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• Reader Comments (10)

  Page 1 of 1 pages

  Thank you for an important article on the disconnect between progressive ideas and actions in some of our lefty organizations.  As someone who has worked in progressive nonprofits since 1993, I have to say that this is a very important and difficult problem for a lot of nonprofit managers, and I have seen my share of poor fiscal management, fudging of reports to funders, nepotism, and other types of mismanagement.  Meanwhile, liberal nonprofits, including the anti-poverty nonprofits I have mostly worked for, are almost invariably not unionized; one department in an organization I worked for even functioned as basically a “scab shop” for the local government that funded it-- it had the exact same jobs as the local government’s office did, serving the exact same kinds of clients; the only difference is that half of the caseload was transferred to our agency’s (conveniently non-union) workers.  Of course, the local government workers who would have had those jobs otherwise, were union workers.

  What does that say about the left, and in particular about those people on the left who aspire to run organizations?  Why does the left produce a bumper crop of people who aspire to run non-unionized nonprofits (my city’s university, like many, has a whole department teaching nonprofit management) and so few who use those leadership skills to lead agencies where workers are represented, or, God forbid, actual democratic workplaces such as worker-owned co-ops?  It’s not as if the Boards of Directors will nail the managers if their stock price goes down-- there is no stock price.  In fact, allowing an antipoverty nonprofit to unionize would make its operations MORE harmoniously connected with the mission statement that is supposed to guide the agency.  And, given that most nonprofit workers already realize they could make more money elsewhere, having locally controlled unions might not even increase the costs of providing service that much--by reducing the chaos caused by turnover of disgruntled un-represented staff, it might even make agencies more cost-efficient.

  It makes one realize that, throughout the economy, it isn’t just the “profit motive” in the financial sense that causes organizations to skirt the law or take advantage of workers, customers, etc.; power by itself, even with relatively little money attached to it, can lead to the same Enron-esque attitude in nonprofit managers that one sees in the corporate world.  Nonprofit managers may be driven by idealism, but can also be driven by wanting to be famous in the local philanthropic community, or by the rush of having cocktails with the Mayor and the chairman of 3-M or Target at black-tie fundraisers.  And on the flip side, somehow some profit-making corporations manage to do great things (say, installing solar panels, as mentioned in the article) and occasionally even respect their workers’ unions.  It’s rare, but it happens despite the “competitive disadvantage.” Summary: social change is more complicated than it looks.

  dw

  Posted by davelwhite on Aug 18, 2006 at 10:04 PM

  It would seem to me that the union itself might replace such a generic fundraising organization as a democratic group. Knowing that they were working toward a personal and humanitarian future they would have more and more enthusiastic help.
  
  And knowing that they were supporting a multi demensional activist group that practiced what they preached should bring in more and better moneys

  Transparency and honor are always the best way to get honorable help to achieve honorable goals

  Posted by FreeDem on Aug 19, 2006 at 1:31 PM

  Hi Greg,

  Thanks for an important article. I too have worked much of my life in the social justice field, most recently these days as independent Fundraising Counsel. Have often lamented the fact that too many of our organizations don’t “walk the talk” when it comes to their own staff and volunteers.

  Today there is a serious lack of experienced professional fundraisers to meet the needs of our community organizations. Much if it has with our inability to on the left to come to terms with money in our society (Kim Klein at the Grassroots Fundraising Journal has written and talked a lot about this), but it is clear from this article that many of our potential future fundraising stars are becoming discouraged too early in the career before they can really have an impact. The long-term result is that today is that it is often as hard, or harder, to staff a Development Director job than it is to find an Executive Director.

  I’ve forwarded this article to a couple of friends, as well as linked on my blog. Was a long-time In These Times subscriber twenty years ago, but faded away. It’s good to rediscover you again.

  Peace,
  Gayle
  Fundraising for Nonprofits
  gayleroberts.com/blog

  Posted by gaylesf on Aug 20, 2006 at 8:52 AM

  It’s a shame the LA office is such a dramatic example of what can go wrong, but lets be honest, you could fill a library with the sad tales of good canvas offices gone bad.

  I have about 16 years worth of stories -watching comfortably from the outside looking in. Canvasing is not for me, but it has been a lifetime of work for several friends, and my ex-husband.

  It has always struck me that what canvasing organisations need is - um, well… common sense.

  Here’s my advice:
  *Hire a payroll company instead of spending a lot of time trying to figure it our on your own and spending more time/money correcting your mistakes.
  *Make the quota and attendance rules simple and put them in writing.
  *Don’t be affraid to dress nicely and comb your hair when asking someone for money.
  *Ultimately, a canvas office is strictly sales - the hardest kind of sales because you don’t end up with an object you can show off to your friends. Canvasers have to sell ideas. So you should act like a sales organization and use some of their ideas about professionalism and psychology.
  *Take yourselves more seriously because no one else is going to do it for you. 
  *Don’t think your better than everybody else either, becuase we all can see through that.

  and lastly… keep up the good fight.

  Posted by xianne on Aug 21, 2006 at 1:46 PM

  Fantastic article, Greg. As a canvasser once myself, I appreciate your article in many ways. Thanks for taking the time to put together such an informative resource.

  -some1

  Posted by some1 on Aug 24, 2006 at 8:53 PM

  Thank You for writing this article, I myself worked for a state PIRG group for almost two summers before quitting for some of those “little things” you mention. As far as policy goes, some(emphasis on some) PIRGs are doing good work, but the office I worked for also had atrocious worker policy. There is also an eerie culture of constant cult-like cheeriness, and any person who expresses any dissent about their policy, or about the work the group in general is doing, is labelled as having a negative attitude. Not to mention the way they eat up all of a worker’s free time, and completely ignore environmental justice issues.

  In one instance, a member of my crew (I was a field manager) was fired after having worked there for a good portion of her summer because she did not meet quota for one week. She was feeling discouraged by the negative response from the neighborhood we were canvassing in (frankly so was I), and instead of switching her to a different area, they told her she just needed to have a more positive attitude. They instructed me, as her manager, to tell her that there is no way we would send her to an area where she could not meet quota, and so I had to find out what she was doing wrong and try to fix it.

  There was a disregard for her feelings and my opinions. They had already decided she had a “bad attitude” and dismissed the situation. And this is one of the less severe cases of ignoring worker’s concerns. When I was a canvasser I brought my friend in to apply(he happened to be African-American) and on one of the training days, he experienced a situation where someone slammed a door in his face and told him they had “already given money to the NAACP that year”. The field manager told him that that couldn’t possibly have happened, that he must be exaggerating or making it up, and failed to even acknowledge my friend’s concern.

  In general the job demanded so much of my time, only part of which was paid, that I would go to work, come home, sleep, get up and go to work again. They wanted everyone to come in for endless extra trainings, weekend meetings, and travel for weeks at a time (which was paid for if you put up the money up front and then submitted a reimbursement form). They expected managers to come in for longer hours than that, for only a small pay raise that was conditional on the manager meeting quota. And you risked being labelled as having a “bad attitude” if you were anything but exuberantly cheery about it. Because of issues like these, and the fact that the PIRGs place making money above workers concerns, the turnover rate at the office was extremely high, with a few people, mostly managers, staying on for the summer, but the crews changing weekly, if not daily. Sounds like a recipe for burn out to me.

  Another concern with PIRGs is that because they are so focused on money that they ignore the concerns and issues that affect lower income communities, talking to people only in communities that have enough money to donate. They discouraged being sympathetic with people who said they didn’t have money to give, and always told us to try and “bump up” donations from people, pressuring them to contribute an additional amount after they had agreed to give. The policy issues that PIRG groups address often have little to do with the issues many communities face, they take feedback from their members, who are largley relatively well-off suburbanites, all while claiming to be a “grassroots” campaign.

  The PIRG groups make it seem like they are doing good work, but they ignore the concerns of their workers, and ignore environmental justice concerns, or other social issues that communities have, as well as draining people of their money, which could be donated to more worthwhile groups. And canvassing burns out people who could be doing so many better things to advance the environmental movement.  But who cares, they are not the members who are funding the group, right?

  Posted by strawberry on Aug 25, 2006 at 2:39 PM

  Strawberry, great post, you’ve flipped many pages of the book on canvassing.

  I did canvassing for all of about six days for a PIRG and left quickly with conflicting emotions. I began with idealistic hopes for doing good and finished thinking that PIRGs are no better than any other money making operation.

  My first pause was the early training program which wasn’t paid, on-the-job canvassing. My second day I brought in more money than any other canvasser in the office including long veterans, yet no pay for me. Subsequently I’ve always wondered whether my enthusiasm and honesty toward the issue was the difference in my performance in comparison to the vets who had done several campaigns.

  My second pause was early the next week when I realized a lie we were using to get contributions in the speech we were to use on people. If a person was already a “member” (I can’t recall but I think it was three-year membership) they were supposed to receive a PIRG periodical of some sort on a regular basis. But even when we ran into a “member,” we were to tell them they had to contribute more to receive the periodical, in other words, we were charging them repeatedly for the periodical. One guy I spoke with figured out this scam and told me so as well as explaining he would never contribute to PIRG again. I brought this scam up to my supervisor and it was explained that this is what the “other side” does to justify this scam. I quit the next day.

  I think it is highly likely that this IS what the “other side” does, but that doesn’t make it right. All canvassing probably uses deception and scams to illicite more money.

  That wasn’t the only reason I quit. That night there was a pizza party where I got to hear some of the inside stuff going on. I was hearing things that I didn’t think were honest, including some of the working conditions mentioned in some of these posts. I also heard about the next issue coming up after the one I was on. We were to go from forest protection (this was in the Pacific Northwest) to hate crime laws. I was fully behind forest protection, I was dubious of hate crime laws. I was expected to work on an issue that I wasn’t fully behind (I’ll explain why in a minute). This was not the advertisment I had answered originally, it was saving forests. I didn’t like having to move off of one issue I liked to one I didn’t.

  Hate crime laws. In most cases these laws are just redundant. Murder is murder, torture is torture, we don’t need to pile on more laws particularily when some would make those additional laws be death penalty laws which I don’t agree with. I could see PIRG flirting with an issue simply out of national publicity and not thinking of how this dance might go beyond their interest.

  I began to understand that PIRG was furthering its’ own organization by looking for other issues in order to continue its existence. I understand this strategy, that having to reform an organization everytime an important issue that needed immediate attention came along can take too long or be fraught with inexperience at start up. Understanding it though doesn’t fully explain issue cherrypicking.

  The thing that is frustrating is that this is how canvassing organizations are forced to act. They exist because we do need organizations as lobbyists that represent issues that corporate lobbyists are on the other side of. Our abilty “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” has in modern times become nearly ineffective unless it is done by a professional lobbying organization with the backing of huge sums of money. I wonder if our foundering fathers ever envisioned this state of affairs.

  Posted by Jon B on Aug 28, 2006 at 1:34 PM

  Greg, thank you for so tirelessly covering this subject both here and at MyDD and DKos.

  I recently worked for Grassroots Campaigns Inc. for a total of four days before I left without looking back. After some friends filled me in on GCI’s terrible reputation, I did some looking around on the web and found your articles.

  This organization exploits its workers while talking out of the other side of its mouth about progressive, Democratic principles. Employees are almost without exception recent additions to the workforce who don’t seem to have a clue as to how they should be treated in the workplace (the ones that stick around, anyway). Employees are paid well below minimum wage (when the hours vs. pay is worked out) and are expected to work 6 days a week.

  It’s disgusting to me that the DNC and MoveOn would give this company money when they so clearly are against everything we stand for.

  Posted by bridget320 on Aug 28, 2006 at 5:52 PM

  As a union organizer who often works to organize non-profit social service agencies, I’ve seen this stuff dozens of times.  Can’t tell you how easily the bosses at these places use the good intentions of their employees to manipulate them into believing that unionizing won’t help them fix the terrible inequities they suffer, often pitting the cool-aid drinkers against the “trouble makers”.
  “If you were really committed to the cause, you wouldn’t be complaining about the workload and capriciousness of management.” Using guilt as the ultimate union-busting tool.

  But the same is true of unions themselves.  Some of the most anti-union employers I’ve seen in the non-profit sector are unions themselves.  I’ve often felt it has something to do with projective identification - adopting the behavior of their adversaries.

  The irony would be enjoyable if it didn’t impact so many hard-working, dedicated people’s lives.

  Posted by jon t on Aug 29, 2006 at 11:44 PM

  PIRGs and canvassers are not the only culpable parties here, either.  I’ve seen the same thing in other social groups (such as GLBTQ organizations) and in the labor movement.  At the root of issue seems to be the motivational techniques used by progressive and left groups:  Martyrdom. The concept is that the left has to work harder, put in more hours, sacrifice pay and benefits, sacrifice private and family life, eat on the run, stress out, etc.  Intertwined with this is the “you’re working for a cause, not doing a job” attitude that underlies the martyrdom.

  In some ways, this makes sense to these groups. The “culture of martyrdom” is very alluring to young people who see nothing but cynicism, irony, insincerity, sarcasm and lack of principles around them.  It’s a terrific marketing ploy, and organizations which utilize it find young people flocking to its program.

  But canvassers (like union organizers) are really working on short-term projects. Organizations lack the long-term commitment and resources to treat their workers well.  The organization knows it will be on-site for one, two, perhaps at most three years.  Then most of the workers will be fired when the campaign is over.  By burning out the staff, the organization has to invest less money and resources.  It can raise less money, or it can divert unused resources into other aspects of the campaign.  If successful, most staff will leave anyway due to burnout and/or lack of commitment to the next compaign.  ("I joined up to fight deforestation, not to fight for universal healthcare.") The “culture of martyrdom” harms the organization in the end.  But so?  Because the organization has burned out the staff, the staff “aren’t worth keeping anyway”.  And a new bunch of college grads is ready in the wings, ready to be used up and burned out.

  One sees the same thing in union organizing drives. Even if successful, there will be little role for most staff in the newly formed union.  And the next organizing campaign is unlikely to be in the same area.  Organizers don’t want to uproot their families.  So the union has every reason to burn out the staff as it organizes, throwing the staff away at the end.  And the union has every reason to want to resist unionization, for unionization would tend to prevent the burn-out, limit post-election layoffs, etc.

  It could be argued that the real problem here is the pervasive despair and cynicism which permeates American culture.  People don’t commit to “progressivism” or “liberalism.” They commit to single issues which they believe in, and organizations and causes they can trust.

  But when an organization is successful, then what?  With no wider commitment to society than the single issue, the supporters drift away.  Organizations are encouraged to engage in “culture of martyrdom” staffing.

  One solution might be to rebuild multi-issue organizations with broader philosophical or ideological commitments.  But this flies in the face of the widespread cynicism present in our society, and even in the face of classic identity-based politics that is the foundation of so much political involvement.

  Posted by Tim1965 on Sep 2, 2006 at 10:00 AM

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Also by Greg Bloom

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  How the canvassing industry is burning out progressive youth