Non-profiting off of our souls

Life goes on in Washington, D.C.

I am once again employed, albeit far from "gainfully", at a call center in the city. All of my distaste and anger at the nonprofit industrial complex has been affirmed once again, making this the third nonprofit job I've worked since graduation that has been exploitative of the people who worked there and acted at best as a band-aid solution to a deep, systemic problem. This is also my second nonprofit job (almost my third) where the pay has been low and the benefits poor (in this case, nonexistent).

The domination of the job market of young college students and graduates by low/no-pay and no-benefit positions isn't a secret - consider the recent article run on the New York Times about the growing concern about internships. Unfortunately, this article is focused on the private sector and the scandal of a "for-profit employer" hiring unpaid workers. Where is the outcry about unpaid or low-paid labor in nonprofits? While I'm not holding my breath for the NYT to break the story, the reality is that the nonprofit field is full of low-paying entry-level jobs (or unpaid internship positions) that take advantage of well-meaning, socially-concerned generally young people.

At this point you may be wringing your hands and muttering to someone else in the room (or no-one in particular) about how nonprofits are strapped for cash and really can't afford to pay people all that much. It's true that many nonprofits don't have all that much money - they're generally running off of grants, dues and private donations, none of which are guaranteed and all of which are subject to change from year to year. The big problem, though, is that nonprofits tend to divide up the money they do get in really bad ways. Because they're usually top-down, the executive director tends to take a huge cut of the money coming into the company, leaving less to work with when it comes to the actual work and the people doing it. I work in a nonprofit where the ED gets almost 200 thousand dollars in pay and benefits - meanwhile people staffing the phones are getting a meager 9 or 10 an hour. Even at my last job, when I was pulling in around 32K for a year's work, my boss was making much more (at the same time lecturing me about how we needed to hold off on spending money on the organizing I was doing).

In order to truly remedy this problem, we need to destroy nonprofits themselves and create/grow fresh, vital forms of creating real social change. But while we're choosing to work these jobs, we need to force these organizations to give us the pay, benefits, and respect that we deserve. In addition, we need to confront and expose nonprofits for how they treat the people that they say they're "helping" or "advocating for" and the problems they say they're "solving". Because the reality is that they're doing neither in any meaningful sense of the term. They don't respect people calling into the call center any more than they respect the people picking up the phone. Real change comes through struggle, in the workplace and outside of it.

Student Debt Destroys the World

"Debt is the perfect commodity, and the future itself became the new market the financial market was born, ushering in the era of postmodernism."

"The value of the financial system grew to an astounding four times the real productivity of capital. Furthermore, the very concept of debt has as its implicit promise that the future must be an eternally frozen version of the present, as debt is a claim on the materialisation of future profits. As it became evident that the poor could never pay back such massive debts, the age of financial capitalism and its secret religion of the free-market ended. No-one believed in the banks and they collapsed, just as the pagan temples of ancient Greece fell into ruins when no-one believed in Zeus any longer."

-Introduction to the Apocalypse

Happy New Year!

As we enter 2010, we drag with us all the messes of the past year and before. Now renting an apartment with some friends in Washington, D.C. (the belly of the beast), yours truly is feeling the sting of two particular messes (unemployment and crippling student debt) more than ever. And I'm certainly not the only one.

One thing particular striking to me about the above quotes is the idea of debt freezing the future as a version of the present. As graduates, many of those of us whose families were not running a multi-thousand dollar household budget surplus in multiples of 10 to pour into the ever-more-expensive education system in this country have been deprived of a future. For years, decades, (forever?), we are tied to the past by our debt. Every month we pay tribute to the most expensive years of our lives in the hundreds of dollars we send to Bank of America, Nelnet, Wachovia, the US government and all the other loan sharks getting fat off of a broken system. We are debt serfs, and those of us lucky enough to have employment tithe a large portion of the meager paychecks from our entry-level jobs to rich people living in mansions somewhere. We are tied to the past when we are unable to move out of our homes because we cannot afford to pay for the cost of living as an independent adult. Our future is frozen when we are unemployed for months on end and our parents must support us as if we were still children.

Debt is the perfect commodity because we cannot escape it - the banks and lenders own our future. But just like the mortgage industry before it, the student loan giants are heading for collapse. When you have a loosely-regulated industry filled with companies offering easy (or not so easy) money to people whose ability to pay it back is questionable at best, it's going to go bust at some point.

These are not happy days for America's young and striving. Indeed, as the economy has rocked and tumbled its way through 2009, spewing jobs like a sea-sick tourist, these have become very, very bad days. In September, the unemployment rate for people between the ages of 16 and 24 hovered morosely at 18.1 percent, nearly double the national average for that month. At the same time, the actual employment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds dropped to a startling 46 percent, the grimmest such figure on record since 1948, the year the government began keeping track. Taken together, this same group of young people has lost more than 2.5 million jobs since the economy began deflating in December 2007, roughly one-third of all the jobs lost, making them the hardest-hit age group of the recession.

-"Generation Recession", The Nation

Given the reality of youth unemployment, underemployment, and indebtedness, it's not hard to see the end in sight. The question is: what are we going to do about it?

Let's look at what happened to the recent collapse of the housing market, a situation where you have many people who couldn't make payments on multi-thousand dollar home loans they had taken out. Similar to student loans, mortgages were made to lower-income folks in a market where housing was very expensive. Investors put tons of money into this market because the interest on these loans, which often got very high, was profit for them. The companies that made these loans, some of which had been created simply for this purpose (or rather, to make massive profits through these loans), hemorrhaged money and many collapsed because the inevitable happened: people without the money to pay high monthly loan payments stopped paying and the house of cards fell in on itself. This caused a chain reaction which tore through the whole capitalist system, causing massive losses across the board and producing the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression.

How did the government respond? Bailouts for these massive debt factories kept companies like Bank of America, AIG and Citigroup going on our money, while the most unstable fell apart at the seams (think lines of people making a run on IndyMac bank in California in the summer of '08, or google American Home Mortgage Services, one of the biggest mortgage lenders ever). For the people who were losing their homes, however, the government's generosity and understanding was noticeably absent. In other words, the government gave tons of money to wealthy corporations to keep them afloat while letting many, many people who got screwed by their loans lose their homes and ruin their credit ratings. Those that have gotten help have had to beg the same banks that abused them with ridiculously high interest rates and threats to take away their homes to re-negotiate their loans.

In other words, the government acted in the interest of the banks, not of the vast majority of people in this country.

We are the next bubble to burst - the rotten business of student loans has to fall in on itself at some point, and soon. Homeowners got and are still getting screwed while the rich are handed our money by the government they control. We're certainly not looking for the same treatment, but how do we avoid it?