Developments in the crisis of social reproduction in youth welfare

Article in the Perspectives series by Fredrik Wolze

[caption id="attachment_3040" align="alignleft" width="216"] Graphic by Paul Zuerker; cc-by-nc[/caption]

In this article, my aim is to explain how the developments of the crisis of social reproduction manifest themselves in the field of socio-pedagogical youth welfare. To this end, I will first present the consequences of economisation and cost limitation in youth welfare for the employees and for the recipients of the services. I will then show that lowering the reproduction costs of labour in youth welfare has worsened its reproduction conditions and that this has repercussions on the exploitation conditions of capital.

Youth welfare services include various services in the areas of counselling, upbringing, education and material care, which the recipients can make use of partly in the form of open services and partly according to need. As part of welfare state services, laid down in Book Eight of the German Social Code (SGB VIII), youth welfare services are not regulated by supply and demand, as in the private sector, but are structured by social policy. The public youth welfare organisations, the youth welfare offices, plan, control and finance youth welfare services. In accordance with the subsidiarity principle, a specific feature of German social law, the public organisations should only provide social services themselves if this cannot be covered by independent providers. The public organisations award corresponding contracts for the creation of youth welfare facilities and the provision of youth welfare services to the independent organisations, through which most of the direct work with the recipients is carried out. Part of the social function of social work and youth welfare is to contribute to the reproduction of the labour force. At the same time, the financial expenditure on social work as part of welfare state expenditure is a burden on profit rates. In terms of expenditure and volume of work, youth welfare is the largest field of social work in Germany. Therefore, as in other areas of paid care work, attempts are made to keep these costs low. In youth welfare, this is achieved through restrictive social policy in the funding of youth welfare facilities, through restrictive approval practices for individual case-related services and, above all, through the economisation that youth welfare, like other fields of social work, is experiencing. Since the mid/end of the 1990s, market mechanisms have increasingly been adopted in the management and provision of youth welfare services. The new management models introduced at local authority level in the 1990s, with which business management elements were implemented, and the 1999 amendment to Book Eight of the Social Code (SGB VIII) were decisive in setting the course for this. This new version of the social law basis largely abolished the previous principle of cost recovery, according to which independent organisations were reimbursed for the costs they actually incurred. Differentiated, predetermined service, quality and fee agreements were introduced as a new mode of financing. The conditions for authorisation to operate as a youth welfare organisation were also deregulated. The distinction between non-profit and for-profit organisations has been largely abolished and they are now treated equally as service providers. This created a market in which the independent youth welfare organisations - both non-profit and private sector - compete for the award of public contracts by the youth welfare office (cf. Dahme/Wohlfahrt 2015: 142 ff.). The political objective underlying this restructuring was to be able to manage the youth welfare services more flexibly via the independent organisations through competition between providers and to achieve efficiency increases and cost reductions on the provider side. In a competitive framework, the independent providers offer individual case assistance for a specific hourly rate for specialised services or bid to provide youth welfare facilities and projects for a lump sum. On the part of the independent providers, more favourable offers can largely only be implemented by reducing costs for employees. Compared to other sectors with comparable qualifications, social work was and is characterised by a generally low wage level anyway (cf. Chassé 2013: 18 f.). One of the intended results of the abolition of the self-cost recovery principle is that independent providers have since developed a vested interest in further reducing labour costs in order to be able to hold their own against the competition. Consequently, the pressure on wages has increased: Below-tariff pay and insecure employment relationships, such as fee-based work, have increased. Lower staffing ratios and higher case and user numbers have led to more intensive work for employees and are at the expense of the quality of counselling and the support provided to clients in line with their needs. With reference to fluctuating order situations, staff deployment is being made more flexible and job security has decreased. This has resulted in a high turnover of staff due to the flexible deployment of freelance staff, fixed-term contracts or redundancies due to orders. This stands in the way of continuity in the work, which requires direct interaction between recipients and social workers. The area of individual case assistance in particular is characterised by a special dynamic under the conditions of competition due to the case-by-case allocation of specialist service hours. At the same time, there has been an increase in reporting, which is largely due to the requirements of the billing system. This places additional work demands on social workers and reduces the time they can spend working directly with clients. Working with clients who are in precarious circumstances often requires them to react flexibly to their life situations. The opportunities to adequately respond to the needs of clients are limited by the increase in requirements due to the funding model and reporting activities (cf. Wolze 2017: 54 ff.). In addition to these developments that affect youth welfare as a whole, further cost-cutting and economisation strategies are being applied in the individual, differentiated areas of work and in different regions, of which I will outline three as examples: Firstly, in the area of outpatient individual case support, which as a personnel-intensive legal entitlement service is under particular pressure to reduce costs, the approval practice on the part of the youth welfare offices has become more restrictive. On average, less time is now authorised for individual case work with troubled young people, which means that the conditions for working on the underlying problems have deteriorated. In conjunction with competition between providers and funding via specialised service hours, which are allocated on a case-by-case basis, social workers are increasingly faced with a tense relationship between professional and economic requirements in view of the restrictive approval practice. Secondly, areas of work and youth welfare facilities for which there is no legal entitlement are generally characterised by insecure funding. This applies to open programmes and educational projects, among others. The opportunities to organise corresponding youth welfare services, which are usually not lucrative for commercial providers, are extremely limited. If the services can be realised at all, the social workers spend a large part of their working time acquiring funding. Thirdly, in some municipalities, youth welfare services are also increasingly controlled via social area budgets, with which youth welfare expenditure, for which the independent providers compete, is capped for a specific neighbourhood (cf. ibid.: 72 ff.). The cost containment and economisation strategies, which have only been incompletely outlined here, have worsened the working conditions of social workers - in terms of material security, work intensity and workload. Similarly, the conditions for effective socio-pedagogical work and support for the addressees have deteriorated with a reduction in the time available for working with individual users. The various areas of work within youth welfare and the specific activities, such as counselling, support the individual reproduction of the addressees. Youth welfare has the following functions: it specifically supports the reproduction of the current labour force in the form of legal guardians and adolescents and young adults who are already able to work and, above all, the reproduction of the future labour force, i.e. adolescent children and young people. Youth welfare has a compensatory effect: it reacts to the social problems of its addressees and becomes active where reproduction is not readily possible or is problematic. Its services are aimed at recipients who are predominantly affected by precarious living conditions, have more difficult access to paid work and, as a result, to material resources for reproduction. Unmet support needs as a result of a restriction of youth welfare expenditure therefore worsen the conditions of reproduction of the recipients of youth welfare (cf. Wolze 2017: 95 ff.). However, individual reproduction remains necessarily related to the valorisation process of capital, as it is part of the reproduction of the social labour force potential (cf. Winker 2011: 334ff). There is a contradiction here in that, on the one hand, youth welfare should fulfil the social function of social policy of empowering its recipients so that they can meet the requirement of leading an independent life in the future, which is financed by selling their own labour (cf. BMFSFJ 2013: 295; Dahme/Wohlfahrt 2011: 402). On the other hand, the costs of labour in youth welfare are limited to such an extent that the reproduction of a workforce that meets the requirements of the exploitation process is undermined. In a highly developed capitalist society, in order to generate profits by increasing labour productivity, capital requires a large proportion of the workforce to be qualified and as widely deployable as possible. The Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ) complains that a significant proportion of young people have skills and qualification deficits and do not meet the requirements of the labour market (cf. BMFSFJ 2013: 54). This can be understood as an expression of the fact that the utilisation of labour power does not meet the demands of capital, at least in part, and that capital sees its access to adequate labour power restricted. If the labour market integration envisaged by social policy does not succeed due to social problems, the young people concerned will not produce any added value in the future. The productivity of the labour force of society as a whole will be impaired. The central dynamic of the crisis of social reproduction is that lowering the reproduction costs of labour power in relation to the care work required for reproduction temporarily improves the conditions for accumulation, but in the longer term it restricts the conditions for the exploitation of capital (see Winker 2015: 92 ff.). This crisis dynamic therefore also has an impact on youth welfare. The developments described, which worsen the working conditions of social workers and mean support that does not meet the needs and cuts in the living conditions of the young people concerned, must therefore be understood as part of the crisis of social reproduction. Literature: Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ) (2013): 14th Child and Youth Report. Report on the living situation of young people and child and youth welfare services in Germany. BerlinChassé, Karl August (2013): Deregulated social work? In: Contradictions. Zeitschrift für sozialistische Politik im Bildungs-, Gesundheits- und Sozialbereich, Issue 128, pp. 11-30 Dahme, Heinz-Jürgen/ Wohlfahrt, Norbert (2015): Social service policy. A critical stocktaking. Wiesbaden: Springer VS Dahme, Heinz-Jürgen/ Wohlfahrt, Norbert (2011): Gerechtigkeit im Kapitalismus: Anmerkungen zur affirmativen Normativität moderner Gerechtigkeitstheorie. In: New Practice. Zeitschrift für Sozialarbeit, Sozialpädagogik und Sozialpolitik, 41(4), pp. 385-408 Winker, Gabriele (2015): Care Revolution. Steps towards a society based on solidarity. Bielefeld: transcript Winker, Gabriele (2011): Social Reproduction in Crisis - Care Revolution as a Perspective. In: Das Argument, Issue 292, 53(3), pp. 333-344. Wolze, Fredrik (2017): Exacerbation of the crisis of social reproduction through the economisation of social work using the example of youth welfare. ExMa-Papers, Centre for Economic and Sociological Studies, University of Hamburg. Available online at: https://www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de/fachbereich-sozoek/professuren/heise/zoess/publikationen/exma34.pdf