Living Conditions Of Sanitary Workes In Social Support Theory Perspective

Sanitary workers,“the city beautician”,play a vital role in enhancing city environment,improving urban civilization,and in meeting the increasing material and cultural need of Chinese.Their contribution to the city is visible to us all.The environment of a city cannot be satisfactory without their silent but laborious work.However,it is always neglected that sanitary workers are in need of better living conditions and more social supports.The perfection of social supports will certainly be of assistance.This study bases on social support theories,employs various methodologies,such as questionnaire survey,non-structural interview,literature research and site observation,comprehensively analyzing the current social support situation of the sanitary workers at D strict in Erdos city.Furthermore,this paper proposes social work intervention strategy on improve the living conditions of sanitary workers from social support theory perspective,showing its policy implication.The main findings of this research are following:1.Living conditions of sanitary workers.We find that sanitary workers at D district(1)generally keep on good terms with their family members,but to some degree are lack in emotional belonging;(2)are in an ordinary economic status,having no extra income besides salary;(3)are not in the habit of regular health checking;(4)sign no employment contracts,being lack in social security and uninsured,and always work at holidays and festivals;(5)and live boring leisure lives.2.Social support for sanitary workers.The result shows the sanitary workers at D district do not receive enough social supports.They mainly receive the subjective supports from their spouses and children,and are barely paid attention by neighbors and colleagues.As for the objective support,they only have single-source of financial assistance or assistance for practical matters which usually is blood relation.In addition,sanitary workers are not willing to or say they do not possess other support sources to ask for help,especially supports from their working places and communities.At the same time,in the subjective support,the reason why there is no enough social support is because of their own career limitation,less network resource,weak sense of self-identity,and low awareness of social support.With regard to the objective support,it is the lack of social insurance,unsatisfactory introduction training,and the way of system reform that affect the sanitary workers.3.The necessity and feasibility of analyzing social work intervening in the living conditions of sanitary workers.This paper proposes the strategy devised for improving the living conditions of sanitary workers,including social case work and living standard enhancement,social group work and living standard enhancement,and social community work and living standard enhancement.Social case work proceeds with typical cases,selecting the workers who have prominent network characteristics to help with their participating in social activities.Social group work organizes various group activities like team work group,mutual-help group and labor union.Social community work can facilitate the community function,providing official community support for sanitary workers.4.At the end of this paper,we make a conclusion about our findings.We hope that employing social work methods in improving the living conditions of disadvantaged groups can enrich the related literature.