Contemporary social transformations, operated by the neoliberal program under the command of financial capital, bring new challenges to the group of citizens and men and women who live by the sale of their labor power. Social workers, individually and collectively, are not separate from this reality. The profession was characterized by its confrontation with these challenges and its questioning and analysis of its role in society, in its attempt to assume more critical profiles and commitments to the interests of workers and the subaltern sectors. An example of this is the "Reconceptualization Movement" and the later attempt to define an "Alternative Social Service" concerned with the meaning of its practice, with the process of critical knowledge, with a criticism of capitalism and its situations of social injustice. The current challenges include overcoming earlier weaknesses, collectively constructing an ethical-political professional project that can competently and committedly confront, at the heart of progressive social forces, the conditions in which workers live (with or without employment) as well as other subaltern populations.
critical Social Work; ethical-political project; Social Work and neoliberalism