Servicing a need
Last week, Mayor Adams and City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams announced a $741 million set-aside to raise the pay for tens of thousands of social services workers who are inextricably linked to, but not technically part of, the city’s municipal services apparatus. This is just common sense and should have happened sooner.
The city’s human services workforce is often described as supplementary, but that doesn’t quite do it justice. In many cases, it’s the direct provider for programs that the city would simply be unable to run otherwise. While they don’t enjoy the same salaries, benefits and job protections of municipal employees, their labor maintains the framework that allows the city to function at all.
Pre-K programs have been shown conclusively to have exponential return on investment over children’s lifetimes. Child care is essential to working parents, just as home care is to an aging population. For those who want New Yorkers with homelessness and mental health issues to receive outreach, services and case management as opposed to finding themselves untreated and on the city’s subway platforms and trains — which really should be all of us — the nonprofit social services workforce is crucial.
These tasks are not incidental, easy or merely nice; we need them to be done, and we need people willing to do them and able to survive off the pay for doing them. Inasmuch as there are staff shortages, they tend to come down to one simple calculation: the stress of the job isn’t worth the compensation for performing it, exceeding even the differential for the sense of mission that often accompanies the labor.
The more time goes on without adjustments, the more this calculation gets weighted in favor of leaving, and the more acute the shortages become. If and when the impact becomes more visible — children missing out on crucial early learning, adults missing out on stabilizing services, more New Yorkers ending up on the street — it won’t be as easy to snap our fingers and reverse course.
With the loss of a workforce comes the loss of experience and institutional know-how. Putting in place these investments preemptively is a cost-savings versus the more intensive and logistically complex task of trying to build them back up.
None of this prevents finding institutional efficiencies, reevaluating service delivery or auditing the actual performance and results of individual organizations and their workers to ensure taxpayers are getting their money’s worth. Nor does ensuring a stable social services workforce by itself solve the city’s social and political issues (just ask New Yorkers newly eligible for the Council’s expanded CityFHEPS rental voucher program still struggling to find a spot in the oversaturated housing market).
What it’s about is allowing the city the capacity to implement policy in areas where the municipal workforce itself won’t always reach.
It’s worth noting that the salaries are being raised from often hovers around the poverty level, below what we pay city workers for similar work and far below what we pay other public employees with critical roles. These increases are about little more than establishing some parity and allowing these workers to continue doing their jobs without fear that they’re teetering on the edge of needing homeless services themselves.