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I have been working as a clinical social worker treating clients in poverty for the better part of 17 years. Little did my clients know, I was in poverty as well, and even, for a time, I went to work as a clinical family psychotherapist from my tent in the woods.
I am one of many in poverty in the social work profession since Idaho began to privatize social services in about 1988. By 1995 they had set up private employers and agencies that pay social workers and non social workers as contractors for limited functions such as writing and face to face contacts in psychotherapy while keeping us on site at their disposal as slaves, answering phones, providing supervision, going to meetings, furnishing office and travel to clients homes at our own expense. If our work is late due to personal crises or illness we have to do it for free. I complained to the state senate, the health and welfare committee, the Idaho licensing board, the Idaho department of employment, senators and congressmen both state and federal and got nothing but the run around. Then I was fired.
You see this is cheap labor,and who wants to pay for taking care of people at the lower end of the economic spectrum. Even the National Association of Social Workers turns their back to the poverty of their own professionals who pay for their very existence. I write them and they don’t respond. Yet they throw their noses in the air and speak ceaselessly about the “social injustice of poverty in the US” and they don’t, in all actuality give a damn for anything but their own glory and position as self appointed heroes of the marginalized members of society. In the same gesture, they walk across the bodies of their fallen colleagues without shame, guilt or even a second thought.
I have worked many 40 hour weeks and been paid for as little as 10 hours of work. I furnished my offices on my dime. I paid thousands for auto and gas expenses. I was considered an employee and subject to the same rules as any paid employee, but I was also on contract and ”only a contract worker” with no rights. The EEOC says this is illegal, but Idaho care about federal law? - now that is funny.
In an environment of sexual harassment by my bosses and co-workers harassed me with meetings full of sexual jokes and innuendo, one relative of the boss going so far as to rub her nipples against me, a married man in the office, the boss and her step sister sitting on my lap. These conditions in and Idaho State sanctioned a social service company in Kamiah Idaho.
But I was angry about the slave wages. Sex didn't bother me much. So,I went to an online Attorney site while researching the billable hour verses employee issue. I paid for a lawyer to chat with me and she said that under federal law, Idaho can't require an individual to be both an employee and a contract employee at the same time. I am both and was just fired after bringing it and all of this to their attention and set up for false charge of sexual harassment for saying an employees Neice was attractive (not in her presence).
Anyway, Per what I see in federal law, Idaho is a violation of federal standards to classify employees as both employees and contract workers in order to place them inthe positi in the position of staying on site unpaid waiting for the next client when clients don't show up or they are conveniently scheduled hours apart.
Also, since the EEOC requires a contract employee, whose employer is receiving federal money, to be paid for at least 4 hours if forced by any circumstance to be on site to see another contracted client later, that means employers are also subject to paying the contract employee for at least 4 hours if he came in for one hour alone. This has not been the case for any employee I know of in my 16 year tenure with various private agencies.
An attorney could not believe that Idaho pulled this off and told me that I, and all others in the same situation, should sue every employer for which they have worked under this system for back wages. She said it appears that the state of Idaho made up its own policy and law in conflict with established federal employment and contract law. She said it is a fraud and it is illegal, because all federal and all EEOC law does trump all state employment.I have for at least 12 years been trying to get this issue on the table, but the state of Idaho has blown me off. And the Idaho Department of Employment has refused to help me (and many others with the same problem) by saying "it is a civil matter." The attorney says, it is not, and never will be, a civil matter, but it is fraud by the state of Idaho. (The word racketeering comes to mind - 17 years of it). By refusing to address it I believe they (the state and the employers) are negligent and can be sued. But, the big issue is that they are subject to human rights violations that would be pursued by the United States Department of Employment and the Equal Opportunities Employment Commission (EEOC).
I have been given similar and slightly differing accounts by attorneys saying this is tyranny for years. But, it always came down to them saying "this is really bad, but we don't have the resources or money to confront the whole state of Idaho." And they complain that they "would be attacked without cease by business interest groups in the State and in the right wing of the congress." Bottom line, it has always been swept under the rug, because it would open up such a quagmire and result in endless infighting. Now the quagmire is disintegrating. Now the tables of the political climate are turning, and the wheels are already rolling. It is just a matter of time before contract employees of all stripes who have been subject to this tyranny begin suing for back wages and complaining as I have to the US Department of Employment to demand, under laws that already are in place (I have an open case with them) that all workers on contract be booked back-to-back and paid for missed appointments. It is very serendipitous for my employers that I am into social justice and not lawsuits - but one can get quite inflamed by worker injustice. Thus this communication. I want to change the status-quo for social workers in Idaho and elsewhere. I am not in this for compensation but for justice.
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