Actual thing happening in the world

So, there's some kind of news on the New York LCSW front, but it's a bit hard to decode.

The history, through the veil of my own muddle: in the last ten years New York created a tiered licensure system like most states now have instead of everyone just being CSW. Ostensibly this would benefit um...clients? Maybe insurance companies?

In fact this would benefit people lucky enough to get grandfathered in as LCSW or those with the foresight to get it quickly, because suddenly a huge class of people were shut out from getting the credential that would enable them to bill insurance companies for private practice, but also to apply for a good number of upper level jobs.

The other beneficiary, it should absolutely be noted, is the licensing board in Albany and ASWB, both of whom could make a lot of new money off the licensing process. Win/win, although more accurately win/win/lose. If you graduated around 2004, you were in the lose, because unless you immediately got a job in what would turn out, several years later, to be one of the approved settings, you were out of luck. Pretty much permanently, because a lot of those approved jobs are clinic work that pays so little nobody in his/her right mind would go back to it after 4-5 years clawing a path up the shallow incline of the social work payscale.

A lot of people got screwed but good. There was an active listserv about it, which was hard to make a lot of sense of but satisfying for bitching, and in any case seems to have disappeared. A lot happened behind the scenes, apparently, though it's been hard to follow because it isn't exactly big news, well-covered. Some debt of gratitude is apparently owed to the NASW for advocating for the broadening of what is an acceptable setting, and this is the news that broke recently.

Me, I spent thousands of dollars and a lot of my time on private supervision. It was a gamble. My work isn't therapy, but for a while the rules were vague and everyone knew it and what you did was hire a private supervisor who saw what you did as clinically substantial enough that you should enter the elect class of those able to increase their earning potential and maybe someday pay off their debt. Everyone knew this. But, of course it could go wrong if someone decided that things were going to be more by-the-book, and it did.

The question here is what it means to create these divides and whether anyone actually benefits from them. It'll never be reformed, because things don't tend to go backward that way, especially when someone is profiting from it not doing so. But in a profession that already has a kind of beggars-can't-be-choosers thing going on in terms of who signs up, it is a wilfull act of worsening to tell a number of the smart ones who sign up anyway to go fuck themselves.

I have the letter somewhere in which I am told to go fuck myself. I wrote back and forth a number of times and was none too pleasant myself. But if I can find the letter, I'm posting the guy's name here and anywhere else I can think of as a tiny protest and a tiny publicization of one of the people who made this field weaker. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has thought of leaving rather than saying in my meek little social worker voice "oh well! Fucked again!"

Ah, here's some actual information. Which I will now read. Except, eh, part of me has given up on it.