Care For Our Service Workers!

Hi friends,

I'm ending 2025 with something that feels a little like my own set of theses tacked to the door. Not because I'm angry, but because I love my people. Good, honest, courageous people who show up day after day to do the hard work of social services. The helpers. The caregivers. The ones who go to places most people would rather not even think about, let alone enter.

When I was a boy, I was taught a simple lesson about making your way in the world. If you want to be profitable, find something no one else really wants to do and do it with excellence. The assumption was that people would pay well for work they'd rather not touch.

As it turns out, that rule of thumb is an old wives' tale.

I didn't choose my profession because it looked strategic or lucrative. I chose it because my care for others pulled me there. And after decades in this work, I can say plainly that serving the people our society prefers to step around like a dirty puddle does not come with much practical support. Not financially. Not structurally. Not when it comes time to think about longevity or sustainability.

As a society, we praise this work. We admire it from a distance. But too often, we do not protect the people who do it.

And that's what I'm finally saying out loud.

So, here it goes.

There is a quiet injustice baked into the way we talk about "Service Work" in this country.

We love the language of service. We frame it in posters and prayers and gala speeches. We say words like vocation, sacrifice, and heart for the work, as if those phrases alone were a kind of currency. As if faithfulness to the cause itself should pay the rent.

But faithfulness does not pay the rent. Fathfulness does not fund a retirement account. Faithfulness does not carry a body safely into its later years when the hands are tired, and the knees remember every church basement floor they ever stood on.

The truth is, many of the most faithful people in our society are, by design, economically expendable as it currently stands.

We have built entire systems that function only because there are people willing to do what most others refuse to do. Sit with the mentally ill when the room smells of fear and unwashed clothes. Listen to stories that don't resolve cleanly. Bear witness to addiction, relapse, violence, and loss without applause or protection. We rely on their conscience to fill the gaps left by policy and profit.

And then we pay them just enough to survive.

We call this noble. We call it servant-hearted. We call it "not about the money." And all of those things are, indeed, true...

But there is nothing noble about structuring a society that burns through its most compassionate people and calls the ash "virtue."

Sustainability is not greed. Wanting to age with dignity is not a moral failure. Asking whether a lifetime of faithfulness should include security is not a betrayal of one's calling. It is a demand for decency.

A decent society does not treat its caregivers, counselors, shelter workers, case managers, and frontline servants as disposable. It does not depend on their silence or their shame to keep wages low. It does not romanticize exhaustion and call it holiness.

Here is the question we rarely ask out loud: What kind of culture needs good people to stay financially insecure in order to feel morally intact?

Because if the only way the work gets done is by people who accept instability, burnout, and financial precarity as part of their identity, then the system is not just broken; It is unethical.

And the cost of that ethic is not abstract. It shows up in empty positions, shuttered programs, thinner safety nets, and communities that quietly unravel when the faithful finally cannot afford to keep showing up.

Advocating for this social decency means insisting that goodness should not require poverty as proof. It means building pathways where service and stability are not opposites, where devotion does not preclude a future, and where doing the hard work of caring for others does not mean forfeiting care for oneself and their families.

The measure of a society is not how loudly it praises its helpers. It is how well it protects them when the work has taken its toll.

We can do better. And if we do not, we should not be surprised when the people we depended on finally step away, not because they stopped caring, but because care alone was never meant to carry the whole weight.

This kind of change only occurs when pressure is applied from two directions simultaneously. From above, through policy and culture. And from below, through behavior, boundaries, and collective refusal to keep pretending this is sustainable.

This cannot, nor will it, happen quickly. But here's what that looks like, concretely, in our lifetime if we value these workers.

Macro level steps

What institutions, governments, funders, and systems must do:

1. Redefine "essential work" to include care work with teeth, not applause

 If a role is critical to public safety, public health, or community stability, then compensation standards must reflect that. That means wage floors tied to the cost of living, not goodwill. No more praising the work while exempting it from economic seriousness.

2. Tie public funding to workforce sustainability metrics

 Any nonprofit or social service organization receiving government or foundation funding should be required to demonstrate:

• Living wages for frontline staff

• Employer-matched retirement contributions

• Paid sabbaticals or longevity incentives after defined service periods

• Caseload caps that reflect reality, not fantasy

If an organization cannot sustain its workers, it simply should not be scaled.

3. Create portable benefits for service professions

 Many helpers move between agencies because burnout and funding instability force them to do so. Retirement accounts, health benefits, and professional protections should follow the worker, not the employer. This is doable. Other countries already do versions of this. America will be celebrating its 250th birthday next year. Let's grow up. We can do this.

4. Fund outcomes without punishing honesty

 Right now, agencies are rewarded for numbers that look good on paper, while service staff are penalized for telling the truth about complexity, relapse, and human messiness. This drives burnout and moral injury. Funding models must account for long-term, nonlinear outcomes, not just quarterly success stories.

5. Elevate lived-experience leadership into decision-making power

 People who have done this work for decades must be at the tables where budgets, policies, and priorities are set. Not as advisors. As decision makers. No more systems designed by people who have little to no experience sitting in a room with hurting clients.

6. Normalize exit pathways without moral judgment

 A healthy system should expect people to age out of frontline roles and provide dignified transitions into mentoring, training, policy, teaching, or consulting positions. Staying forever in the hardest seat should not be the only way to be considered faithful to the program.

7. Meaningful on-the-job training that allows for career advancement.

There is a quiet paradox at work in many service professions. Meaningful advancement often requires a formal degree at the very moment when degrees are becoming less essential in practice and increasingly out of reach financially. For service workers, the cost of that credential is rarely recoverable through wages in the field. The paycheck simply does not support the debt it demands.

Reimagining advancement pathways through rigorous on-the-job training, apprenticeships, and recognized certifications is not a lowering of standards. It is a necessary correction. And it is a venture well worth pursuing if we are serious about sustainability, equity, and keeping experienced, capable people in the work.

Micro level steps

What individuals, organizations, and communities can do now:

1. Stop spiritualizing unsustainability

 At the individual level, helpers must refuse the lie that exhaustion equals holiness. When someone says, "It's not about the money," the correct response is, "It's also about the future of caring for people. Theirs and mine." Naming this out loud changes culture faster than policy.

2. Set financial non-negotiables early and often

 This is hard, but essential. Individuals entering or remaining in service work must define minimums for pay, benefits, and time off and refuse roles that violate them. I personally feel the difficulty of this in my bones. A small paycheck is more than no paycheck, especially when one needs to pay for the cost of life.

But quiet acceptance keeps the system broken.

3. Organize horizontally, not just vertically

 Change rarely starts with executives. It begins when peers compare notes and realize they are all absorbing the same harm. Worker councils, professional associations, and informal coalitions create leverage long before unions or legislation appear.

4. Tell the whole story publicly and don't hide your truth.

 Not just redemption arcs. Not just success stories. The cost stories. The long nights. The financial reality. When the public understands that helpers are aging into insecurity, political change will follow. Silence protects no one.

5. Support the helpers you know materially, not symbolically

 Communities can act immediately by:

• Paying speakers and facilitators fairly

• Offering pro bono financial planning and legal help

• Creating community-funded retirement pools or emergency funds

• Supporting local bond measures and levies tied to social services

Care is practical; otherwise, it's just theater.

The cultural shift underneath all of this

At its core, this change needs one sentence to become socially unacceptable to say from here on out:

"You knew what you signed up for."

No one signs up to be economically discarded for doing good work well.

A decent society does not require sacrifice without provision.

 A sustainable society does not depend on quiet martyrs.

 And a moral society does not confuse gratitude with justice.

This is fixable in our lifetime because the solutions are not mysterious.

 They are simply inconvenient to the powers that be at the moment.

But truths, once spoken clearly enough, have a way of refusing to sit back down.

This can sound like pie in the sky if we let it. But only if we let it. Ideas don't change systems on their own. Every day, ordinary people with a little courage in their hearts do. Real change only happens when ordinary people decide to stop looking past what unsettles them and do one small, deliberate thing.

So if you've read all the way to this point, I'm asking just that. One thing.

Click the share button. Like and comment if you want to, too. But by all means, please share this with everybody.

It's a small act. A single click. But when many people do it, conversations begin. And conversations are where accountability, pressure, and eventually change take root.

 God bless you all in 2026.

I'll meet you there,

Jim Kerr