Poverty is taking on a new face in the new globalized economy, and with America shipping so many jobs overseas, and current economic trends, many more people are being laid off and having difficulty finding jobs which pay as much as the ones they are losing, if they are lucky enough to find jobs at all. Traditionally, socially workers have dealt with individuals or families, and because the systems work so slowly, much of their time is spent in the more practical areas (Day 230). Social workers are not usually concerned with the effects of politics and economics, and any changes they bring about are accepted as given.
The aim of U.S. society is to make profits, not to end poverty, and society extends its largess to the rich, not the poor (Day, 1989, 230). The nation's wealth remains in the hands of the top two percent, who control most of the assets. Multinational corporations have no allegiance to any one country, and although they own bases in one, they often avoid paying taxes in the United States, or reinvesting here. It is much cheaper these days for manufacturers to produce overseas, which means more jobs lost in the U.S. and higher unemployment rates. In 1989, only half of the largest economic units in the world were nations - the other half were multinational corporations.
Social workers in the United Kingdom, where poverty is also growing rapidly, are coming to realize that they must include poverty as part of their agenda, and not something to be left to politicians and policy makers (Green, 2000, 287-303). They are recognizing that poverty is a social work issue and that it affects how social services are used. They have developed a community needs profiling approach to identify service user poverty so that social workers can become more aware of the needs of service users and the communities in which they live.
The problems in the United Kingdom very much mirror what is happening in the United Sta...