Non-profit sweatshops
Here's an article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy that I find quite amusing:
Long Hours, Low Pay Turn Off Young Nonprofit Workers, Study Finds…
A friend who advocates on behalf of low-wage immigrant workers noted, "hey, Long Hours, Low Pay, that sounds like a panel at a sweatshop conference." I recall I once worked on a publication that sounded eerily similar too. Hey, but who's complaining...no doubt that I'll grovel for a grant and assign myself to hours of program reports before risking my life and limb as a garment worker, day laborer, or domestic worker.
The article is a bit of a no-brainer. The funders behind this "study" should have just corralled (in foundation-speak the word would be "convened") 10 non-profit managers and you'd have gotten to the same findings.
While noting the consequences of a non-profit grind that offers little in terms of a "career ladder," the article fails to address bigger structural and "movement building" (love that funder-talk) implications. As social justice movements have become more institutionalized, organizations supposedly committed to "rapid response" and "innovative strategies" to address "emerging needs", find themselves dedicating nearly all their time to meeting proposed "deliverables", scouring about for small grants that don't quite hire a full-time person at a living wage, reporting on "organizational developments" such as staff turnover due to aforementioned not quite full-time person leaving to seek an actual living wage which in turn thwarted "meeting proposed objectives."
I could go on and on, but rather than write about it for free, maybe I'll see if I can find a funder to pay me. I'll "cultivate" the funder--first, plant the seed establishing a need for this kind of analysis, spend 2 years alluding to this "need" as recurring issue tangentially related to the funder's core issues, conduct a peer needs assessment survey, front a thousand dollars in publication costs to make the survey findings glossy, do a couple of unfunded workshops at random conferences and cite to my own survey to establish myself as the recognized "expert" in this field---all so I can not blog for free.