Barbara S. Davis LCSW
Work and the Workplace is the culmination and finest expression to date of Sheila Akabas and Paul Kurzman's long history of inspiring, educating, challenging, and guiding social workers in World of Work settings. Akabas and Kurzman make clear the critical role of occupational social work in creating and integrating services and policies that enhance the lives of workers, their families, communities and employers. They carefully demonstrate how social work practice and goals can be achieved through workplace service delivery and how all practitioners must understand the complex meaning of work in the lives of those they serve. This book offers a framework for a comprehensive understanding of the social policies and cultural values that have shaped the American workplace. It addresses the changing landscape of the workplace, its impact on our future and the necessity to create new safety net systems, particularly for those who face the most challenges -- immigrants, the growing contingent workforce, the working poor, and the disabled. This book deserves a prominent place in the library of all social workers and human resource professionals.
— Barbara S. Davis LCSW, chief program officer, The Actors' Fund of America
Bruce Raynor
The lives of most adults are defined by their work -- or lack of it. But the workplace -- because of job loss, growing inequality, attacks on unions, reduced health insurance coverage and smaller pensions -- is under tremendous stress. The social work profession's dedication to individuals, families and communities requires taking on these issues. Work and the Workplace describes why this engagement is necessary and how it can most usefully occur.
— Bruce Raynor, General President, UNITE HERE
Roslyn Yasser
Doctors Akabas and Kurzman have written a comprehensive text that effectively defines current Occupational Social Work practice. This book successfully discusses today's world of work and will focus the student and practitioner in all social work settings on the opportunities to use our professional skills and values to impact the lives of workers and the policies that exist in today's complex work place. It is the author's contention that this field of Social Work plays a vital positive role in the changing nature of the workplace environment.
— Roslyn Yasser, senior vice president for project management, HIP Health Plan of New York
Gordon Law
Akabas and Kurzman's, Work and the Workplace, is now the leading comprehensive text in the literature on occupational social work. They have given us a broad context in which to understand how issues in the workplace affect the delivery of services to individuals, the family, and the community. An invaluable contribution to the literature of occupational social work.
— Gordon Law, director of M. P. Catherwood Library, Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations
