Recognizing that the lack of social workers in Taiwan is a serious problem with potentially severe consequences, the Ministry of the Interior yesterday unveiled a project to double the number of social workers by 2025.
“Social workers are on the frontline of our social welfare system. However well-designed the system is, it will not work without social workers,” Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) told a press conference in Miaoli County after visiting a family shelter.
“The lack of social workers is a serious problem that has been around for a long time,” he said.
Citing the example of a girl who was killed during the course of her mother’s suicide in Taichung County in April, Jiang said the deaths could have been prevented had there been enough well-trained social workers, as the family had been one of the cases overseen by the local social welfare department.
“At the moment, we have only 1,590 qualified social workers in the government system. Among them, only 338 are government employees, while 1,252 are contract social workers,” the minister said.
“In addition to a shortage in manpower, the high percentage of contract social workers could jeopardize the quality of their work, since these contract social workers have no job security and have to worry about losing their jobs, as their contracts are renewed once a year,” Jiang said. “The project aims to resolves these issues.”
The ministry’s plan — which was approved by the Cabinet on Sept. 15 — stipulates that the total number of social workers will gradually rise to more than 2,900 by 2016 and to 3,052 by 2025, Jiang said.
In addition to the increase in number, the ministry also plans to raise the pay for social workers to more than NT$30,000 a month and cover 60 percent of the total costs, with local governments shouldering the remaining 40 percent.
“In the long-term, we will also provide on-the-job training to social workers and will have social workers who can operate in specialized areas,” Jiang said.
Commenting on the new policy, National Taiwan University professor of social work Lin Wan-yi (林萬億) told the Taipei Times via telephone the new policy failed to address two key issues.
“First, it’s the money, and second, it’s still the manpower,” Lin said.
“Even though the central government would subsidize 60 percent of the costs and local governments pay only 40 percent, there are still local governments that simply do not have the money,” he said.
“As such, instead of using a unified standard for providing subsidies, the central government should provide subsidies according to the different financial situations of each county or city,” he said.
Lin said that in addition to the shortage of social workers, many local level social welfare departments also lacked administrative staff.
“Since they don’t have enough administrators, they assign some social workers to administrative positions and the shortage of social workers remains unresolved,” he said.
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