Welfare clients and the general public in Australia

poor have definite functions. They do the dirty work no one else wants to do; they make the not-so-poor feel superior; they provide employment for social workers (and other human service personnel and welfare bureaucrats). As well, Gans observed, the poor justify their helpers ’ years of education, relatively high salaries, and mem-bership of the middle class. Throssell (1976), himself a social worker, adds insult to injury when he picks up Gans’s notion and indicts the profession for channelling very little to the poor; worse yet, for using up welfare money in salaries and setting up a bureau-cracy for ’clients ’ to struggle against. Thus, according to Throssell, social workers ensure the continuation of the very problem which they are supposedly trying to solve. Accusations of this nature- be they from the extreme left or extreme right- are more readily made than justified. However, the radical 1970s hardly required justification! These accusations were predicated on the assumption that we know the clientele of social workers: the poor, those unwilling and unable to help themselves, those who get a free ride at the expense of the hard-working and tax-paying middle class. More recently considerable doubt has been cast on the accuracy of this stereotype. In fact, it has been argued that the main beneficiaries of the welfare system are the greedy rather than the needy. It is frequently pointed out that the bulk of welfare funds go toward the maintenance of an ever larger group of individuals who confuse the safety net with the hammock. The following contributions to radical social work teaching and practice

Economic growth · Economics · Political science · Public economics · Public welfare · Sociology · Welfare · Healthcare innovation and challenges · Law · Research in Social Sciences · Social Work Education and Practice · Social Work

• Critical Pedagogy and the Forgotten Social Work Student

  William De Maria•Australian Social Work•1993

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