Why The Trabadores Sociales Taking Over?

[Karl Marx's Camel]

What are the trabadores sociales, social workers, really? What is their "mission"?

Why are the govt firing people at more and more jobs and putting trabadores sociales there instead?

Apparently all those who worked at gas stations was fired and was replaced by these trabadores sociales... Why?

[Severian]

The word is trabajadores, workers. I'm not sure why you don't just say social workers.

U.S. youth meet Cuban social workers (http://themilitant.com/2003/6729/672950.html)


“When I finished high school I took the university entrance exams but couldn’t get high enough scores to be admitted,” said Josy García Ayala. “I spent a whole year just sitting around the house practically doing nothing. Then my neighbor told me how I could study at the school for social work and become involved in this movement. I signed up, and was able in this way to resume my studies. Now I’m also at the university studying history.”
....
Among those most affected by the economic and social crisis are young people, including layers of teenagers who, after graduating from high school, are neither working nor studying. Some become alienated and get involved in hustling or petty crime.
....
“In Havana there were 109 [professional] social workers before this program began,” said Norma Pérez, who heads the program in Havana. “They would mainly wait in community centers like the one we are meeting in today for people to come to them and tell them about their problems.

“Now there are 2,182 social workers in Havana. These young people go out into the community. They live among and get to know the families they are working with,” Pérez explained. “They work together with them on problems they are facing.”

The schools of social work were established “to solve two problems at once,” Pérez said. “We take youth who weren’t benefiting from all of the rights that the revolution offers and connect them with school and work again. The social workers go out into the community, evaluate the problems, criticize when government institutions aren’t working properly, and offer solutions.”

As these young social workers were succesful in their early efforts, and have clearly developed a lot of revolutionary consciousness, they've been given more responsibilities. Including the prevention of theft at gas stations.

Cuba Seeks Revolutionary Renewal (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=9846)


On October 15, the government moved to end the gas diversion problem by assigning thousands of young people in blue T-shirts to assist in pumping gas at service stations across the country. The youth belong to Cuba's corps of 28,000 social workers, recruited from among school dropouts and the young unemployed. After extensive education and preparation (7,000 are now in training), they work on projects that assist Cuba's most vulnerable citizens.
Referring to the anti-corruption effort, Fidel commented, "We read every day in the opinion polls that people are asking about when the 'kids' are coming to the dollar stores, to the drugstores, or to all the other places." Dollar and drug stores have a reputation as targets for theft. "Everyone is full of admiration for these 'kids.'"

The crackdown on corruption has a social as well as an economic goal: to reduce the gap between privileged and unprivileged within Cuban society.