by Mithran Samuel
Our exclusive survey out today on social worker pay reveals remuneration (or lack of) remains a huge issue for practitioners.
Forty per cent of you have taken second jobs to make ends meet, and almost 40% are "always overdrawn" at the end of the month. Almost 60% are considering leaving the profession because of pay and over 70% of you feel your pay is unfair.
This situation is pretty intolerable and it's time the government responded with a commission on pay for social workers, tied to the findings of the review into their roles and tasks under the GSCC.
So what kind of pay rates are we talking about?
Twenty per cent of respondents earned less than £25,000 a year, while less than 10% earned over £40,000.
Obviously, social workers are better off than many other employees (including thousands of care workers): April 2007 figures show that the national median wage for full-time male employees was £26,300 and for full-time males and £20,500 for full-time women.
While it's impossible to place an objective value on respective occupations, social workers obviously feel that the pay rates they receive do not reflect the value of their work. It is that belief in the value of what they do that ensures that turnover and vacancy rates are not higher than their current level (recent local authority surveys have put the figures for vacancies at around 11%).
In this context, the government's insistence that public sector pay rises be no more than 2% over the next three years is disastrous. Though the final decisions for local government social workers theoretically rest with council leaders, government pay policy is pretty impossible for town halls to ignore.
The right and proper thing is for ministers to commission a genuine look at not just the roles and tasks of social workers, but their value, along the lines of the Agenda for Change process for health staff, which ended up pushing up their wages, significantly in some cases.
That's what should happen at least - political realities, sadly, are another thing.
Social workers pay has been deteriorating for the past ten years and the amalgamation of the Unions has not helped. For Unison want our support for strike action for care staff but do nothing to improve our pay and conditions and if our salaries are compared to teachers we are left a long way behind them.
why do males get paid more than famales! :(