Social Services
Government of Ontario policy on social services is drastically shifting. Restructuring, re-engineering and new delivery and funding models including new social entrepreneurship and social venture capital options will push services into hybrid-semi public-private partnership models.
CUPE Ontario's Social Service Workers Coordinating Committee (SSWCC) represents over 30,000 social service workers in Ontario. SSWCC is working to stand up for publicly funded and accountable social services across Ontario communities.
Meet your Social Service Workers Coordinating Committee
SSWCC represents workers who deliver essential social services to Ontarians in five sectors:
- CAS – Children's Aid Society
- Childcare
- Community Agencies
- DS – Developmental Services
- Municipal Social Services Workers
This sector also includes child protection, children's mental health, shelters/hostels and WSIB workers.
The radical reforms being proposed at the highest levels of the provincial government include aspects of privatization that will have detrimental effects on service quality, service accessibility and on the workers' working conditions and collective agreements across the social services sector.
The provincial government will be couching upcoming reforms as ‘sustaining public services' even though they undermine the public, not-for-profit delivery of services.
As those who deliver the public services Ontarians need, CUPE members know that these reforms will erode government's role in social services from protecting a public, universal model to one where government's role is to set minimum service standards and control social service spending by limiting access through a shift to regionalized programs, delivered ad hoc by small under-resourced community agencies.
Get involved with SSWCC to work to confront these challenges through a number of campaign initiatives.
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