ABSTRACT
Though social workers generally position themselves as professionals, they can also be argued to be part of a highly feminized workforce known as care workers. Though social work is among the higher paid, higher status and highly educated employees in the care work sector, social work’s association with tasks that are seen as part of women’s natural predisposition to provide expandable and endless care makes it difficult to improve respect for the work, pay or conditions. The intersectional theory has been useful in analysing the dynamics of social work in the context of neoliberalism and austerity where the conditions of care work have diminished and the female-majority, increasingly racialized workforce has been pressed to do more with less and to grapple with service provision that is increasingly marketized, fragmented and alienating. Most social workers work closely with those who are marginalized and excluded and are thus well-positioned to understand how oppression operates in everyday life, to foster strategies of resistance and to contribute to the building of a more equitable and socially just society. This chapter will explore the dynamics of social work as a form of care work that provides much-needed services that sometimes legitimizes neoliberal approaches and logics, and at the same time frequently resists widespread social uncaring and inequity.
