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Social Workers Protest Compton Office Overcrowding
County says a second office to be located in Hawthorne is in the works, but union officials say that’s not good enough

By Allison Jean Eaton
Bulletin Staff Writer

COMPTON – More than 100 social workers protested outside their Compton Boulevard office last week demanding the county provide them with adequate space and computer equipment.

Clad in purple SEIU Local 721 T-shirts and hoisting signs reading “We Need Space to Rebuild Families,” the social workers Wednesday, May 7 rallied in front of the county building at 921 E. Compton Blvd.

“There’s a lack of space in our office,” said Jose Izquiero, who’s worked at the Compton office of the county Department of Child and Family Services (DCFS) since it opened in 2005 to provide services to the greater Compton area, which is considered to be high-need. Nearly a quarter of the 35,000 children who receive child welfare services countywide reside in its South Los Angeles service area.

“The administration prides itself in the work that we put out, but they don’t give us the tools that we need to provide services to the best of our ability,” he continued.

Izquiero said that approximately 300 social workers work out of the office and are forced to share desks, phones and roughly130 computers. He and others described the computers and other office equipment as outdated. Copiers, printers and fax machines go out almost daily, they said.

“Because we’re doubling up on computers, it makes it difficult for us to reach our clients in a timely manner, and it creates a level of frustration for us,” Izquiero said. “Our equipment is never working.”

“Compton social workers work hard to keep families together,” said fellow social worker Patricia Placencia. “That’s what our community asked for, and we’re listening. But we need the tools necessary to build on our success.

“We are united and working to retain families together regardless of the lack of space and high case loads,” she continued. “We are united in preventing children from falling out of their families, and that means we have to move fast to get services to families on the brink. We need our county leaders to recognize that.”

SEIU Local 721 officials said that office space is available nearby, but that the county is dragging its feet in moving some social workers to alleviate the space crunch. The social workers met with state Sen. Mark Ridley Thomas on April 10, and labor representatives raised the issue with DCFS at an April 22 countywide meeting where the county failed to set a move date, said SEIU’s Michael Soller.

DCSF Director Patricia Ploehn last week told SEIU’s Michael Green that the county was moving forward with opening up a new office in Hawthorne, Green told The Bulletin. The time frame she gave him was six to eight weeks, which Green said isn’t good enough.

Social worker Donald Napier said that opening up an additional office in Hawthorne is a bad idea because it’s so far away from the service area.

“What good is it going to do? With the price of gas, and then you think about the families who don’t have transportation,” he said. “How are those families going to get all the way to Hawthorne? A lot of them don’t have the means.”

On hand to show solidarity were representatives from the Children’s Defense Fund of California and the South Los Angeles-based Community Coalition, which works to keep children with grandparents or other kin and out of the private foster care system when they can no longer be cared for by their parents.

“Every day when we talk to the families we service, they tell us they are struggling to keep the children in their care,” said Community Coalition’s Aurea Montes-Rodriguez. “When we ask them what would make a difference, they consistently tell us they need resourceful, helpful and caring social workers. So when we hear that they (social workers) are not equipped with the space and tools they need, that makes us really upset. They need the right resources to do their jobs.”