greggish's blog

It has been more than six months since I last wrote about this subject. Recent events warrant an epilogue of sorts.

The Fund for Public Interest Research (FFPIR, or 'the Fund,' as it is commonly known) deploys thousands of canvassers each year onto streets and at doors to raise money for dozens of liberal non-profit organizations. Its 'sister' company, Grassroots Campaigns Inc (GCI), has major contracts with the DNC, the ACLU, MoveOn, and the League of Conservation Voters.

The Fund is also being sued by a class of its former employees for systemic labor infractions.

Now before we really dive in here, it's important to establish two more facts.

1. FFPIR has already been found in violation of labor law by the California State Labor Commission. You can find the Commission's ruling here (in PDF).

2. Soon after the canvasser class action suit was filed, the Fund changed its labor policies. Reportedly, the policies now ensure that all canvassers get paid at least minimum wage, plus overtime for all hours of work over 40 a week. The policies now ensure its employees have a half hour lunch break, and short breaks during the day. All additional "campaign work" is now made explicitly clear to be volunteer. (Maggie Mead broke this news yesterday, but as they say, she buried the lede.)

It is good to know that the largest direct fundraising apparatus on the Left now adheres to fundamental labor laws. Of course, the sudden and explicit establishment of these policies is also a tacit admission that for many years--up to two decades or more--the largest employer on the Left has been breaking these laws.

How could this have happened for so long?

What does it mean for the future of these organizations?

In this piece, I am going to posit some answers to those questions. If you want to learn more about the Fund's operation, about the story of the canvassers who demanded change to it and ultimately filed suit, or about the for-profit sister Grassroots Campaigns Inc, please look to the reporting I did last year on MyDD and DailyKos.

Hi! Once again, I'm here to push my Campus Progress typing. Please check out the story there, and then check out the exclusive FM-only bonus typing below!
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For Lucas Schaefer, like thousands of others who poured themselves into grueling Get Out the Vote campaigns, the drive out of Florida in November 2004 was long and awful. Lucas--who had not-quite-made-it through Grassroots Campaigns Inc's MoveOn Leave No Voter Behind fiasco--was apparently feeling particularly masochistic; so Lucas, who is a curious sort, forced himself to ride out the trip home with talk radio on. He baked for hours in the heat of right-wing victory tirades.

"It was the moral values moment," he recalled to me with disgust, referring to the polling question to which the majority of voters supposedly answered that they 'voted their values.' "All these pundits and various anti-gay groups were using that polling question to make it seem as if the majority of Americans were unsupportive of gay rights. These right-wing activists would spin the election of George Bush to empower themselves by further disempowering the homosexuals in the country. And I'm becoming angrier and angrier -- that's not true in my experience. That wasn't the America that I had just experienced in Florida."

In the time since the election, compelled forward by this experience, Lucas has been traveling across the country many times over with the Gay? Fine By Me T-shirt project, like a Johnny Appleseed sowing fields of fruity tolerance. This week in Campus Progress, I'm fortunate to have had the chance to write about this simple-yet-remarkably-ambitious idea that Lucas has helped grow into a true grassroots movement:

Today, Fine By Me campaigns have run in over 200 communities. Last month alone, at least 50 college campuses were treated to the coordinated display of 12,000 students, faculty, and staff who are openly tolerant of a diverse spectrum of sexual orientation.

Schaefer regularly travels to new campuses to give presentations about what the program is all about. From there, the effect is viral—the T-shirts have a way of moving themselves around—and every week a new group or two decides to launch their own campaign.

[S]ays Schaefer of his organization’s relationship with the groups that run Fine By Me campaigns: "Our experience is that this program can work in any community, and we’ll tell you what worked for us and what worked for other groups, but how you want to implement it is pretty much up to you."

At its heart, this is the essence of activism: taking a moral cause that a great number of people believe to be just, and making the essence of that justice inescapably visible.

And what I love best about this story is that Lucas--like the creators of this site, in fact--has been propelled forward by the experience of crushing defeat in 2004. Sort of (kind of) like how the Sex Pistols launched a thousand bands by slaughtering rock and roll -- perhaps we could say the same about George Bush and democracy. (Or maybe that's a stretch... Anyways, read up!)

Today, Campus Progress published my article about the unique pension plan program created by the National Organizers Alliance. NOA is an association for community organizers and non-profit workers, and the pension is its flagship project -- probably the only plan of its kind.

By pooling together the resources of its thousand-plus members, and scores of member organizations, NOA was able to secure a deal that's as desirable a pension benefit as any employee could hope to see. All members, regardless of their place on the staff ladder, have access to a employer-matched 5% contribution towards a secure and accessible savings fund.

When I spoke with Patrick Masterson, acting director of NOA, I mentioned that this seems to be a smart way to fix one of the market failures in the activist industry. Patrick laughed to hear the phrase "activist industry"--saying that he'd never quite thought of it like that--but it would seem that this is exactly the insight that prompted NOA to take up the plan. In the world of cash-strapped community work, employees' main benefit is "psychic income"--but while no one does it to get rich, those who do want to stay committed for the long-term often find themselves approaching a future that's actually financially insecure.

NOA's plan was not just about a sweet benny--it was a deliberate and measured reaction to a widespread problem among community organizers and activists: no matter how committed they were to the cause, most progressive organizations have been failing to invest in their future. Is yours?

You can read more about it in "Private Pensions, Public Good":

The notion that non-profit employment benefits should have an “ideological frame” is, in itself, somewhat unusual. "So often in social change work, we don’t practice what we preach,” [Cathy] Howell says. “We say right off the bat that we don’t have enough money, and what ends up happening is that we don’t cover people’s basic needs. [NOA] wanted to set a standard to show that it is the responsibility of social justice organizations to invest in their employees."

At the end of the article, Cathy shares a particularly interesting insight into the way that the mindset of social justice work has changed from the 70s (when it was first widely professionalized) to now (when the "industry" is led by people from that first generation, who might not be in tune with the realities of today's youth).