Precarious Professionals: The Impact of Neoliberalism on the Workforce of the Nonprofit Human Service Sector

1 Introduction

The U.S. human service sector encompasses a vast array of private and public agencies that provide “cradle to grave” services in the areas of health, mental health, education, and social welfare. As was apparent from efforts during the COVID pandemic, human service staff provide critical care and support to the most vulnerable populations (Abrams and Dettlaff 2020). Yet over the past 40 years, neoliberal policies and regulations that emphasized private market solutions, austerity measures, and public sector devolution (Brown 2015, 2019; Kotsko 2018; Wilson 2018) have negatively impacted the human service sector (Abramovitz 2014; Abramovitz and Zelnick 2015; Caplan and Ricciardelli 2016; Hasenfeld and Garrow 2012). Simultaneously, economic precarity among working class, low-income, and in-poverty populations has intensified, resulting in increased demands for human service sector assistance with staff reporting that service user needs have become psychologically, socially, and materially more complex (Burghardt 2021; Newell 2020; Zelnick and Abramovitz 2020). These developments further weaken an already strained human service sector with the COVID pandemic making the situation worse (Alessi, Hutchison, and Kahn 2021; Neely-Barnes et al. 2021; Ross et al. 2022).

In this article, I focus on the impact of neoliberalism on the U.S. nonprofit human service workforce, though many developments discussed here also are present in other countries (Gauffin, Heggebø and Elstad 2021; Gómez-García, Alson-Sangregorio, and Llamazares-Sánchez 2020; Hyslop 2018; Sakellariou and Rotarou 2017; Strier and Feldman 2018; Turpin, Shier, and Handy 2021). I delineate ways that neoliberalism has impacted the nonprofit human service sector and indicate some ways that nonprofit human service agencies respond to, cope with, or mitigate that impact. Given sector and organizational contexts, I then share findings from a qualitative study on human service working conditions, specifically centering on the experiences and opinions of frontline professional direct service workers. I conclude by highlighting actions that workers have undertaken to cope with current conditions and suggest possible strategies that could offer more comprehensive responses to neoliberalism.

2 Neoliberalism, the Nonprofit Sector, and Human Service Organizations

Neoliberalism “has never been only about the economics. Neoliberalism is a set of cultural beliefs that celebrates and reifies individualism, property ownership, and wealth accumulation in ways that are profoundly anti-political and anti-democratic” (Wong 2022). The fiscal consequences of 40 years of neoliberalism, including concentrating wealth in the upper 1 %, a widening income gap, de-funding government programs and initiatives, increasing personal and household debt (especially student debt), and financial precarity resulting in rising housing and food insecurities, are well documented (Brown 2015; 2019; Caplan and Ricciardelli 2016; Gerstle 2022; Kotsko 2018; Toft 2021; Wilson 2018; Wong 2022). Equally important was an accompanying shift in values, with the reification of individual effort and responsibility. Wilson (2018) characterized this as “hyper-individualism … that pits us against our peers and the rest of the world” (p. 4), thus atomizing society and delegitimating collective action.

In theory, the mission-driven nature of the nonprofit sector is diametrically opposed to the ethos of neoliberalism. Nonprofits, by definition, are meant to serve and be accountable to community. The shift away from public services, through privatization, and towards market-based solutions, impacted the nonprofit sector, which was expected to provide needed programs and services. Many nonprofits did so by embracing more entrepreneurial approaches including heightened marketization. There is a considerable body of literature on the integration of business-oriented ethics, values, and practices into the nonprofit world, especially regarding fiscal health, performance measurement, and staff control through approaches such as the New Public Management model (Harrison and Thornton 2022; Maier, Meyer, and Steinbereithner 2016; Paarlberg and Hwang 2017; Robichau, Sandberg, and Russo 2024; Smith 2018; Smith and Phillips 2016; Turpin, Shier, and Handy 2021).

Yet critiques of the sector reframe it as a non-profit industrial complex in which neoliberalism is upheld not challenged, especially by impeding social justice initiatives (Alexander and Fernandez 2021; Fancher 2020; Fox and Turner 2016; Samimi and DeHerrera 2021). In this view, the nonprofit sector serves the interests of political and economic elites by placating and surveilling marginalized and potentially disruptive populations. The philanthropic arm supports initiatives that maintain this status quo, while underfunding projects or programs that call for structural change. The sector’s turn toward marketization and promotion of professionalization, as well as the regulatory environment in which nonprofits operate, have resulted in 40 years of undermining civil society and by extension democracy with advocacy and public interest functions substantially thwarted (Alexander and Fernandez 2021).

Human service agencies, by design, are about meeting the needs of the public, especially those from marginalized groups. Yet the human services have been caught in the fiscal web and cultural ethos of neoliberalism. Perhaps to stay viable, the sector and the agencies within it, have adopted various approaches to fiscal management, service goals and delivery, and staffing that reflect neoliberal principles (Abramovitz 2014; Robichau and Wang 2018; Soss et al. 2013; Zelnick, Abramovitz, and Pirutinsky 2022). Client interventions increasingly are valued for efficiency of implementation, measurable (usually quantifiable) outcomes, and marketability, rather than the more time-consuming approaches of relationship building, or community and structural collective actions. Privatization has shifted resources away from public agencies that now contract with nonprofit organizations to deliver services at less cost. The public sector functions as a monitoring entity, overseeing the devolution of programs to NPOs (Abramovitz and Zelnick 2020; Burghardt 2021; Toft 2021; Zelnick and Abramovitz 2020).

Scholarship on neoliberalism’s impact on the human service sector and its nonprofit agencies paints a bleak picture, as illustrated in Figure 1. First, note that clients and communities, who are asking for assistance from human service agencies, also have been affected by neoliberal policies as manifested through heightened economic precarity including food scarcity, housing insecurity, and employment irregularity. There has been a noticeable uptick in the range of problems and challenges reported by agency service users, many of whom do not have the financial resources to make ends meet (Burghardt 2021; Collins-Camargo et al. 2019; Hyde 2020).

Figure 1:

Neoliberalism’s impact on the human service sector and agencies.

These circumstances eventually may lead to requests for human service assistance; they also may exacerbate existing or create new physical and mental health illness and distress (e.g. stress and anxiety). For example, the traumatizing cumulative impact of living in or near poverty on the health and well-being of children, adolescents, and adults has been well documented (Hodgetts and Stolte 2017; Lee et al. 2021; Victora et al. 2022). The complexity of service user situations has intensified (Burghardt 2021; Costakis, Gruhlke, and Su 2021; Newell 2020; Zelnick and Abramovitz 2020). A family seeking housing assistance also may benefit from substance abuse or mental health counseling for a family member, job training opportunities for the adults, and affordable care for children and the elderly. Human service agencies contend with not just an increase in, but an intensification of, client and community demands within an ideological environment that places responsibility for recovery on the individual not the system (Wilson 2018).

Neoliberalism’s austerity measures, devolution of public services, and emphasis on market solutions has made it much more difficult for human services to respond effectively to growing client and community need. Fiscally starved and unable to meet demand, the human service sector is nonetheless blamed by politicians and the public for a failure to adequately serve those in need (Burghardt 2021, Toft 2021). Human services are thus delegitimated and degraded. The sector’s response to neoliberal austerity measures has manifested primarily through the adoption of service privatization and managerialism, thereby placing an increased burden on nonprofits that are being managed in more restrictive or authoritarian ways (Abramovitz and Zelnick 2015; Collins-Camargo et al. 2019; Robichau and Wang 2018; Zelnick and Abramovitz 2020; Zelnick, Abramovitz, and Pirutinsky 2022).

Nonprofit human service organizations negotiate the neoliberal environment in a number of ways. Often, staff are asked to increase client contact hours (necessary for billing revenue), undertake tasks such as endless paperwork on their own time, and pay for their own professional development opportunities and supervision (Burghardt 2021; Huerta et al. 2021; Katz, Julien-Chinn, and Wall 2021; Spielfogel, Leathers, and Christian 2016; Vito 2020). Human service managers may raise service eligibility thresholds, restrict number of client sessions, and focus on insurance reimbursement as opposed to client need (Aronowitz 2012; Burghardt 2021; Caplan and Ricciardelli 2016; Collins-Camargo et al. 2019; Hasenfeld and Garrow 2012; Zelnick, Abramovitz, and Pirutinsky 2022). Managers also look for ways to cut personnel costs through below market staff compensation and precarious work arrangements including an emerging trend of hiring professional staff on a contingency basis. Contingency, or gig work, is typically associated with low skill segments of the labor market but increasingly this employment arrangement is used with highly skilled or educated workers; university adjunct professors probably are the most familiar example (Childress 2019; Gibelman 2005; Hyde 2020, 2021; Lapalme and Doucet 2018; Van Harten, Knies, and Leisink 2017). Given these conditions, a major challenge in the human services is finding and especially retaining professional frontline service staff trained to provide the array of critically needed health, mental health and social services to individuals, families, and communities.

3 Views from Frontline Service Workers in Human Service Agencies

Research on neoliberalism’s impact on the human services has tended to focus on sector or organizational levels of analysis. Largely missing are the voices of human service workers. To understand how professionally trained frontline human service workers contend with current working conditions, interviews were conducted with 40 workers as part of a larger study on the labor conditions in the human services (Hyde 2020, 2021). Table 1 presents a demographic profile of the interviewees, half of whom worked on contingency and the other half held permanent jobs. Interviewees are mostly white women with MSW degrees; all employed in nonprofit settings. Interviews explored “typical” workdays, best and worst parts of their jobs, what they wished they had known at the start of their jobs, future plans, and general working conditions. The interviews were recorded and transcribed; data were then thematically coded and analyzed (Saldaña 2016). Presented here are the themes that capture workers views of current working conditions. While findings from these interviews cannot be considered generalizable, they do dovetail with current scholarship on working conditions in human service and nonprofit sectors.

The overwhelming concern of these workers, regardless of status, experience, or focus was compensation. Simply put, they asserted that they were not paid enough especially given the education and experience they brought to their work. Under-compensation was linked to unreasonable work demands manifested through high caseloads or needing to complete work after hours:

I have a caseload of 120 [dialysis] patients across four sites. We’ve gotten no raise or bonus in years (Rosa, permanent).

My caseload is over 40 clients a week. There’s no way for me to keep up with all the paperwork that comes with these cases, so I take it home. I do a lot of work at home (Jada, permanent).

I only get paid when my client shows up and can only bill for client contact hours. I also need to build my own client pool. All paperwork gets done at home. It’s a grind (Sadie, contingent).

Interviewees indicated that they were expected to “do more with less” and several, such as Trish (permanent), commented that the combination of low pay, high caseloads, and work at home was responsible for staff leaving:

Our workload has increased by 30 cases with no additional staff and no financial incentives. The low pay, no raises or bonuses, and too many extra clients are why we’re losing staff. And newer staff just see this job as a steppingstone, but there’s no lasting commitment.

Fiscal concerns for human service workers were not limited to insufficient wages. Professional staff with graduate-level education and training, such as these interviewees, usually seek and maintain various levels of licensure. To get and keep licensure, workers take continuing education classes and licensure exams, and receive set hours of one-on-one supervision. These costs used to be borne, partially or fully, by the agency, but have increasingly shifted to the individual worker. This is particularly challenging for contingency workers, who report not having access to regular supervision and thus need to hire an outside supervisor to meet licensure requirements (Hyde 2021). Add to this the verified data that the licensure exam has significantly higher fail rates for people of color because it is normed on white, middle-class standards (Mina 2022), which heightens economic vulnerability. It can be expensive to become and continue as a direct service worker:

I had debt coming out of school. My job allowed me to stay on probation until I got my license. But I failed that [expletive] exam twice. That is, I paid for prep, supervision, and exam fees twice without getting anything! I guess the third time is a charm because I finally passed and have my LSW. Of course, I now need to worry about how I’m going to manage the next step. It’s such a racquet. I continue to go into debt to help people I care about (Cassie, permanent).

If material concerns are one side of the coin, the “emotional labor” of human service work is the other (Costakis, Gruhlke, and Yu 2021). Both permanent and contingency workers spoke of significant psychological burdens. Stress from the job’s fiscal precarity contributes to this, as does the increasingly complicated demands of (too many) clients. A more recent development identified by respondents is the atomized environment of human service agencies. Relationships are an integral part of human service work. A practitioner needs to establish viable connections with service users in order to understand and adequately respond to requests for assistance. Further, staff often rely on collegial relationships to get feedback on difficult cases, resolve ethical dilemmas, or acquire referral options. Yet staff reported that the workflow in agencies often resembled an assembly line rather than engaged, relationship-centered processes. Clients are seen and dispatched or are monitored using punitive benchmarks. There is little time to build meaningful relationships with service users or engage in collaborative work or consultation with colleagues. One social worker at a community health center said: “I thought social work was social. But it is not. It is just work and I’m really starting to hate it” (Zack, contingency).

In addition to the centrality of relationships in social work, the ethos of “helping,” “doing good,” or ameliorating social problems is central to human service work, and corresponds with the construct – “psychic income” – that permeates the nonprofit sector (Robichau, Sandberg, and Russo 2024). Human service staff are “encouraged” to perform over and above their job scope or hours because “clients need them.” Yet as with nonprofit employees in general, human service workers are increasingly questioning whether the opportunity to engage in altruistic work is a benefit or something to extol. Some staff, such as Brittany (permanent), reframe human service labor from an act of charity to a knowledge and skill set that deserves adequate compensation and respect:

I really want to like my job. I love my clients and I believe in the work I do. I’ve been with my current employer for about 16–17 months, and I’ve gotten so exhausted by them constantly asking for me to labor for them for free. They are constantly begging full-time, salaried people to cover 3-hour therapy groups, with an additional hour of notes, for no pay. … I am skilled and competent and well-versed in my subfield. I already have a caseload of 25–30 clients and run 9 hours of group a week as part of my regular workload. I am compassionate and my clients almost uniformly have positive things to say about me. I could start working a private practice and begin with charging folks $150 an hour. So, management shouldn’t turn around and tell me my labor is literally worthless and that if I don’t do their bidding for free that I don’t care about the clients.

Given the fiscal, relational, and personal pressures, it should not be surprising that human service workers name “burnout” as a significant worksite issue. Yet while workers can identify some of the broad factors that contribute to burnout (e.g. high caseloads), professional associations, educational programs, and many human service organizations have emphasized individual solutions to mitigate stress, such as better time management or self-care routines. Staff are encouraged to meditate, eat well, and get enough sleep. One respondent shared that in her agency, managers gave each worker an aroma candle to help them relax. The problem is not self-care, per se, but rather it is that the onus for self-care rests on the individual worker with little or no attention paid to the systemic or organizational dynamics that caused worker burnout. Self-care is used as a panacea for worker distress and disengagement:

If I hear one more person tell me to engage in self-care, I will scream. I won’t be responsible for my actions. Sure, meditation is a good practice to have. But it doesn’t solve the fact that I have too many clients, too much paperwork, and not enough answers. It is heartbreaking and stressful. I’m running on empty, and this self-care bullshit doesn’t fill the tank (Harriet, permanent).

While some respondents noted that their supervisors were supportive, that alone was not sufficient to protect against burnout: “My immediate supervisor is great. Very encouraging and insightful. But she’s overwhelmed too, though I try to reciprocate and support her. I think we’re both drowning” (Kayla, permanent).

While most interviewees did not articulate analyses of why these working conditions existed beyond statements such as “it’s just getting worse,” they were clear that their situations were not sustainable financially or emotionally. Beyond the belief that they deserved better pay commensurate with education and experience, they also asserted that given the cost of living, educational debt, and other expenses they needed higher wages to live:

It’s erratic pay and low benefits. I can’t get ahead financially or professionally (Tina, contingency).

It’s hard to be in a job where you like the work and your co-workers but you can’t live on your salary. Thankfully social work gives you transferable skills, so I’m looking for jobs with better salaries, upward mobility, and growth. It probably won’t be in social services, though, because I can’t afford it. Maybe I’ll look into communications in a business (Kat, permanent).

Similarly, respondents who raised concerns about the emotional toll of their work talked about appreciating the job, but that they could not continue with the endless demands. Marlene (permanent) captured this viewpoint: “I really like working in a collaborative agency with supportive co-workers. But the work is so emotionally and physically taxing that I can’t sustain this for much longer. The work is meaningful, but the expectations are too much.”

Respondents who offered a more analytical understanding homed in on how agencies treated them as expendable labor:

Here’s how I see it. We see clients, fit them in a diagnostic box, fill out insurance forms and then start all over again. We’re just cogs in a machine (Fred, contingency).

Clinicians are exploited through low wages and high caseloads, and punished if we try to draw boundaries. The agency basically steals income from its staff (Julie, permanent).

Interestingly, respondents did not place responsibility or blame on individuals, such as supervisors or managers, for these working conditions. Instead, they held “the agency” culpable, as if the organization had the ability to act, make decisions, and set working conditions as an entity unto itself. Based on the situations shared by interviewees, it does seem that human service agencies increasingly rely on the uncompensated or undercompensated labor to meet (or attempt to meet) service user demands. The problem of inadequate resources is solved on the backs of the staff, who are somehow expected to “cope” with the strain.

4 Addressing Neoliberalism

In their report on the need to support and strengthen the human service sector, Morris and Roberts state that “both recipients of human services and society as a whole face significant risks if the human services ecosystem is not financially strong and able to deliver on its potential. The consequences range from negative health and behavioral outcomes to elevated health and criminal justice and corrections system expenses” (2018, p. 17). Since that report was issued, there are few sustained efforts on the national stage to bolster and expand that ecosystem. Instead, as predicted, the carceral system has increased (it also is a primary point of delivery for human services to Black and Brown service users). The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the dire circumstances within the human service sector.

To date, the professional associations that represent the human service workforce have done little on behalf of workers to directly challenge neoliberal policies and practices. For example, the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), in its recent Code of Ethics revision, now indicates that “self-care” is the professional responsibility of the individual social worker (https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Highlighted-Revisions-to-the-Code-of-Ethics). While there is brief mention of agency context and systemic reasons for why social workers feel burned out, alienated, or disengaged to the point of resignation, no strategies for altering broader organizational or system environments are offered.

It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a fully developed, comprehensive set of strategies that mitigate or dismantle neoliberalism. There are, however, important developments that call attention to and in some instances address working conditions in human service agencies, as well as possible strategic options that could challenge neoliberal policies and protocols. Figure 2 depicts a strategic array from individual to professional association responses.

First are two examples that focus on individual job and labor market behavior. “Quiet quitting” is a version of working to contract that has received considerable attention lately (Klotz and Bolino 2022; Krueger 2022; Nyce 2022). It is a misnamed concept because one doesn’t exit employment. Rather, workers do the minimum required by their jobs (sometimes termed “working to contract”). In human services, scaling back to specificized job responsibilities rather than what is being demanded is significant. It directly challenges the ethos of sacrifice used to mandate extra work. As noted above by several interviewees, surplus labor is extracted from workers when they perform tasks after hours or take on new responsibilities without additional compensation. While only anecdotal, there does seem to be a scaling back by human service workers (mostly younger ones) of engaging in work over and above what they are paid to do. Quiet quitting represents an attempt to assert control over one’s scope of work and recalibrate work-life balance.

Another individual strategy is actual quitting. Employment data during and post COVID indicate significant labor market disruptions termed broadly as “the Great Resignation.” Human services, particularly those providing health care, were not immune to mass job exiting; and this exiting was happening well before the current mass exodus from the labor market. This is particularly true for female staff, who comprise most of the human service workforce and disproportionately carried additional family care burdens. As interview respondents asserted, low pay, high caseloads, and poor work-family boundaries were the primary drivers of job exits, with the option of remote work being a mitigating factor (AdoptUSKids 2022; Cho, Lambert, and Pollack 2023; Collins-Camargo et al. 2019; Costakis, Gruhlke, and Su 2021; Katz, Julien-Chinn, and Wall 2021; Spielfogel, Leathers, and Christian 2016; Vito 2020). Some professionals moved into private practice, others took jobs outside the sector, and another group left the labor market entirely (Burghardt 2021).

Quiet quitting and actual quitting are reactive acts of individual resistance with the worker perhaps benefiting by controlling their work requirements or obtaining better options. If, however, enough staff in an agency engage in them then there could be a significant impact on workflow, program coverage, or staff availability, though these repercussions do not address the neoliberal causes of the working conditions.

Human service workers, and their allies, also are engaging in various collective mobilization efforts to challenge the professional status quo and secure better working conditions. Increased unionization in human service organizations are part of a broader resurgence of labor mobilization such as the well-publicized Starbucks and Amazon warehouse campaigns. Within human service agencies, it appears to be younger workers leading these efforts as they are refusing the norms of sacrifice, low pay, and work overload. Established unions such as the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are making concerted engagement efforts with human service workers, and there has been a resurgence of the International Workers of the World (IWW) that brings a focus of building a working-class movement across labor sectors including the human services. Organized groups, such as Social Service Workers United (https://socialserviceworkersunited.medium.com/) are mobilizing for better pay, improved working conditions, and “collective liberation.”

There also are cross-site issue organizing initiatives. Groups such as the Social Work Equity Campaign, a nation-wide effort of concerned educators and practitioners to address “deplorable salaries, ballooning workloads, demands for unpaid overtime, and racial and gender inequality” (https://www.swequitycampaign.info/home), and the Network to Advance Abolitionist Social Work (NAASW), which “strives to amplify a practice of social work aimed at dismantling the prison industrial complex” (https://www.naasw.com/) through research, political education, organizing and advocacy, are engaged in long-term initiatives to move the human service sector away from neoliberal ideologies and practices and toward more compassionate, social justice praxis.

As with individual worker actions, these collective actions are in reaction to current conditions. Unlike individual strategies, however, collective initiatives often were built on analyses of broader systemic causes of their working conditions including the impact of neoliberal measures and principles.

Moving from worker to agency-based actions, there was little information from respondents regarding organizations undertaking comprehensive measures to address their concerns. Instead, human service agencies seem to deal with neoliberalism by trying to adapt to it (Abramovitz and Zelnick 2015; Burghardt 2021; Morris and Robert 2018). This, in turn, contributed to the problematic working conditions that immiserated workers and created staffing problems. There needs to be efforts within these organizations to rethink purpose, protocols, and outcomes so that staff and service users feel respected and supported. Agency leadership could or should recalibrate wages and implement consistent non-punitive supervision, since altruism and sacrifice will no longer be enough to entice or retain workers who may feel overwhelmed by the demands of a job’s emotional labor (Costakis, Gruhlke, and Su 2021; Robichau, Sandberg, and Russo 2024).

One option is to examine and revise how nonprofit managers, often the messengers and enforcers of neoliberal policies and protocols, are trained. There needs to be movement away from adopting business values and practices that manifest managerialism and marketization skills and towards support for the more altruistic aspects of nonprofit missions and goals. Sandberg and Elliott (2019) outline one such framework with a “care-centered” model for nonprofit management. This model recognizes that in addition to promoting the civic role of nonprofits, managers need to engage in and facilitate organizational environments that nurture and support of staff and consumers. Staff cite relationships with supervisors and colleagues as critical in their determination of job worth and satisfaction, so engaged management would be one possible place to begin. This also would help counter the hyper-individualism of neoliberal ideology. Further, the model calls for re-prioritizing the business or corporate aspects that have infiltrated nonprofit organizations such that these elements are seen as useful skills (e.g. accounting) rather than ideological mandates (e.g. profit creation).

Many of the problems identified by human service staff are rooted in a shortage of funding. There never seems to be enough, and what monies are available often come with limitations that echo neoliberal principles. Resource providers such as foundations and government granting agencies could play important roles in altering the ideological and fiscal terrain in which human service agencies operate in ways that address systemic factors. For example, they could prioritize general operating support over extended periods of time rather than the backing of short-term pilot programs. Funders could reconsider what they deem as “measures of success.” Under the neoliberal umbrella, quantifiable metrics often are used, and such an approach renders inherently relational processes into a count of outputs. Much like banging a round peg into a square hole, practitioners are asked to jam as many clients as possible into a set treatment protocol with specified outcomes. Further, resource providers could focus on the quality of the relationships built between practitioners, clients, and communities. Funders should question grant proposals that underpay professional staff or claim high client counts, a practice nonprofits employ in the hopes that high client to worker ratios will be rewarded with funding. This would probably mean serving fewer people per practitioner, but it would reflect a more accurate view of what human service work should be and how it should be compensated.

Professional associations such as the National Association of Social Workers and the Council of Social Work Education have addressed some concerns by advocating for more federal educational and training funds (useful mostly to social work students), social worker safety, and loan forgiveness programs (https://www.socialworkers.org/Advocacy/Policy-Issues; https://www.cswe.org/Advocacy-Policy/Policy-Agenda#Funding). While helpful, these policy initiatives essentially uphold adaptation to current conditions rather than questioning them or calling for different systems or approaches altogether. As first steps, professional associations could call for an end to substandard wages and delineate minimum wage guidelines commensurate with education, training, and experience; encourage human service organizations to engage in collective, rather than individual, self-care as ethical imperatives; or engage with resource providers to support agencies and initiatives that genuinely support human service staff. Such measure would begin to shift the profession into one that reflects equity and respect, though they still fall short of fully challenging neoliberalism.

Finally, it is tempting to focus on the impact of the COVID pandemic as the reason for untenable working conditions in the human services. The pandemic did dramatically alter how services were delivered, especially during the lockdown when agencies pivoted to telehealth and other virtual delivery modes. Racialized and gendered demands, personal and work-related, placed disproportionate responsibilities on staff of color and women, and demonstrated how crucial work-family balance is. The pandemic exacerbated challenges for clients and communities, especially for those in marginalized or underserved groups. Thus, no one is questioning that the pandemic placed extraordinary burdens on the human service sector with a disproportionate impact on women and persons of color (Alessi, Hutchison, and Kahn 2021; Cho, Lambert, and Pollack 2023; Neely-Barnes et al. 2021; Ross et al. 2022).

The pandemic, however, didn’t create problematic working conditions. Rather, it illuminated them. This period of time revealed the precarity of the human service infrastructure due to decades of austerity measures, privatization, and delegitimation. Despite the rhetoric of “essential” services and workers, actual support was inconsistent and fleeting (Abrams and Detlaff 2020). The weight of the pandemic led many to re-assess their employment situation, especially when “post” pandemic, agencies did little to address concerns and instead attempted to return to “business as usual.”

Nonetheless, there are lessons from the pandemic that could contribute to better working conditions. For example, emerging research suggests that hybrid forms of service delivery seem to be preferred by staff and service users in part because attention to work-life issues was part of the conversations (Cho, Lambert, and Pollack 2023; Collins-Camargo et al. 2019; Costakis, Gruhlke, and Su 2021). Several respondents mentioned flexibility in hours or forms of service delivery as a key benefit in their employment. Rather than returning to pre-COVID standards and protocols, why not continue some of the more innovative measures tried during the pandemic in education and employment?

Educational institutions, professional associations, resource providers, and service agencies now uphold mainstream gatekeeping functions through particular metrics for degree programs, accreditation, service output, and practitioner licensing. In the process, they extol the virtues of sacrifice as a measure of dedication and recommend individual responsibility for what are systemic issues that are supporting and extending neoliberalism. Rather than promoting measures that, in effect, ask staff to adapt to neoliberalism, there needs to be concerted efforts to name and challenge neoliberalism, including in ways that have yet to be discovered and embraced. Otherwise, the human services workforce is further locked into the cycle of neoliberalism. Indeed, they continue as one more cog in the neoliberal machine.