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.