Social Worker Shortage Looms If Field Keeps Relying on Unpaid Student Labor

Truthout • By Talya Wintman • December 10, 2023

“The Council of Social Work Education (CSWE), the accrediting body for social work education in the United States, requires students to complete 900 practicum hours toward a master of social work degree. While experiential learning is critical to students’ education, social work internships are also a product of budget cuts and labor shortages within the social service sector and often fill essential agency functions. This is despite the Fair Labor Standards Act’s insistence that students be the primary beneficiaries of these internships and that internships not displace the work of paid employees. But as paid positions are converted to unpaid internships, employees are pushed out of social service agencies while unpaid social work students who may replace them are left with excessive financial hardship.

As a result, social work students like myself are speaking out in favor of Payment for Placements, a national coalition of social work students organizing to be paid for their fieldwork, and we are not alone. A growing number of nursing students and student teachers are also demanding an end to the practice of subsidizing their clinical rotations with free labor and teaching in the face of ever-greater student loan burdens and dwindling personal savings. Like social work interns, they, too, are referred to as ‘trainees.’”

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