UCSF social workers march on the boss, call out disparities in service for vulnerable patients
On July 20, UCSF campus social workers marched on our department leadership to deliver a petition and draw attention to the growing turnover and inequity that is impacting services and the vulnerable clients who depend on us. You can read the petition we delivered by clicking here.
Our divisions serve San Francisco's most marginalized identities–engaging clients across categories of race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, country of origin, and class who are often excluded or underserved by other systems of care. Inadequate compensation for these social workers only deepens disparities in services that these clients receive.
Check out a video recapping the action on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Please be sure to like and share to help us spread the word.
Sometimes, a social worker is the only person in someone's life who they can trust. Retaining our exceptional staff is not a luxury but a necessity. When UCSF doesn't retain staff, or when workers are holding down multiple jobs just to get by, it's our clients who ultimately suffer—and the people we serve often belong to San Francisco's most vulnerable communities.
"A lot of my colleagues have to work second or even third jobs just to be able to afford to stay here and keep doing this work. We do what we do because we care about our clients, we love the work, and we want to be able to keep doing this. We just want to be able to be here for our clients and also have it be stable," said David, a clinical social worker who has worked at UCSF for nearly ten years.
In a time when UCSF has justly highlighted the importance of responding to a national call for a racial reckoning and the destructiveness of anti-LGBTQIA+ attacks, it is unacceptable that the clinicians who attend those populations for UCSF are so egregiously underpaid compared to our fellow social workers at UCSF Health hospitals and clinics. The UCSF Health medical centers serve patients with, on average, significantly more means and identities of privilege than the clients at our campus-based clinics.
Our clinicians are bright, skilled, conscientious and compassionate people who aim to make the world a safer and more loving place, and we are the reason why UCSF's Department of Psychiatry ZSFG divisions have gained their outstanding reputations.
When we marched on our boss to deliver a petition and talk about the rampant turnover of social workers and its impacts on services for San Francisco's most vulnerable communities, we were met by security and no one from management came to talk to us. UCSF should be ashamed.