the world (Yousif, 2020). The hypocrisy of political leaders is not a particularly unique or surprising concept. But the acquiescence of large swathes of the citizenry, those who tacitly give the state its legitimacy, is perhaps more baffling. That is until one considers just how deeply ingrained the state’s justifying mythologies are.

Pure Ideology

The mythology of the police as the “thin blue line” between order and chaos has been highly effective in justifying their power and presence, even if it does not bear out in the relevant data (Wall, 2020; Seigel, 2020). In a country where the crime rate has significantly been decreasing for decades the police population has increased along with their funding, yet of the crimes that are reported, the number of cases actually investigated and successfully closed by the police are shockingly low (Badger & Bui, 2020) (Gramlich, 2019). The amount of chaos that police must contend with is vastly overstated; because it’s so rare for police to make arrests -- and even

rarer for those arrests to lead to convictions -- the majority of a uniformed law enforcement official’s day is spent on patrol (Vitale 2017; Seigel, 2018). It is also useful to examine what is meant by “order” in the context of law enforcement, as there is a wellestablished disparity in response based on which types of crimes are committed and by whom. The US has a two-tiered justice system in which lowlevel crimes committed by people living in the poor and working-class neighborhoods most likely to be patrolled are publicized and pursued relentlessly. Simple assault, robbery, and even non-violent drug charges landing people in prison for decades, the likelihood of harsh sentencing increasing with a defendant’s inability to afford court fees and attorneys, whereas financial crimes and even immediately violent acts committed by the wealthy are only reluctantly pursued, at best (Vitale, 2017; Waters, 2015). By all accounts, the order that police establish in society seems to be that in which a man who robbed a convenience store will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law (assuming the local police can manage to capture him, rather than simply use his existence as leverage to secure more funding), whereas a man who headed a bank that specializes in rigging currency exchange markets and contributed to a nationwide financial crash will be given a golden parachute and yet another lofty corporate position down the line. The rule of law does not exist in practice, nor do our rights to due process or protections against cruel and unusual punishment (Whitehead, 2013). Most ironic is the fact that the institution of law enforcement, of course, ostensibly dedicated to law and order, is the most actively hostile to the idea of enforcing the law amongst themselves. In a culture known as the “blue wall of silence”, most any instance of officer misconduct or lawlessness is denied or defended by fellow officers -- under the threat of retaliation on whistleblowers (Koepke, 2000). Police unions -- which, not coincidentally, are far more organized and powerful than almost any working-class union (Levin, 2020) -militantly shield any of the members in question from any consequences of their actions. This collusion extends throughout the criminal justice system. Prosecutors are reluctant to bring charges against officers, placing electoral concerns and professional cohesion above integrity in carrying out the law (Vitale, 2017; Levine, 2016). The word of law enforcement is given special status -- in court proceedings that come down to contradictory accounts from an officer and a citizen, the officer will be given automatic credence. Treating the police and prosecutors as neutral, inherently trustworthy authority figures only concerned with the facts and evidence without any concomitant regulation and oversight is of course an invitation for further corruption. Instances of police committing perjury against defendants to secure convictions and perhaps protect themselves are so prominent as to warrant the neologism of “testilying” (Moran, 2018). Rather than act as a check on executive powers of police, or even just simply fulfill their assigned duty of interpreting the Constitution, the Supreme Court of the United States took it upon themselves to invent a doctrine, known as qualified

immunity, that preemptively exempts police officers and other public officials from facing lawsuits for violating the civil liberties of citizens (Reinhardt, 2015). The reasoning given is that if law enforcement had to worry about being held accountable for breaking the law or overstepping their boundaries as government officials, they would be hindered in their ability to do their jobs. Under a government ostensibly committed to protecting citizens from the excesses of itself, it would seem that any corruption and abuse of power from state agents would warrant greater cause for concern -and policy response -- than any actions of private citizens. Yet many pundits and politicians decry the violence of protestors while downplaying and ignoring the violence of trained, militarized state-sanctioned agents, in service of handing more power to the latter group. Conversely, even those who defend the protests are rarely willing to do anything to materially limit police power, such as challenge qualified immunity or police unions. Overall, the expectations for the conduct of government officials are not only lower than those for the conduct of the people they serve, in many cases, they are nonexistent if the tendency of the courts is any metric. The message is clear: Police are not public servants; they have no duty or responsibility to protect citizens and residents. They are here to protect themselves and their economic interests as well as the economic interests of the classes equipped to fund them. This speaks to an inherently antagonist relationship with the working class. Much like an occupying army, under “warrior mentality,” the police adopt an us vs. them attitude towards the public they serve (Wall, 2020). It is through this lens, that the justification for the constant unregulated violence and increasing levels of militarization they employ on the public becomes evident. The existence of motivations beyond commitment to public safety and enhanced quality of life is perhaps most evident in a few of the more outwardly anti-libertarian aspects of policing. Drug prohibition and the criminalization of sex work, for all their resource allocation and media attention, are abject failures from a perspective of decreasing either behavior or protecting potential victims (Vitale, 2017). In addition to the clear conservative moralism in which the policies in question are rooted, it’s difficult to see the persistent refusal to reevaluate said policies in the face of their public health and safety failures as much other than pure ideological motivation; a continuation of policies that only serve to perpetuate state authority and power. Of course, it is not a bad thing to have an ideology that informs your policy advocacy. As Thorn (2017, 0:43) puts it, ideologies do not inherently hinder capability for more objective analysis, they simply “determine what facts are important and what actions are acceptable”, a process necessary for everyone, consciously or not. But underneath every ideology is a set of moral principles that one must accept to be benefited from the outcome. And because the neoconservative ideology behind law enforcement is not often presented as a subjective value set but a prescribed truth, people do not often get a chance to question it as a subjective ideology. This is of course one of the victories of liberalism, to

create an atmosphere in which people do not even consider an alternative. (Thorn, 2017).

The Multiracial Moderate

Dubbed as the “noble profession”, social work is a field committed to a broad range of social justice and advocacy in every facet of a client’s life, often for low pay and in a larger environment hostile to its cause. Yet it is equally important to acknowledge that explicitly stated good intentions do not automatically lead to good practices. As professionals dedicated to working with those who are marginalized or at low points in their life, social workers exist in positions of power, and as has been made clear above, powerful people are not exactly beholden to the interests of the less so. There is, of course, a long history in social work of racism and other prejudices levied at the marginalized, and of gestures to ethical principles without followthrough (Foster, 2020). But on a deeper level, it’s worth examining if the shortcomings of the profession are not simply oversights that can be fixed with better education and more progressive social workers, but something inherent to the profession itself as an institution. In other words, the idea that social workers are as much agents of the hostile environment as they are opponents. By the late 1800s, the capitalist class structure that begets modern policing less than a century earlier had become more complex, making it necessary that the police are not the only buffer between capitalists and workers (Ehrenreich, 1979). The classical Marxist analysis consisting of a few capitalists who own the means of production and a large, nearly allencompassing working class that labored to produce for them was becoming insufficient. The reality was that alongside the working class, another distinct group began to emerge, though it went without name or analysis as such until the 1970s, when Barbara & John Ehrenreich (1979, p. 12) first described the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC), defining it as “consisting of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” This large, heterogeneous group composed of professionals ranging from nurses and caseworkers to corporate managers, exists separately from members of the traditional working-class because despite not being capitalists, they still have opposing interests from workers. Besides their material status, however, a major differentiating factor between the PMC and capitalists was the former’s commitment to rationality and other enlightenment principles rather than solely to profit. Of course, this had to do with their self-interest as well, as demonstrated by the mass professionalization during the 1920s that served to justify their existence to the capitalist class and erect a barrier against the working class. In other words, the lengthy qualifications, ethical codes, and generally insular nature of each profession “are aimed at ensuring that the relationship between the individual professional and his or her “client” is one of benign domination” (Ehrenreichs, 1979, p. 26). For social work, this seems to be the default state that is maintained given the conflict

between ethical imperatives and other, more self-preserving aspects of professionalism. For example, despite their stated commitment to the individual dignity and worth of every human, social workers did not even begin addressing American racism head-on until the widespread period of social unrest of the 60s, and even then, their efficacy was mitigated due to the ensuing hand wringing over the professionalism of radical tactics (Reisch, 2018). The reality is that oftentimes the profession’s class status and proximity with other institutions of power influences social workers to side with the powerful over the powerless. Despite the acknowledgment of institutional injustice throughout US history, we seem to be disappointingly eager to accept the premises of law and order advocacy in the modern-day, as if the struggle for justice is over and there is no more distinction to be made between just and unjust laws (King, 1968). Currently, lulled into complacency by our comparatively racially progressive and diverse profession, many of us fail to see how the fundamental principles that figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. can be relevant today, even beyond the racial framework of his time: I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the white citizen’s council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to “justice”; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice. (2963) When describing the multiple different roles they are expected to play in communities, from performing wellness checks to counseling students inside of schools, law enforcement often refer to themselves as amateur social workers of sorts. Yet when one absorbs the implications of this -- that the normal crime and punishmentoriented police switch roles to become gentler, more humanitarian social workers -- it seems that, in practice, the opposite is true. Social workers are susceptible to similar institutional forces as the ones that facilitate police corruption, and we should be wary of perspectives that present the profession as an inherently mitigating factor.

Yet just because social workers and other members of the PMC sought out capitalist approval in a system designed by capitalist does not mean that they did not have their own will. Beyond stability of working-class and capitalist relations, the post-WWⅡ economy facilitated an unprecedented level of growth and power for the professional-managerial class (Heffernan, 2000) (Ehrenreichs, 1979) and it was at the peak of this security that a New Left emerged, led by college students and adult members of the PMC. Guided by the high ideals of rationality and public service, these radicals went to war with the older guard of their class, incorporating new social movements such as feminism, black liberation, and anti-war activism. But despite their growing interactions with and guilt-laden

consciousness of the working class, the PMC maintained their vision of a world where they themselves led, “of technocratic socialism, of a society in which the bourgeoisie has been replaced by bureaucrats, planners and experts of various sorts” (Ehrenreich, 1979, p. 42). The continued antiworking-class nature of the movement contributed to the failure to foster solidarity and set both classes up to be further divided in the coming years. In their 2013 revisitation of their seminal theory, the Ehrenreichs catalog the fall of the professionalmanagerial class. The wave of privatization and deregulation that came with the rise of neoliberalism has devastated PMC power and autonomy, and the slashing of social services has limited both the capacity and financial security and social workers and other helping professionals. Of course, the working class has always borne the brunt of societal misery, but the biggest tipping point has been the increasingly bleak prospects for the PMC alongside these workers. The class served not only as a practical buffer between capitalists and workers but also as an almost propagandistic image, a testimony to upward mobility and the American dream. Yet Ehmsen and Scharenberg (2012, p. 1) counter with the modern reality, a bleak picture in which, “saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt, unemployed or working part-time for not much more than minimum wage: the struggling recent college graduate has … become a new iconic figure on the American cultural landscape”. In this context, it becomes more clear that the sheer size of the current uprisings against police brutality and racism are not just spurred by the direct victims of either injustice, rather the discontent and insecurity of entire generations of people who have been failed by the American system, of which law enforcement is but one aspect. There are lessons for social workers to internalize going forward, and so the Ehrenreichs (2013) layout some options. The PMC dream of a technocratic rule is simply no longer viable, so, to put it bluntly, we must pick a side. Either by committing ourselves to defend the legitimacy of a rotted system or by organizing against it, this time as but a part of a movement led by client communities.

Guerrilla Warfare

There can be no attempt to defund the police or otherwise limit their power that does not come alongside addressing the issues that law enforcement was developed to keep under control. The first step for social workers here is to be able to properly understand and combat the ideology that drives this system. As Vitale (2017) points out, many law enforcement advocates will justify their presence by asserting that oftentimes people who live in heavily policed neighborhoods call for the police presence to provide a sense of security. This is true, but what is omitted here is that those same people are also oftentimes the same ones who call for better schools and other social programs, yet are ignored. Philosophically, it seems that these justifications can be boiled down to one’s conception of freedom. Because neoliberalism reigns supreme, most people are convinced that narrow

neoliberal ideas of freedom, known as negative freedoms, are the only kind there are. We cling to the ideals of freedom from violence and other violations of our persons, and even if they remain unfulfilled in practice, we still have those ideals and the police to support our perceptions. Contrasted with positive freedoms, the freedom to an education, to healthcare, and to financial security and good job benefits, which are treated as ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky fantasies, and, perversely, perhaps even a violation of our freedom (Harvey, 2007). The cheeky, inflammatory slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB), widely repeated by protestors, leftists, and libertarians of all persuasions, speaks to the unique threat of the police. It isn’t simply meant to upset law enforcement officials and individualists, though it may sometimes be levied in such a way. It has a deeper meaning; it points to a very real systemic role that cops fulfill that leaves them incapable of being anything but -- for the purposes of bluntness -- bastards. A position of near-absolute, unaccountable power over citizens and residents combined with their monopoly on violence does not change because an individual law enforcement official is a pleasant or well-intentioned person, or even if they choose to not act on their power in a given instance. It is this material reality that undergirds the behavior that leads many people who have been victimized by police to be automatically wary and resentful of them all, just as any civilian would view soldiers from hostile occupying armies. By contrast, the feelings that social workers evoke in clients and communities they serve are also based on negative experiences, but those experiences do not have the same power structure behind them. While they -- empowered by their positions in the PMC -- use often their power to neglect or harm clients, social workers are not violent workers. The difference between them and their clients, while certainly great, is more nebulous and culturally relative to the difference between law enforcement officials and their clients. A social worker does not have the power to brutalize or intimidate a client physically, nor do they have a categorical exemption from the rule of law. Rather than being naturally positioned as totally antagonistic to workers, the relationship of the PMC to workers is more complex and partially dependent upon the ideological choices of the former. Specifically relevant to the purposes of this paper, much of the harm that social workers enact on their clients would not be possible without the police and their alliance with the institution. Essentially, despite being complicit in many of the abuses of police, social workers have the ability to redeem themselves. Of course, as much as our ethical responsibility to recognize and effectively combat injustices such as those of the deeply rotted institution of policing, our collective inaction must be contextualized with real-world obstacles. Neoconservative ideas about policing and criminal justice are ingrained in the public consciousness. Ideas about the police as a necessity that we require in forms of everincreasing power and resources and people who commit (or are suspected of committing) crimes as subhumans who must be punished by any and with

any means desired not only to fly in the face of both the spirit and letter of the Constitution but also directly contradict criminological data are accepted without question. Liberals who recognize the unacceptable nature of some of the worst excesses of the police are still unable to imagine a world without the popular but warped version of law and order. And those with leftist and libertarian tendencies who have robust critiques of policing are often hesitant to advocate for policies to curb police authority and corruption, partially because of the social consequences of appearing radical and partially because of the material reality of concentrated police power that resulted from the reigning ideology invites a sense of hopelessness. People have been conditioned to stop expecting or even asking for better. Social workers must educate and empower them to do so and stand alongside them. As for those people in the streets who are demanding change -either chaotically or strategically, violent or nonviolent -- comparisons to the civil rights movement are fascinating in the moral superiority displayed by their liberal and conservative detractors. For this multiracial group of moderates in their shallow cooptation of Martin Luther King’s values, outbreaks of violence on the side of protestors -- those without institutional power -- automatically delegitimize the validity of the protests. Never mind that King, rather than condemning contemporaneous riots, referred to them as the language of the unheard. In other words, one does not have to support violence to recognize that when a powerless group responds in kind to the violence of a powerful counterpart, it is not the latter who should be called upon to change to achieve peace. Never mind that nonviolence -- beyond its moral influence -- is a strategy, one that depends on broader societal support in response to the state brutalization of nonviolent citizens. In other words, “change happens when people are willing to bleed for it” (Dankin, 2020, 3:20). The state and the police will always be perpetrators of violence, it is in their nature; the question is whether citizens respond in kind. And if they do, those that condemn them without first and primarily condemning the state “are not wishing for nonviolence; they are stating a preference for whom the violence should happen to” (Dankin, 2020, 3:58). Social workers truly committed to justice for the marginalized people do not necessarily have to encourage or support violence from that population, but at the very least they have to be willing to speak truth to power before speaking down to the routinely violated.

As Hearn (1982, p. 20) acknowledges, “it is never easy to be radical; ‘to seize things by the root.’” This does not simply apply to the mental and social difficulty of first internalizing and then advocating for highly subversive ideas, but also the conflict that can arise with one’s basic security. Despite his justifiable critiques of the profession in the mid20th-century, Reisch (2018) also

provides the necessary historical context of the extent to which the Red Scare had ravaged the field. Fast forward to the days of late capitalism, in which social workers certainly don’t enjoy militant unions along with their reliable job security and guaranteed pensions. Our high levels of actual accountability -- often at the whims of our employers and host institutions -do much to align us more with workers than with law enforcement and also solidify our weak tactical position against them. The Rosenbergs (2006) point out in their call for increased social work unionization, the history of social work’s relationship with collective bargaining is as complex as their history with the working class. There’s a deep irony in the ability of the police and the ruling class to show solidarity with each other, and they disseminate individualist messaging to the general population to maintain discord. But as the Ehrenreichs (2013) mentioned, there is a perverse hope in the collective bleakness of the situations of the working class and the PMC, in which the possibility is set for the latter to finally embrace solidarity. And so becomes more plausible the obvious first step to building effective mechanisms for pushback against the police state and the neoliberal dystopia it maintains are to beat our opponents at their own game: organize, this time with all workers in mind.

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