As Social Workers, our ability to provide quality care to our clients depends on having the time needed to listen, evaluate and plan our interventions. Of course we also need to do the follow up, and document, document, document. It's a lot!

Unions of other caring professions employed by NYC -- like nurses and teachers -- have adopted strategies that have successfully forced their employers to bargaining over their workloads. For nurses, they fought hard to win fair 'nurse:patient ratios'. Similarly, for teachers, it's all about class size. For these workers, there are nationally recognized benchmarks that help them figure out what the demand ought to be.

For Social Workers, there is no nationally recognized standard workload, so if we want to put up a strong fight to win caseload standards, we need to develop that goal ourselves. That is the purpose of this survey: We need to know your experience, so that we can formulate a goal that meets your needs, for your clients.

Please take just a few minutes to answer these questions, and encourage all other Social Worker in Local 768 to fill it out as well!