Spread across the country, youth care workers are on strike today. They think the workload is too high. Employees in our province are also laying down their work.
“It is the only thing we can do to indicate that it is no longer possible and that we have too much work,” says Hanneke Drevel of youth protection Noord.
A job as an employee in youth care is normally not a quiet office job, says Drevel. “Every day we hear harrowing stories. We come across the most serious problems there is, a measure is not just pronounced by the juvenile court.” She says that she often works with traumatized children, and that parents have often been through a lot.
On top of that comes the increased workload. Drevel sees that more and more colleagues are leaving as a result. The work that remains is in addition to the normal work of the employees left behind. “There has been a study that says you can guide 8 to 9 families, and often that is now around 18 families.”
So strike is seen as the only option. In practice, this means that the employees will work half office days. Normally they are available all day long for anyone who has questions, says Drevel. “But that’s why we stop because we can’t get it together anymore.”
If that does not have the desired result, the employees plan to stop the office services altogether. This means that they will only be available to existing clients, but nothing else.
“We hope that the government will say: that’s actually not possible, so we’ll just have to step in. The last thing we want is to dupe our customers. If there is a crisis, we are just there, because we have that obligation. But some questions can wait a day. And to that we say: we need that time now for our real work.”