Subject: Social Service Workers Moonlight and Scrimp To Make Ends Meet Date: Published: 2/10/92 (250 lines) Source: Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. The Genteel Poor: Social Service Workers Moonlight and Scrimp To Make Ends Meet --- They're Educated, Dedicated And Earn Little; Pay Gap With Profit Sector Grows --- Teachers and Food Stamps ---- By Clare Ansberry Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal Catherine Kelleher marched into gritty neighborhoods like Pittsburgh's Polish Hill 30 years ago to conquer measles and polio. She fought to keep pregnant teens in school and was nursing crack-addicted infants before most people knew crack existed. Back then, public health nurses were the highest paid nurses in the city. Today they are the lowest. Now, Ms. Kelleher's biggest foe seems to be a society that no longer values her work -- at least on payday. With three decades of experience and a graduate degree, Ms. Kelleher earns $23,000 a year. Those serving the needy are increasingly becoming impoverished themselves -- a new class of genteel poor, in a sense. They are preschool teachers, youth counselors, social workers and hospital chaplains who typically have middle-class backgrounds and educations, but aren't living middle-class lives. With starting salaries of $11,000, some Catholic elementary school teachers in Pittsburgh could qualify for food stamps. People like Ms. Kelleher never expected to become rich. Indeed, some even scorn money as evil, and consider six-figure incomes vulgar. Pat Duhon, who has worked in soup kitchens and homeless shelters in New York and Ohio, says he always thought he'd be satisfied even if his earnings didn't reach $20,000 a year by the time he was 30. But even he believes inequities have gotten out of hand. Consider this: A 1989 study of human service workers in Pennsylvania showed that they earned about the same wages as supermarket and movie theater clerks. "We clearly don't value these workers," says Marta Peck, executive director of Berks County Mental Health Association in Reading, Pa. She notes that some actually earn less than the people they care for, who receive disability or Social Security benefits. Yet need for their services is skyrocketing. The economic theory that those in demand command premiums carries little weight in this area. So, too, does the notion that people should be rewarded for productivity and cost savings. If social worker Lori Crist, who has a degree in psychology, were compensated for what she saves taxpayers, she'd earn substantially more than $12,000 a year. Ms. Crist helps the mentally ill live in group homes instead of institutions that cost several hundred dollars a day. To maintain a car and an apartment, she holds a second part-time social work job and delivers morning newspapers. Moonlighting has become unavoidable. Cash-strapped state and local governments from Maine to California are slashing social service budgets, while nonprofit groups scrounge for dwindling donations. Meanwhile, the gap between what human service professionals earn in the private, for-profit sector versus the public, nonprofit segment has widened into a canyon. Mental health workers in Pennsylvania earned only about $1,000 less than their peers in private hospitals in the early 1980s. Now it's $10,000 less. "Good feelings went a long way in keeping people when the disparity was $1,000 or $2,000. It's tougher when it's $10,000," says Barbara Conniff, director of Allegheny East, a nonprofit mental health agency. Agencies desperately try to retain workers with low-cost goodies -- a $20 Christmas bonus and an ice scraper -- or flexible work schedules. But it's not enough. At one point, Bell Socialization Services, a private, nonprofit group that serves the disabled in York, Pa., had 100% turnover in six months; a four-month veteran had seniority. In Boston, a program dealing with preschool children with developmental problems has been without a speech therapist for two years because private hospitals are offering salaries twice as high. Social workers in Michigan with master's degrees are earning $15,000 in nonprofit sectors, while in Rochester, N. Y., youth counselors start at well under $20,000. "Some people think we are so altruistic that money doesn't matter," says Ms. Conniff. "It does." --- Paul Taylor is an oxymoron: a middle-age case worker. By the time most caseworkers reach 40 years, they're burned out and disgusted with low wages. It's no wonder. At 45, Mr. Taylor, who has a master's degree in counseling, has nearly reached the earnings zenith as a caseworker for the Cuyahoga County Department of Human Services in Cleveland: $24,000, including overtime. He has had to moonlight as a janitor and delivery man to support his three children. "It makes you a little bitter. You wonder `Did I go to school for this? '" says Mr. Taylor, who figures at least 30% of his fellow 850 caseworkers moonlight, and about 20%, like him, have master's degrees. The human services profession's women-only image has perpetuated low wages, he contends, and in turn fueled feelings of inferiority. Every time a child is abused, headlines blast social workers. Asked how they feel the public perceives them, many respond: lazy, chain-smoking paper-shufflers. There are no perks to compensate for poor pay. Mr. Taylor's own "office" is a closet-sized slab of linoleum, with a small cluttered desk standing in a long traffic jam of other small desks. Meanwhile, social workers are handling two or three times as many cases as they did a decade ago. And yesterday's poor are now also crack addicts and homeless. For eight years, Dennis Bunkley handled child sex abuse cases, each of which seemed more horrible than the last. Young abused girls, who saw him as their savior, would write him love letters and follow him home; their mothers, desperate for a strong male, latched onto him, telling him their suffocating secrets. The stress of having so many fragile lives depend on him was like living with a gun to his head. Every few months, he'd break down, unable to write the name of a client, or agonizing about how to begin a sentence. "I'd sit for hours wondering, should I start `I met the client today,' or `The client told me,'" he says. "I wasn't able to operate." When he came home, all he wanted to do was sleep. With two small children of his own, each case hounded him with "What if they were my own? " sequels. He became obsessed, even demanding the names of every person his own children saw during the day. He earns about $27,000 a year. He and his wife didn't go out for two or three years, and although they were desperate for cash, he didn't want his wife to work. Instead, Mr. Bunkley moonlighted. He would work 45 hours a week for the county, come home at 5 p.m., and go back out again from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. working as a musician in a Motown-type band. But the son of a steelworker, whose mother went to college at the age of 50 -- the first of 14 children in her family to get a degree -- never gave up. Although he no longer counsels sexually abused children -- now he works with parents in crisis, an equally poor-paying job -- he won't leave human services. "I'm adhering to a calling," he says. --- At Malachi House, a home for the homeless terminally ill, no one works for the money. They do it for people like the 29-year-old man who had said his parents died 10 years earlier. On the day he died, he confessed that his mother and father were alive and begged to see them. The staff tracked his parents down and stood by his bedside as the young man's mother cradled him in her arms and sang him a final lullaby. Cleveland's Malachi House is a home for people who are expected to die within six months from diseases like AIDS or cancer. It relies on donations, not Medicare or Medicaid, and can afford only a barebones staff, supplemented by volunteers. Karen Murphy's job is to make sure that eight dying people are fed, clothed and as comfortable and happy as they can be. If they need a bowl of ice cream, she gets it; if they want her to say a prayer with them, she does. She helps turn the bedbound every two hours and after someone dies, she places a rose and heart-shaped pillow on the empty bed. She's paid less than $15,000 a year, much less than she could earn if, after college, she stayed with the television production career she once pursued. Now she and her husband, who is in graduate school, live in an inner-city apartment with a view of homeless men on their way to a soup kitchen. She's not used to this life style: She grew up in a six-bedroom suburban home with a big yard on a safe street and vacationed at Cape Cod. "Money has never been important to me," she says. While her parents were initially worried when she came home wearing donated clothes, she doesn't mind because there are intangible rewards. On Christmas morning at Malachi House, a 76-year-old man who hadn't received a present in 40 years laid his new, donated house robe, hankie and sweater in a row, insisting that everyone come see his gifts. She also admits that for now sacrifices are easier. At 26, she and her husband are young, childless and have supportive families and friends. "We've chosen this life and don't feel denied," she says. "That may change when kids come into the picture." --- Lois Bianco remembers sitting at home shortly after her husband died of cancer, with 10 children under the age of 18. "I used to pray that someone -- a delivery man, a postman, anyone -- would come and ring the doorbell," she says. The only one who did was Catherine Kelleher. She still has the sympathy card and letter that Ms. Kelleher sent 15 years ago. It wasn't the first time Ms. Kelleher came to the mother's rescue. When Mrs. Bianco insisted on caring for her husband at home, even though it meant sacrificing insurance coverage and wiping out the family savings, Ms. Kelleher helped her get food stamps. And after one of her sons was born with a birth defect, the public health nurse located a surgeon to handle the procedure and tracked down a foundation to pay for it. Ms. Kelleher wouldn't have time for that today. Instead of serving one district, she has five; instead of 22 full-time public health nurses in her district, there are three. The Allegheny County Health Department, with an average 12.5% vacancy rate for public health nurses, has a standing help-wanted ad. For one thing, public health nursing is arguably more dangerous nursing than in a private hospital, where she worked for 10 years. In the 1960s, she faced race riots; today there are drug wars. She's been robbed twice, and every day risks working with infectious diseases like AIDS and tuberculosis in unsterile homes. Yet public health nurses earn far less than their hospital counterparts. A recent nationwide survey showed that the average salary for experienced bedside nurses rose 8.9% last year; a head nurse earned an average of $43,700. Ms. Kelleher got her last raise four years ago, to $23,000 from $21,000. Single, she spends her own money and takes vacation time to attend public health seminars. "With the shift from hospital to the home and emphasis on prevention and wellness, we should be more important, not less," says Ms. Kelleher. Here in the ethnic outskirts of Pittsburgh, infant mortality is on the rise, as are tuberculosis, drug use and demand for simple things like measles shots from parents suddenly stripped of health insurance. At the house of a young family with an infectious bowel disease, she spends less time nursing than listening to Paula Fine, the 24-year-old mother of three, talk about being abandoned early by her own family and about her two marriages. Ms. Fine shows her the children's clowns saved from someone's trash, the drapes made from shower curtains, and the never-worn wedding dress with a 12-foot train kept in a garbage bag. She tells Ms. Kelleher that one day she will have a master bedroom the color of peach, with a vanity. "I finally found someone who listens to me and cares," says Ms. Fine. "I have a great fear of someone coming and taking my kids away. I need someone to say you're doing great, or this is what you can do better." Ms. Fine says she is applying to nursing school and asks Ms. Kelleher's advice. Outside in the car, Ms. Kelleher sighs. If she doesn't visit Ms. Fine, she fears the young mother will fall apart, along with her three young children. "I can see public health nurses going down the drain," she says. "The sad thing is we'll be taking others with us." [This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]