Session: The Role of Institutions and Worker Power in Shaping Human Service Job Quality (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

The ability of human service organizations (HSOs) to deliver essential services hinges upon the recruitment and retention of frontline human service workers. Yet, the human services field is plagued by chronic staffing shortages. Although poor job quality, particularly low pay, has been shown to be a major contributor to worker turnover and hiring difficulties, further research is needed to understand the drivers of job quality in the human service sector and strategies to improve it. Placing HSOs and their workers at the center of inquiry, the four papers in this symposium further knowledge on both drivers and strategies. Specific attention is given to issues of racial equity in job quality as ensuring workforce diversity is critical for equitable and inclusive provision of human services.

The first two papers examine potential drivers of job quality within the human services field - privatization (outsourcing public services to the private sector) and marketization (outsourcing to for-profit organizations). Using nationally representative data, the first paper investigates the relationship between trends in the privatization and marketization in human services and multiple aspects of job quality, examining how these relationships vary by race. It highlights the racialized consequences of privatization and marketization by showing that, although these shifts are linked to lower job quality overall, they disproportionately disadvantage Black human service workers. Drawing on interviews with nonprofit HSOs managers, the second paper examines decision-making on employee compensation amid privatization in human services. The study illuminates the mechanisms through which privatization impact worker job quality by demonstrating how competing institutional pressures from government contracts and multiple stakeholders influence managers' perceptions of their (in)ability to provide competitive wages to workers.

The third and fourth papers focus on possible strategies to improve job quality in the human services: worker unionization and raised labor standards. Based on in-depth interviews with union organizers of workers in nonprofit HSOs, the third paper identifies the strategies employed by unions to challenge prevailing donative labor perspectives that rationalize mission-driven workers' acceptance of poor working conditions. The study makes a timely contribution to understanding the implications of the recent nonprofit unionization surge for management practices in HSOs and workers' job quality. The fourth paper uses administrative data and a quasi-experimental design to investigate the causal impact of the Seattle minimum wage law on the level of employment of human service workers. The mixed effects of minimum wage laws on employment growth in the human services sector showcase the effectiveness and potential challenges in leveraging labor standards to address chronic job quality problems and inequities in the human services.

The symposium moves beyond documenting the shortcomings of human service jobs to identify the drivers of poor job quality and possible avenues for improving it. The discussion will focus on how social work researchers can contribute knowledge useful for improving the quality of frontline human service jobs and in turn, the quality of services HSOs provide. Additionally, the discussion will address the implications of study findings for achieving racial equity within the human service sector.