"We make sure that nobody is forgotten," Luxembourg's association of social workers (ANASIG) stressed in a statement released earlier this Monday. Social workers are generally very discreet when it comes to talking about their profession and experiences more generally. The testimonies collected during a webinar and published by ANASIG therefore offer a rare insight into the everyday working life of social workers during the pandemic.
Luxembourg boasted 716 social workers in 2019. Social workers qualify as health professionals, which means that a fair share of them also joined the medical reserve corps that was brought to life after the pandemic broke out.
For many other social workers, work continued (almost) as normal with a new emphasis on remote working. According to ANASIG, some social workers faced new challenges. A number of problems that had already existed before the crisis were aggravated.
An unnamed social worker for instance described the difficulties she experienced when she tried to contact secondary school pupils who disappeared off the radar and could not be reached by teaching staff and school officials. Many of the pupils in question had not been in touch with the school's social services unit before the pandemic. Social workers therefore had to build a relationship with them via phone, which proved to be a challenging enterprise. Some of pupils did not have access to computers. They were given laptops by the social workers. Others had serious problems and, according to the social workers, it was not understandable why the school's social services did not intervene earlier.
ANASIG urged the public to continue to display solidarity after the end of the ongoing crisis. The association argued that Luxembourg should not allow its weakest members of society to face the repercussions of the crisis on their own. ANASIG has also drawn up a questionnaire for social workers to get a better understanding of the social workers' experiences and potential problems. The results are expected to be published in June 2020.
