Introduction: neoliberalism, austerity and the human-service workplace

In both the US and Europe, human-service workers are the ‘first responders’ for people and communities in need. However, since the late 1980s, the convergence of neoliberal social policy and mounting austerity in this arena have restructured the nature of work and the labour process (Landsbergis, Grzywacz and LaMontagne, 2014; Farnsworth and Irving, 2018). The results have dramatically affected the social relations of production and the capacity of human-service workers and agencies to provide quality care.

Scholars from various disciplines and many countries have studied the impact of neoliberal austerity on the scale and scope of social welfare programmes (Abramovitz, 2014), the hollowing-out of the welfare state (Ehrenreich, 2016) and the slow-down of the economy (Rogowski, 2019). Others have examined its impact on the well-being of different population groups, especially the poor, low-wage workers and service users (Soss, Fording and Schram, 2011). Yet few researchers have examined the impact of neoliberal policies on workers, mostly women, employed in public and non-profit human-service organizations (Baines, 2004; Abramovitz, 2012). We need more information about the ways in which neoliberal austerity has changed work organization, service provision and the working conditions that shape the daily experience of workers and service users in human-service organizations.

This chapter draws on social science literature and our survey of the New York City (NYC) human-service workforce to discuss the impact of neoliberal austerity on the organization of work and the humanservice workforce in the US, where women, especially women of colour, predominate. Using the Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) theory, we (1) explain the rise of neoliberal austerity; (2) identify five neoliberal strategies designed to dismantle the US welfare state; (3) focus on the impact of privatization, a key neoliberal strategy; (4) drill down to show how privatization has transformed the organization of work in public and non-profit human-service agencies; and (5) detail the experience of nearly 3,000 front-line, mostly female, human-service workers in NYC. Neoliberal privatization is most often understood as selling off public assets and/or shifting the responsibility for welfare state programmes – such as Social Security and Medicare – from the public to the private sector.