Letter to myself

Once upon a time, at a social work camp not too long ago, we went through a group exercise where we wrote short letters to ourselves, to be posted by the camp organizers back to us 6 months hence.

This is the letter I wrote.

Dear CD,

Hope you are well.

You are changing your job soon, and tendering your resignation. You will have finished your internship attachment at an as yet unknown place. The attachment will have changed you, as you have hoped for change, and I hope it has changed you positively, though it might not seem so now to you.

I have just spent 1.5 days in the social work camp in (month), and we are now supposed to write motivational things to enable you to live better in this time.

I can only say that I trust your judgment and that I believe in you, always. You will be a very good social worker, even though you are just starting out. It is more than the doubt that matters, although that is important as part of self-reflection. It is the heart.


Yours,
CD

MCYS video on filial piety

There has been much furore in the Straits Times Forum, both online and print edition, about Ms Hannah Chee's letter in response to the latest MCYS social-message video on filial piety (both the video and the full text of Ms Chee's letter are archived here.) In both her letter and the flurry of Forum letters that ensued, we see different takes (pun unintended) on the descriptive events in the video.

I'm still a social work student, even after this long (yes), and I saw the flurry of negative commentary before seeing the actual video, and so was led to watch it for myself. I've never been enthused about government propaganda visual events (NDP!) and was prepared to be skeptical. This is what I have to say after watching the video from a social work perspective:

There is definitely insufficient information in the video to conclude what are the intentions and motivations of each member of the family, including whether or not the father is showing filial piety.

You can take this word in gold. I'll address some of the major comments that have arisen in this furore:


1. The father is showing filial piety by bringing the grandmother home to live with his family, after the death of the grandfather.

Consider separating the event and the interpretation of the event, for the moment. Event: The grandmother goes to live with the father's family after the death of her husband.

What does this show?

It definitely does not show the presence or absence of decision-making process between the father and the mother. Perhaps the mother has agreed to take in her mother-in-law, but has reservations about the matter that she has kept secret from the father. Perhaps the mother has agreed unconditionally to take in the elderly lady. Perhaps the mother disagreed vehemently but was overruled by her husband. You can't tell from the video.

It definitely does not show the reasons why the grandmother chose to live with the father's family. Is she ill - does she require special care and supervision? Is she feeling lost and confused by her husband's death, and blurrily accepts her son and daughter-in-law's offer of live-in company? Is she feeling on principle that her son by right of filial piety must take her in once her husband is dead? Is she providing a contribution to her son's family in some way by moving in, say, by taking care of the grandchild due to special increased job duties of the parents? You can't tell, either.

What is suggested (but not known for certain, either) in the scene itself is that the elderly lady still grieves her husband's death, as she holds on tightly to her husband's death photo while moving in. However, there is this cultural or religious belief that one must bring the dead relative's personal effects when one moves house, so that the dead relative will know where to go when he returns to the living loved one when the other world's gates are opened during seasons of visitation. It is entirely possible that the elderly lady is not in a state of grief, but merely transporting her late husband's personal effects, in that manner.

True, she looks a little doubtful while getting out of the taxi her son is driving, but possibly if she had been living with her late husband self-sufficiently in her own household, and now is literally faced with moving into her daughter-in-law's household with its associated unknowns and new possibilities, it might give a few moments of unease, yes. I know I would be, in that position.


2. The father disregards his wife's feelings by being kind to his mother, in the dinner table segment.

This interpretation of the dinner table segment, where the grandmother complains that the meat is too tough, and silently refuses the offer of vegetables, is the most overhyped of all the commentary associated with this video.

Consider that the grandmother is, obviously, old, therefore she might not have wished to eat at that moment because she felt significantly unwell. All of us who have lived with physically frail ageing parents would know that sometimes they would rather suffer for long periods than tell us they are feeling unwell, either for the sake of pride or for not wanting to bother the "young ones" i.e. us. She might simply have weak teeth or poor digestion!

As also said earlier in the previous section, we have no idea of the duties and compromises between grandmother, son, and daughter-in-law, such that the cooking may be a point of compromise that has been well-discussed, poorly-discussed, or not discussed at all between the three. (family triad, for the more technically-inclined). We do not know if the grandmother has ever expressed her opinion on the cooking - this could be the first time, which is why the daughter-in-law looked so shocked and reacted so poorly by dumping the 'tough' meat into the bin.

Alternatively, if the grandmother is still suffering intense grief, this may lessen both the appetite (in other words, the tolerance for food) and the empathy towards others' feelings, since some people cope with intense grief by trying not to feel anything at all. They want to feel numb, and for some time, they actually do succeed in doing so.

I note that there is an utter lack of coverage of the discussions between grandmother, son, and daughter-in-law, throughout this video.


3. The grandmother runs out of the house saying loudly that she wants to move to her sister's house in Redhill, and is restrained from leaving by her son and her daughter-in-law. Presumably this is another instance of filial piety in action.

The grandmother's reasons for wanting to move out may have nothing to do with the household per se. She may be bored with her daily life at home, in a new area without her familiar friends, and want to move to a place which has more elderly-friendly access and facilities as well as peer companionship. There is nothing terribly wrong with that. Redhill is well-known to be an elderly estate and community services and gathering places for the elderly are plentiful there. Again this possibility is not shown or discussed. The ways in which the grandmother, son, and daughter-in-law explore the grandmother's possible loneliness to attempt to resolve it, are not shown.


When I watched this video, what immediately came to mind was that this is a very good social work training case study, for students as well as non-social-workers, to explain what social work can do to understand and help this situation. All the alternative interpretations and possibilities I have introduced above are not pulled out by "common sense", or by "good intentions", but by actual shared social work experience of studying intensely and working with families and the elderly, every day. Do you think that elderly pride would come to mind if you had no social work training? Or that all these flurried hurried commentators have judged the events in the video too quickly and too narrowly? I don't think so. QED.

Little-known Facts 1 (that should be more widely known)

Some foreign workers live in bin centres when they don't want to. You know, bin centres, those little buildings in HDB carparks where all the rubbish collected from surrounding apartment blocks is brought to. They are, without fail, very stinky, and have lots of cockroaches. You can barely put a human being inside there for five minutes. Our foreign workers do this because their employers can't afford a place to put them, and there aren't enough dormitories around to house them decently. And the reason there aren't enough places fit for human living to house them, is because we, elitist status-conscious Singaporeans that we are, don't want them seen to be living near us. Think of your friendly neighbourhood cleaner living in a Bin Centre(!), the next time you petition against having decent housing for them near you.

Prisoners are only allowed to reply to two letters a month. [Update: Not a rigid rule, the Prisons Service says.]

The Medisave withdrawal limits are $450 per day for inpatient hospital stay, $300 per day for most day surgeries, $20 per day for senior citizens' daycare at daycare centres (up to $1500 per year), and $300 per year per account for chronic diseases. The chronic diseases in the list are diabetes, stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, various lipid disorders, asthma, COPD. If a person with one or more of these chronic diseases qualifies for Medifund assistance, the $300 per year per account of Medisave of the person and all his immediate family (parents, spouse, children) must still be exhausted first for partial payment, while Medifund covers the remaining cash component.

I know the Medifund income criteria, but I cannot reveal it, not even under pain of death I suppose. Suffice to say that it is not the $1500 household income that is openly used by some other financial assistance schemes. This is because Medifund has a different mission from those other financial assistance schemes. When the government calls it the Medical safety net of last resort, they really mean it. You won't be left alone to be ill if you can't manage.

Role of a Social Worker, Part sqrt(2) of infinite

I'll say this upfront to get it out of the way first. The social work profession in Singapore is less mature than in other countries, for now. At present we have both a low average standard of social work education and few niches of advanced specialization. The Singapore Association of Social Workers is making some plans to change this in the near future. But at the present time this is how it is.

Given all this apparent lack of formal structure, have you ever wondered one rather obvious thing: why do social workers seldom work in pairs when seeing an individual client?

Is it because the work is so simple that it can be handled by one person? Or that the work is of such a nature that it is best handled by one person?

Consider this question for contrast: have you ever seen counsellors work in pairs when seeing (counselling) an individual client. Why, or why not? Is the work so simple that it can be handled by one person? Or is the work of such a nature that it is best handled by one person?

What other jobs does social work bear close similarities to?

Some thoughts to throw to you, dear reader.

Theories of Stages of Grief

I have found a way to come to terms with the issue of clients lying to me, as per the previous post. I discussed it briefly with colleagues and all this can be reconceptualized as the client's "readiness to change", instead of truth detection per se. I now can do my work with an easier heart.

*

Today we talk about grief. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's model of grief is probably the most well-known, comprising the five stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. However that Wikipedia article provides a link to a JAMA 2007 empirical study on another model of grief, Jacobs' model, which according to a reference of that paper has the four stages of numbness-disbelief, separation distress (yearning-anger-anxiety), depression-mourning, and recovery.

That JAMA 2007 paper by Maciejewski et al., contrary to its claims, is not a convincing empirical study of Jacobs' grief stage model on two major counts. First major count: The authors used single items obtained from a scale called the Inventory of Complicated Grief-Revised, formerly known as the Traumatic Grief Response to Loss. The reference given for this Inventory is in a book which I do not have ready access to; however it needs to be proven instead of merely asserted, that a shortened form of a scale has similar explanatory properties as the full scale. Cronbach's alpha test is commonly used as such proof. The authors have not proven this.

In addition, I am most disturbed that even the online version of the paper does not provide the actual single items used in querying the respondents. Surely JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, supports the inclusion of supplementary material. (Later note: Yes it does.) The lack of the actual questionnaire used in the paper can only be a horrific oversight by the authors.

The authors further shoot themselves in the foot by saying in an aggregate letter of response to all preceding letters of response to their paper, that "these [single] items have been evaluated and found to be among the most informative and unbiased in the evaluation of prolonged grief disorder", and that they had "removed [excluded] cases of prolonged grief disorder" from the study sample so to provide a representative sample of grief.

Second major count: As noted by Bonanno and Boerner in a letter of response, even in the earliest months of bereavement, the mean frequency of acceptance experienced by participants was between daily and several times a day, significantly more than any other grief item. Acceptance is the last stage of grief in both Kubler-Ross's and Jacobs' models - grieving is considered to be over when this stage is attained. If acceptance is consistently highest of all grief feelings assessed throughout the study, this only begs the question of what exactly the questionnaire used for assessment was.

The paper does not live up to its claim of being an empirical study of the stage theory of grief.

Homicidal thoughts

me: i have finally acknowledged having homicidal thoughts about my clients, to myself

friend: so late?

me: yeah

because the social worker professional ethics code forbids thinking that the client is bad.

i don't think the ethics code is a good guide anymore

seriously, there are people who will lie to a social worker just to get the financial support they want

(they slip up when i ask them random qns)

me: i think i would rather pursue truth than ethics. in general.

because the truth of "how much are you taking home per month" is probably the most simple truth alive. and they don't even get it right.

me: today i made a phone call to a client's son asking how much he and his siblings earn

he said straight to me, "if i tell you that we all don't earn much, you will give me more money, right?" and he laughed.

no doubt he thought it was funny.

it probably was. but not in a way i can appreciate, or that i choose to appreciate, or that i will ever accept.

me: and he wasn't even someone who was consistently on welfare assistance before

so it was just a simple logical deduction on his part.

how many liars are we subsidizing.

-----

More to the point, why do I try to learn so much about helping people merely to consistently come across people like this? I swear that giving out financial assistance is bad for the sincere social worker soul.

At some point a person really has to put his (or her) foot down hard and say, enough is enough. You are gaming the system. You are freeriding on the goodwill of others' hard work, others who have produced the resources that generate the money that you so gleefully, spinelessly, inhumanly take. Go forth and die. I will not care.

But of course, we are never supposed to say this to the client.

Cognitive Dissonance as the name of this blog, is more apt than I'd ever thought it would be.

Being Helpful

I have previously written about how different people present themselves differently when coming to look for social workers, and how regardless of circumstances we try to assist the client. But this recent article in TOC bothers me enough that I need to write about it.

Several allegations have been made in the main article as well as in the comments. I have no wish to polarize the comments as many of them do show sympathy for the client mentioned in the main article, by offering concrete suggestions and wondering aloud what wider social changes are necessary for similar situations to be prevented in the future. Generally I find the comments to be fair.

To what extent do we subsidize people's choices?

And how do you explain to your hopeful client, sitting in front of you, you wishing to help him, that his previous actions have compounded his problems to such an extent that merely signing over some money to him will not assure his long-term stability? How do you survey with him his barriers to a successful life? A single consultation will not be enough. People take a long long time to readjust their expectations =)

And, of course, we cannot rely on hearsay to judge this man even before we have met him and he has spoken with us. In person. For an extended period of time. About 45 minutes is the normal length of an in-person conversation. 30 minutes is the bare minimum.

I have had fairly long conversations with clients during which it transpired that their children are earning quite a bit and yet the client does not wish to ask for financial support from them. We are social workers, not ATMs in disguise. If there is some longstanding issue with the client's family relationships, we would like to know so that we can offer help. The client's quality of life remains always important to us. It's not always financial assistance that will alleviate the issues <- this is faintly heretical to some of our clients - again the bit about managing expectations. What we would like to do most often, when time permits, is to provide education in the ways of the world so that our clients can fledge.

A Pencil and Unconditional Positive Regard

We always go out to the reception area to call the client in. I make use of all the customer service skills I've ever learnt in my short life, to welcome him (or her) once he has acknowledged his identity, and then walk a little in front to lead the client to my desk. He follows hesitantly, clutching his documents and hope. The corridor is narrow, so that I cannot walk beside him. This is the best compromise I can find, the first of the many in our interaction.

I use these few moments to take a breath and to strongly resist the urge to weep. Not a trace of anything except unconditional positive regard shows in my face and demeanor, as I invite him to sit, before I take my own seat behind the desk. No social worker weeps where you can see it - it is not polite to the client.

(I mentally clutch at my social work theories the way the client holds his documents. The desk between us provides a focus for my terribly confused feelings at this point - I may not be able to give the client full financial assistance and this desk will enable separation at the end of the appointment without hard feelings. I know that our money does not fall from the sky and to give one family what they ask for may result in deprivation for another family even more needy yet whose only reason for deprivation was that I saw them just a little bit later. So there are rules, government rules, agency rules. I have to suspend my disbelief in the wisdom of the State in deciding precisely those rules.

Those of you who have read my previous posts would know that I dislike systems without transparency but in this instance I do not know where to go to find the demographics breakdown of how much was given to each family under which circumstances. I do not know if such demographics data even exists, whether busy fatigued social workers have taken the time to code their information in formal research studies. I do not know anything at all except some rules.

If things continue in this way I will become a mindless tool of the State. One of my tutors said it well, a long time ago, "You either become an agent of change or you become a changed agent." I must discover or I shall go mad.)

We begin the conversation with our client, eliciting information we need to assess their requirements. From what we can observe during the interview, we know if clients are evading our questions, and we will ask further. Nonetheless, we do not finalize our assessment of the client's honesty except in the final instance where we use a pencil to sign the form to decide how much additional financial assistance to give, on top of what is given according to the rules. There are clients who lie about their finances and their family relationships, and you will know it. They tell you these while sitting across the desk from you, expecting you to bestow the funds that they deserve as a right. But you can only trust them to give you the truth, in those gray areas (which I cannot reveal here lest it inspire others to practise them :) ).

There are all these borderline instances where the clients know the system so well and it simply breaks my heart to give them the benefit of the doubt, although I do and I know that I should. Because you know that if their families had put just a little bit more effort into salvaging their family relationships, there would be a bit more State funds for the person who sat across from you with sad, sad eyes, giving you his documents, answering your questions and talking with you, trying to gracefully ask for some help while being the sole caregiver and financial provider for his grandchildren. And this grandfather would always be the one to say, "Money doesn't fall from the sky, I know. I can manage with the [present assistance I have from elsewhere], and my grandchildren [incidentally still preschoolers] are obedient and smart. We simply have [astronomical sum!] in [organizations'] arrears, is all. We will be fine. It is only the arrears that worry me, we cannot have our [et cetera basic necessities] cut off, the children need to eat."

Our clients' dignity steadies us, but it worries me too. The social workers would know, because we spend the time to talk with them, but taken at face value their claims to be able to get by with only a little bit of assistance are not really viable.

So the pencil strikes as we sign the form, where we give as much as we can give. We have some discretion in our additional recommendations. :) and we hand back the client's documents to him after photocopying them, and we send him out. Where unconditional positive regard meets pencil, the pencil has the final say, sorry. No matter how much we want to treat you well by liking you personally, that liking does not automatically translate into assistance because assistance is a public good, shared in common. (Maybe some would find this unconditional positive regard a bit vacuous, then. You are entitled to your opinion on that. We try to make the client feel comfortable during the conversation.) The ending of this interaction is somewhat businesslike - client gets his assistance, and we do not get weird power kicks from the client thanking us profusely for the State's temporary relief of his woes. It is unnecessary to prolong the leavetaking, although some thanks are customarily exchanged.

And we go out to call the next person in.

Poverty is Poison

... from the New York Times today.

“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life.

So now we have another, even more compelling reason to be ashamed about America’s record of failing to fight poverty.

Philosophical Developments in Social Work (quoted)

Entire section quoted from Early TJ and GlenMaye LF (2000), Social Work 45(2):118-127, 'Valuing Families: Social Work Practice with Families from a Strengths Perspective'. Supporting references have been deleted to improve readability.

Philosophical Developments in Social Work

Although the focus of social work throughout its history was primarily client problems and deficits, prominent examples of other foci also existed. For example, the functional approach, developed by Virginia Robinson, Jesse Taft, and the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work in the 1930s, was centered on a psychology of growth and was distinctly different from the other major approach of that period, the diagnostic school, which was based on Mary Richmond's traditional formulations emphasizing metaphors of illness and locating the center of change in the social worker. The functional approach saw change as centered in the client rather than the social worker, and a client-social worker relationship process in which the client's own power for growth and choice was released. In contrast to the expert role adopted by the diagnostic school of practice, within the functional approach, the social worker entered into the helping relationship "with avowed lack of knowledge of how it would all turn out.... only client and worker together would discover what the client could do with the help offered" (p. 80). The functional approach was based in large part on philosophical perspectives emphasizing human purposive action, self-actualization, human potential, and other existentialist understandings of human development which tended to view human beings in terms of complexity and potential. The diagnostic approach, in contrast, was based on deterministic formulations of behavior in which causal events needed to be discovered and understood before adjustment could occur. The social worker's expert knowledge was used to diagnose and describe behaviors and causes. Functionalism contributed a major and lasting reconceptualization of the helping process by underscoring the fundamental importance of the relationship between client and worker. The diagnostic approach and the functionalist approach are representative of a basic split in philosophical perspective that has informed social work practice since the beginning of the profession.

Functionalism, with an emphasis on phenomena as processes, the concept of wholeness, relationship, and human potential, is part of a philosophical thread that winds its way through one major aspect of the social work profession-- the abiding presence of schools of thought advocating for social change, social justice, and the search for meaning and purpose in human endeavors. The other major aspect of social work has focused on treatment and cure, and problem identification and problem solving. This dichotomy of practice perspectives is based on a similar bifurcation of philosophical perspective that has been conceptualized in many ways, including a dichotomy of subjectivist versus objectivist. The objectivist position, with its focus on pathogens, determinism, universalizing theories of human behavior, and diagnosis, informs the problem-based approaches of traditional casework. The subjectivist standpoint emphasizes the complexity and uniqueness of human beings, the creation of self and choices, and understanding through the search for meaning. Subjectivist perspectives supported the functional approach and today provide the philosophical underpinnings for the social justice-- oriented approaches, such as socialist, feminist, constructivist, empowerment, and strengths approaches to practice. Space does not permit a full explication of the similarities and differences among subjectivist orientations, as, for instance, the difference between empowerment approaches and strengths approaches, or the differences between a constructivist versus a feminist approach. These approaches share similar values orientations regarding the sharing of power between client and worker, emphasis on process and praxis, and a belief in the potential competence and inherent worth of all human beings. The strengths approach, with its emphasis on growth and change, collaborative relationship, and the center of change located in the client, has as its foundation a subjectivist understanding of human behavior and purpose.

Two other current movements that share common assumptions and goals with the strengths perspective are the early intervention "family support" movement based on empowerment principles and "resilience-based practice".

Selfishness and Altruism

From The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand:

"Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice - run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master. But if you ever hear a man telling you that you must be happy, that it's your natural right, that your first duty is to yourself - that will be the man who's not after your soul. That will be the man who has nothing to gain from you. But let him come and you'll scream your empty heads off, howling that he's a selfish monster. So the racket is safe for many, many centuries. But here you might have noticed something. I said, 'It stands to reason.' Do you see? Men have a weapon against you. Reason."

This is the reason why this blog does not exhort the reader to make some sacrifice, despite it being a social work blog and for all my own very selfish :) purposes altruistic in intention. Instead I insist upon the right to choose your own happiness, as opposed to having others choose it for you.

A short note: Be Happy Doing Nothing

Last week I wrote about a young one asking me for advice on how to develop his interests. Today he wrote again to me, "I have no interests. What do I do now?"

....

I told him to be happy doing nothing.

Social work* is, after all, respecting the choices of the client. Apart from special situations of imminent harm or criminality, which are governed by our Codes of Ethics. I think this is something you the reader should know if one day you should ever decide to seek help.


*More accurately this refers to direct social work practice, not the entirety of social work.

How Do You Capture An Idea Or An Action Into Achievement

I.

From time to time, I start writing a post, and don't know what to say. So I was sitting here blankly after a two-month hiatus from blogging, and wondering that same thing. Everyone has ideas all the time, after all; walking is an idea, computer programming is an idea, and vegging out at home watching DVDs with your wife over the weekend is also an idea. My mother has a thousand and one ideas about my elder sister's upcoming wedding. How do you then capture an idea into writing?

II.

I had a conversation with a young one a short while back, and when I asked him to read more of what he loved, and do more of what he loved, and hang out with communities who do the same (he enjoys oceanography, not drugs, so this sort of advice is okay), he asked me, How?

He asked, how? That terrible lost look. How can I do it?

III.

I have read the recent series of discussions on how to discover one's purpose in life that Mr Wang hosted. His present post is on how to refocus one's sense of duty and obligation onto one's self. He has ambiguous feelings about that approach to life; on the one hand, he considers it necessary, but on the other, he wonders if it is selfish and bad.

I would prefer to think of Mr Wang's approach as self-centred. To do I. or II. or any other action, you must move yourself to do it. To move yourself, you must feel obliged to yourself to move, and your duty to yourself to learn. You must know the concept of the self-disciplined self as primary. How, again how?

*

We all ask "how?" so often, it has become a stopping point for critical thought. After taking the trouble to find something we might like, we stop, tear our hair out, and turn round and round in circles. We fear it can never be done. We hope it can be done. And fear and hope are a potent combination by themselves, in causing us to lose whatever sense of direction and purpose we once had. In causing us to build on worry, to panic, and to fear more, and in the end, to never find our way. Does this sound familiar?

*

You'd realise, in the entire previous paragraph, there was not a single word about rational thought, about planning, and about persistence. Yet these are as vital human qualities as are worry and hope and fear. And all involve only the self in some manner.

And strangely, my only answer on how to capture an idea or an initial action into achievement, is to keep going, and to always know that you are searching for your ultimate purpose, and to remember these two things when nothing seems right. That is all. Once you get moving in that way, you will know where you are going next. Rational thought is involved when you reflect on the actions you had chosen. Planning is involved when using those reflections to help decide what to do next. And persistence carries everything through dark times. So it doesn't matter what direction you take at first, as long as you are developing one or a few (best if all) of your present interests.

At the end of my young life, I found that it wasn't my lack of inspired direction that was stopping me. It was the fixed thought I had that I definitely had to pick the shortest and most "beautiful" path. No one path is beautiful, every life has its shortcomings. It is the greatest tragedy of our education system that we have been indoctrinated into thinking there is only one perfect way. Instead, I believe the way that belongs to you will unfold itself gradually in a process of constant feedback and refinement.

Incidentally, this post also encapsulates my views on university admissions.

Love

Love. Sometimes known as Charity in other versions of the Christian Bible.

I intend to talk about ministerial pay and social work pay, about just recompense for the fruits of one's labour and the effect of talent in achieving those, and the nature of public service for both ministers and social workers.

Of course whether this intention has been realized in this article is not for me to judge, at the end. :)

We begin. And begin again and again, on the topic of ministerial pay. Presently the ministers are paid 1.2m a year. According to a pay peg to the salaries of the most highly-paid 8 professionals in 6 fields of the private sector (Yawning Bread), they should be paid 2.2m. Our Prime Minister wishes to "close this gap" (direct quote). Needless to say, the question of perverse incentive to not spend effort on closing the other gap has been raised elsewhere.

It's going to rise no matter what we say. You know it, and I know it. A question to consider is: why is it that we know what we know? My suggested answer is, because there is no clear accountability for performance of the ministers. If they advocate that they deserve to have their pay pegged to the private sector, where are their KPIs, and thus the sword of Damocles that falls when they perform badly?

I hear only a ringing silence on this.

A hypothetical scenario for comparison: If I walked into my boss' office today and asked for a pay raise without justifying the contributions over and above my job's required specifications that I had made, he would not only laugh in my face but possibly fire me for arrogance (except that it would be called lack of team-playing skills or something). But this situation would never arise amongst the citizens and the PAP, because they were voted in without any clear mention of their jobs' required specifications a.k.a. KPIs. Thus the screaming of the cows (Ringisei).

But all this isn't quite about what KPIs they have. The present state of affairs has not even reached that stage of transparency yet. It's about on what basis (KPIs, pure randomness, the 66.6% vote?) they are paying themselves more. Let those criteria be held up for open scrutiny by the citizens, our country's stakeholders - only then will the increase in pay begin to be rationally justified.

Alternatively, the pay peg to the private sector would be acceptable if, like the masses they govern, each and every one of them could do this: Go to a private sector company with absolutely no ties to their original company Singapore (no suggestion of possible corruption or vested interest for our PAP, no), apply for a job, get selected for the interview, pass the interview, get offered a certain salary, and then bring that salary amount back to their original company Singapore as a competing quote. How the ministers are going to put this into effect, well we will just have to rely on their work ethics to find such jobs.

Other comparisons have been offered, from the method of selection of PAP ministers (LuckyTan), to the lack of further increase in Public Assistance (PA) funding, to the recent GST hike to "help the poor" ...

On to social work pay now. Yapdates mentions (found via The Void Deck: Minsta Pay Increase Special!) that people do not want to become social workers because of the low pay.

"I think back on those social organizations where social-workers receive one of the lowest pay in the whole economy, yet people continue to say that the work they do are 'priceless.' Isn't it common to hear positive comments about social workers helping an unemployed widow of many children find a job? Yet how many people will raise their hands to become social workers? Not many, as one of the reasons is that it does not pay adequately). "

Please, this is a pretty inaccurate analogy. From anecdotal evidence, I have heard that the threshold for "being paid adequately" in the social service sector is a question of whether one can support a 1-child family on social worker income. This criterion is one of basic subsistence; it is a far cry from the proposed increase in ministerial pay. So please do not insult the social work profession in this manner, by saying that its inadequate pay is comparable to the ministers' inadequate pay and that its selflessness is comparable to the ministers' selflessness. Notably, on Jan 21 2007, a day after the ST ran their Saturday profile on Social Workers' Day, Dr Vivian Balakrishnan announced in the ST that 11m would be set aside for the social service sector, some of which would go towards an increase in social workers' pay. 11m happens to be more or less the same sum as that required for the salaries of 10 Cabinet ministers to reach their proposed benchmark.

Which leads on to whether ministers are more talented than social workers? Undoubtedly they are. (okay, indubitably, you pedants. :) ) But...

...On just recompense for the fruits of one's labour and the effect of talent in achieving those. LuckyTan has another interesting piece on this. Less rantily, there will always be a pay differential amongst various occupations, though all are required to keep the society running. This pay differential would ideally be based only on the fruits of one's talent (therefore, the existence of KPIs) as a contribution to society, but this view ignores pre-existing variation in people's talents or backgrounds in contributing to those fruits. Say, if one had enough space at home to store all the books one wanted to read, one would tend to buy those books instead of renting or borrowing them, thus enabling 365/24/7 access to the ideas in those books. This is quite different from borrowing those same books and taking the extra time to summarize them quickly for future reference before returning them, to achieve the same outcome of round-the-clock access. In the former, the cost is in money; the latter's cost is in time. If society places a premium on group availability of the individual's time instead of group availability of the individual's money, then the financially poorer one would be disadvantaged no matter what claims of equal starting points the meritocracy rhetoric has. The word for unequal starting points, in the social work conceptual framework, is 'privilege'.

So there are pre-existing variations in people's talents or backgrounds already. But does it therefore follow that those variations must be reinforced, or worse, solely attributed to one's individual intrinsic 'talent'? Is it really true that the poor deserve to live poorly while the rich deserve to live richly? Well this is up for debate and is a huge topic in itself, but I have taken the step to be a social work student so I clearly do not think so. Neither do the many people who have made their stand clear that the nature of public service is one of selfless generosity.

Ian, especially, talks about how public service can never be bought over by large sums of money, just recompense for the fruits of one's labour aside.

"Finally, I think the people in civil service and government should be people whose morality cannot be affected by money. We shouldn’t give more money to ensure people don’t be corrupt. We should give more money because it is fair to give them that amount of money for the work they do and their contributions to Singapore. To say X amount of money is enough to prevent corruption is to me naive because someone else could always offer X + 1. But if the argument is that there is indeed a threshold where a person would be less susceptible to be corrupt (if not totally not corrupt), then shouldn’t there also be a threshold where enough pay is enough to want to keep the person from jumping ship to the private sector.

And there is indeed such a threshold. It is the benchmark to private sector salaries. But the benchmark will change won’t it. And if such a benchmark changes which means the threshold changes, then by working backwards, doesn’t that mean the people we have are just being bought off now at current market rates so they won’t be corrupt.

And if so, doesn’t that mean they have a price. Which comes back to the first point. If there is a price, there is always an X + 1. "

It was supposed to be about Love and Charity. Are you committed to serve?

[Edit: One more thing I forgot to discuss. Social workers are bound by their national organisations' Codes of Ethics. The comparable document for government ministers would presumably be the Constitution. Your thoughts on this?]

Hope

Every year, at around this time, I have thoughts about my own mortality.
Every year, without fail, someone somewhere out there will try his very best to kill me. I do not know who he is, nor who he will be, the next year and the year after that.
Each year, I hope beyond all hope that it will not happen again, but I know better.

And it's not only me, it's my entire family who's involved as well.

I'm referring to CNY driving on Singapore roads.

*

Hope is really a topic best left unexplained - almost everyone knows what it is. It's the quality that makes the events of each day worth living. And it drives the search for meaning.

But for some, each day is "more of the same", and little brightens it.

Part of social work requires the rebuilding of hope. And it has to be the person's own reframing of his situation, and enlightenment about his support networks and habits of self-care, that allow hope to regenerate. No one else can do those for him. No one else can take those steps for him. He has to find within himself the emotion to change.

Often the way is obvious, even to the person.

This bears repeating. Often the way is obvious. But what makes him take it, is an emotion. It may be ratified by post hoc justification, or it may not. That does not much matter.

If I were to advise CNY drivers to be more careful, I could do it till I was blue in the face, and I would still have to drive as defensively as always. Because not everyone would see. Not everyone would see the need to not hurt, not kill, and not threaten to take by force another's life, simply because they are lost on the roads, or impatient, or, good grief, drunk.

Please. Do it. Feel it.

Know Your Darknesses

"If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences."

- William I. Thomas,
sociologist

"Ask yourselves, all of you... what power would Hell have if those here imprisoned were not able to Dream of Heaven?"

- Morpheus (Dream),
Neil Gaiman in Sandman #1

"Every endless night has a dawning day
Every darkest sky has a shining ray
...
It's a private emotion that fills you tonight
And a silence falls between us
As the shadows steal the light
And wherever you may find it
Wherever it may lead
Let your private emotion come to me."

- Private Emotions,
(singer) Ricky Martin

Something a commentor wrote in one of Mr Wang's posts caught my eye and set me thinking. Amongst other things, he wrote this sentence, "Surely a counsellor [social worker] should point towards the light, rather than dwell on the dark." Rather than hovering on the endless issue of the papanons, I am in favour of discussing this notion of light and darkness today.

The above quotes have expressed my position eloquently - in so many other words, I am who I am because of all the joys and sorrows I have encountered. My life and ability to help would be much poorer if I only looked at the light and never upon the dark. How would one know the qualities of light if one has never seen pure darkness? Nevertheless I understand the importance of being a light for my clients, as they usually come to us because of their various perceived darknesses, personal and/or structural. We bandage their wounds, and we fight for them when they are in a better position to challenge their circumstances.