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Melissa Benn is a journalist and novelist.

It seems odd that social workers do not have their own trade union. Here is one of the most maligned and overlooked professional groups in society lacking a designated public body to speak up on its behalf .

Some social workers have become frustrated at the split in responsibility for representation between the British Association of Social Workers, the body which leads on professional issues, and the public sector union Unison, which deals with pay and conditions. A dissident motion was up for discussion at last month's BASW AGM calling for the establishment of a breakaway union. Feeling has run particularly high in Scotland where local pay deals have meant social workers in some cities are being paid thousands more than others.

The motion was lost, to the obvious relief of Unison officials. But there are still rumblings of frustration among social workers about representation, which feeds into worries about a loss of professional identity arising from the greater merging of the social work role into health and educational work.

The dissatisfaction is understandable. The 40,000 or so social workers who are Unison members clearly form a valuable core of the public sector giant. But browse through the Unison website; there you find social workers listed as part of the sub-section of local government, wedged between housing and meat hygiene. In unity there is strength, but in mass there can be dilution.

But whoever represents social workers, and whether two bodies really can do the job better than one, it is clear that the public voice of the profession is not as strong as it should be. Yes, there is plenty of periodic finger pointing when things go wrong. But I can't remember the last time a senior social worker or representative was treated with any sort of respect in a national broadsheet or, even, ferociously grilled (a different marker of respect) by a Paxman or a Humphries on more general questions.

Sometimes, it is useful to think about absences, to analyse the public conversations we are not having. For instance, there is little debate about the pay and conditions of social workers, and the connection between financial reward and the deeper social meanings of the job.

Compare this omission to the steady stream of discussion about rewards and incentives for nurses and teachers - both of which professions have their own unions - or the police force, which is socially honoured and financially well looked after.

Many agree that social workers are the target of unfair hostility but we never get much beyond a dazed repeat of the same dismal point. In a recent debate in the Scottish parliament, it was suggested that the term "social worker" itself was the problem. A change to "social carer" was mooted, to help show the public, and politicians, the real nature of the job: concerned, rather than interfering.


But hostility to social work surely goes much deeper than the mere matter of job titles. Social work is the profession most directly involved with two of the most criticised sectors of society; the poor, and the fractured family.

Clearly these two groups do not always overlap (think of several junior branches of the royal family, for a start) but where they do, there is a double dose of condemnation. Hostility to the poor is a constant feature of the social landscape; and while there have been periods of British social history where a more liberal, exploratory, less condemnatory attitude has prevailed, we are not living through such a period now.

Social work also shows up the eternal problem of lack of funding for public service work. Unlike a teacher or a nurse or doctor, all of whom we consider to be doing a clear, contained task of healing or educating, the social worker undertakes the more random, if crucial, task of damage limitation. But he or she is then tarred by a kind of crazy guilt-by-association which makes public money harder to argue for.

But that is exactly why we need to hear the reflective - and collective - voice of social workers more publicly. Again, it's odd that we don't, given society's episodic fascination with the marginalised and the troublesome.

Think how often we read the work of journalists and campaigners who give up comfortable lives for anything from a month to a year in order to get close to the "bottom of the pile". Yet we barely attend to the accumulated experience of a group of professionals who are in constant touch with that same constituency and, what's more, trying to effect some positive long lasting changes to people's lives. It is about time that we did.