‘“We don't want to be ashamed tomorrow”: poverty, inequality and the challenge to social workers’ is a progressive/radical manifesto that challenges social workers to fight back against today's mounting inequality, deepening poverty, and the austerity-driven attack on programmes for the poor and working classes. Jones and Novak, who see social workers as the ‘eyewitnesses to the suffering of the poorest’ ask us to protest against current conditions with both ‘howls of anguish’ and active resistance to the effort by business and the state to secure their interests by legitimating inequality, dismantling social welfare programmes, and disciplining the poor.

Social workers sit at the intersection between individuals and the state – where the needs of the state and the individual often clash – a location that may ease or complicate responding to this call. Will we be silenced in the current political climate where siding with progressive social change appears unfashionable, if not risky? The following discussion contextualises the current attack on the public sector, provides a basis for deciding which side we are on and otherwise engages in the political struggle endorsed by Jones and Novak. It identifies: (1) the contradictory functions of US welfare state, (2) the relationship between dismantling the welfare state and the wider neoliberal agenda, and (3) the three-pronged impact of the assault on women and persons of colour as the major public sector programme users, workers, and union members.

The regulatory and liberatory functions of the US welfare state

The US welfare state carries out a contradictory set of social, economi, and political functions that both uphold status quo and create the conditions for social change. The social functions of the welfare state support the status quo by requiring clients to comply with prevailing work and family norms. However, the programmes also provide access to the social wage (eg non-market income) that can help workers to avoid the low-paid jobs, and women to avoid unhappy or dangerous relationships. The economic functions of the welfare state benefit business by lowering labour costs and fuelling consumption, profits and economic growth. However, like a strike fund, access to the social wage can increase the leverage and therefore the bargaining power of workers with employers, and of women at home. Politically the welfare state helps the powers-that-be by quelling the discontent produced when market inequality contradicts the democratic promise of equal opportunity for all.