Work Won't Love You Back
Page 18
Just as arguments about moral virtue justified women’s entrance into the professions, gifts to charity justified the massive Gilded Age accumulation of wealth into the hands of a few. Titans of industry like Andrew Carnegie created giant foundations for their charitable giving with their names prominently attached. Corporate leaders advocated “welfare capitalism,” as we saw in department stores, to alleviate the worst conditions of their workers and to encourage them to aspire to upward mobility rather than class power.
As businesses consolidated and grew, reformers cast their eyes on the supposed inefficiencies of charities, organizing them in order to ensure the maximum effectiveness of their giving—and for “maximum effectiveness,” read “giving only to those who we can be absolutely certain deserve help.” “Scientific charity” involved gathering extensive data on the poor, but it also entailed educating them about hygiene, as if their problem was that they didn’t know they ought to bathe, rather than that the only homes they could afford had little space in which to do so. Such education, in the United States, aimed to “Americanize” new immigrants, assuming that rising out of poverty would be easier for those who fitted a certain image of hard-working whiteness.19
The modern charitable foundation, the tax-exempt vehicle for the wealthy to funnel their money to a variety of causes, developed in this period. Schiller pointed to a key change in 1936, when US law began to allow corporations as well as individuals to take charitable tax deductions, although the matrix of laws that allow for tax-exempt giving dates back to the 1890s, and it continues to evolve today (notably in the Trump tax break package of 2017). Through these tax laws, the state has always been deeply intertwined with NGO and nonprofit work, subsidizing their privatized provision of social services. The foundation allowed the wealthy to extend their influence beyond their corporate domain; they were, they felt, by virtue of being extremely rich, best suited to decide how others should live their lives. This control extended to the people who actually did the charitable work that foundation dollars paid for—women might be doing the work on the ground, but it was wealthy men who assumed decision-making power over the way it would be done.20
Modern social work grew from but was a step away from the “friendly visitor” role, where middle-class women worked to discipline the poor. In turn, the professionalization of some of this caring work allowed some women to make money at the social roles they’d long been pushed into. The gendered and racialized division of labor still held, though—white men would be the titans of industry who made the money, the elected officials who would decide what to do with public funds, and the managers who decided how caring workers would be allowed to do their jobs.21
With the coming of the Great Depression, private charities could no longer care for all the needy. The crisis of capitalism ensured that tinkering around the edges would not be enough—to prevent the system’s total collapse, the state had to step in and give direct relief, create jobs, and pay for care. The modern welfare state was taking shape, and while private charities still had plenty to do, the Depression’s severity cut through the long-held attitude that poverty was the poor’s own fault. Instead, the poor were marching, demanding that the government step in. The Depression also turned the great wealth accumulated by the Carnegies and other “robber barons” of the Gilded Age into less of a badge of honor and more of a target: progressive taxation and spending, not charitable giving, was the order of the day.22
The nonprofit sector, of course, didn’t go away. Its influence shrank during the Depression and World War II, when the state did what private charity couldn’t, but after the war, when women were pushed out of the industrial workplaces they’d stepped into in crisis times, the better-off among them turned to volunteering and political work, and the big foundations (such as the Ford Foundation, founded in 1936) began to flex their muscles abroad as well as at home, working in tandem with the state as the Cold War developed. The desires of foundation heads to tamp down social unrest in the years after the wars—particularly in the 1960s, and particularly in the civil rights moment—sometimes clashed with the genuine wishes of lower-level nonprofit workers, who could find themselves squeezed between their political goals and the threat of lost funding. This pattern continues today.23
PLANNED PARENTHOOD HAD ITS ROOTS IN THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT OF the early twentieth century. Margaret Sanger founded the United States’ first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1916, and was arrested for it shortly after. Charged with obscenity, Sanger spent time in jail and her clinic was closed, but after her release she began to travel the country as a public speaker, advocating for family planning. Her early organizations were backed by the same kinds of wealthy do-gooders that supported other philanthropic ventures. She also courted the support of those interested in eugenics, a fact that has made her legacy complicated for the organization to claim. The two organizations Sanger founded merged legally in 1942 to become the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the name chosen because “birth control” was too radical and anti-family for some. Sanger herself bitterly opposed the name, writing, in 1956, “If I told or wrote you that the name Planned Parenthood would be the end of the movement, it was and has proven true. The movement was then a fighting, forward, no fooling movement, battling for the freedom of the poorest parents and for women’s biological freedom and development.”24
As the organization had grown, Sanger felt it had left its original ideals behind to conciliate potential supporters. It was, after all, reliant on private funding to keep its clinics open. In the 1960s as the feminist movement and the Great Society moved forward, they brought public support for its health clinics, but the organization itself became a lightning rod—a fact that would affect the working conditions of women like Ashley Brink. Historian Jill Lepore wrote, “The fury over Planned Parenthood is two political passions—opposition to abortion and opposition to government programs for the poor—acting as one.”25
The 1960s were a boom time for foundations. As their number multiplied, the US government moved to regulate them, to ensure that they were actually vehicles for delivering needed funds to organizations doing charitable work rather than solely tax shelters for the well-off to maintain control over their fortunes. These regulations in turn spawned the growth of legal nonprofits, with many existing organizations now incorporating as such, the better to receive foundation largesse. But such funding came with strings attached. Scholar Robert L. Allen traced the way the Ford Foundation’s strategic donations to civil rights organizations, such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), shaped their direction. He found that as they came to rely on the foundations, the organizations began to back away from criticisms of capitalism and to start calling for Black people’s further integration into it. Black Power would be turned toward the goal of enabling Black capitalism.26
The proliferation of issues to care about in the 1960s—from racial justice to environmental degradation to ending the Vietnam War to nuclear nonproliferation—came from what was at first a more unified movement. Yet the New Left was easily splintered into single-issue nonprofits. As young college radicals grew into boomers running the family business, noted organizer and researcher Eric Tang, they took up respectable means of pressing for progressive ends. That often meant nonprofit work—giving money, taking up party politics, or, for those with real money, setting up their own foundations.27
Foundations weren’t the only source of funding for nonprofits doing community work in the 1960s and 1970s. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, following on the heels of the New Deal, aimed to carry out a “War on Poverty” by many different means, and one of them was distributing government money directly to nonprofit groups, including Planned Parenthood. The money even came with requirements that the poor participate in the War on Poverty. That requirement placed money in the hands of organizations to hire workers from the communities they served, jobs directly with municipal governments but also with activist groups newly flush wi
th funding—and for a while, at least, some of those groups used that money to make trouble. As noted in Chapter 1, this stream of funding supporting welfare rights organizing around this time made it possible to hire activists rather than middle-class caseworkers. This brought a change from personalizing the problems of the poor back toward the social roots of the problem. In the case of welfare rights, the root of the problem was that women’s work in the home was not recognized as work.28
The tension between the professionalized do-gooders—those closer to the donors in class and ethnic background—and the people who were struggling was not only a problem in the United States. In 1982, when the English Collective of Prostitutes occupied the Church of the Holy Cross in London, demanding an end to police violence and aiming to preserve the community legal services they had created, the group’s initial victory turned sour in the aftermath, when the sex workers’ direct action was written out of the story. Selma James, spokesperson for the group at the time, wrote that the action was seen as “an invitation to careerists to professionalize and depoliticize the legal and other services prostitute women had created as campaigning tools.” A report that came out afterward made no mention of the occupation; legal services created by the sex workers would be dismantled and a new, professional service created. “What we are witnessing before our very eyes is the process whereby women’s struggle is hidden from history and transformed into an industry, jobs for the girls,” James wrote. Elsewhere, she commented, “Every time we build a movement a few people get jobs, and those who get the jobs claim that this was the objective of the movement, this was the change.”29
As charitable or NGO work began to be considered real work, worthy of a wage or indeed a salary, the old split was reformulated. Better-off, educated white women now had careers, the careers that feminism had demanded for them, but they still were not allowed to have much power at work—at least not power over men. In the nonprofit sector, they could retain their old social role in a new format, using caring work as a way to have power, even if it was mostly over other women.
As the Great Society of the 1960s gave way to the crisis of the 1970s and the neoliberal era, cuts to publicly funded social services meant that NGOs expanded greatly, filling their old role of softening the blows of capitalism’s changes and caring for those who fell through its (many) cracks. In 1953, about fifty thousand organizations had nonprofit status in the United States; by 1978, that number had multiplied nearly sixfold. In the words of geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, nonprofits grew under the assumption that “where the market failed, the voluntary, non-profit sector can pick up any stray pieces.” They began to act as a “shadow state,” picking up the slack from the cutbacks to the expanded welfare state, and their sheer numbers (along with the numbers of foundations that fund them) skyrocketed. Today, the nonprofit sector employs the third-largest workforce in the United States.30
The growth of foundations has multiplied their political power, and the cutbacks to the state have included the parts of it that should be overseeing these tax-exempt vehicles. Nicholas Lemann wrote in The Atlantic in 1997, “The shift in power from government to foundations makes the exercise of that power less visible.… The main policy questions about them—How, exactly, should their economic and political activities be restricted in return for their tax-exempt status? Does the tax exemption still make sense?—go unasked.”31
But the people who worked in nonprofits still, by and large, aimed to do good. Many of them even aspired to shift the distribution of wealth, even if they were restricted in their ability to criticize its accumulation. Nonprofits have been a way for activists to sustain and support their work; they have allowed for movements to find ways to fund themselves. And it is those workers, those activists themselves, who have leveled a critique of the “nonprofit industrial complex” (NPIC), who can help us understand the limitations of the form. In The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, an anthology from the INCITE! Network of feminists of color against violence, a variety of authors who worked in and studied nonprofits examined this complex and its effects on movement work. They came to no unitary conclusion: nonprofits were neither all good nor all bad. Rather, they argued for understanding the intertwined relationships between governments, donors, foundations, and social service and social justice groups—an understanding that also includes an analysis of the working conditions within those organizations.32
The long-standing tension, for nonprofits and for those who work in them, between service provision—alleviating suffering—and fighting for political change continued apace through the 1980s and 1990s, as the cutbacks to the public sector left more suffering people in need of care. This has only been exacerbated by the crises of 2008 and then 2020. Service provision is often easier to fund, as it fits into the old model of charity; saying “we want money to help marginalized people organize and gain power” is a dicier proposition when it must be made to those who already hoard power. The tension at the heart of nonprofits remains that they are funded by the proceeds of an inherently unequal capitalist system, yet this system requires—indeed cannot exist without—humans who must be fed, housed, clothed, and cared for. In doing that caring work, nonprofits grease the wheels of that system; if they aim to stop its rolling, they may have to turn from work that allows the system to reproduce itself. This presents a difficult choice when that work is necessary for people to survive.33
There is also a tension built directly into the nonprofit model, whereby organizations that accept the nonprofit or charity structure are restricted in what kind of political work they can do. In the United States, for example, nonprofits are forbidden to campaign for parties or candidates, and in practice the restrictions influence political activity well beyond what is legally restrained. In the United Kingdom, a 2014 law further restricted what charities (and trade unions) can do and say about politics in an election year; ahead of 2017’s general election, more than fifty charities sent a letter demanding reform of the legislation, known as the Lobbying Act, and saying they were “weighed down by an unreasonable and unfair law which restricts our ability to contribute fully to a democratic society.” Such restrictions leave NGOs dancing carefully around their political statements and action.34
Nonprofits also wind up competing with one another for funding, which in turn requires workers to spend their time marketing their successes—whether or not they truly achieved their objectives—to the funders, much the same way that for-profit companies market their products to consumers. But the “consumers” of nonprofits’ services are, in this model, the funders rather than the people being served. Nonprofits wind up structured like little corporations, with workers under a kind of pressure to produce that mimics the pressure of the assembly line. Nonprofit staff, Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote, “who often have a great understanding of the scale and scope of both individual clients and the needs of society at large—become in their everyday practice technocrats through imposed specialization.” The legal structure of the nonprofit limits its ability to do “political” work. Moreover, Gilmore noted, progressive funders, in particular, want their money to go to programs rather than to core operations. The right, meanwhile, she wrote, spends freely on ideas. As a result, people like Ashley Brink work long, grueling schedules to make up for the work that should be done by a much larger workforce.35
Indeed, in the era of capitalist realism, charity itself became a business model. Perhaps the most famous example of this was Project (RED), U2 singer Bono’s branded clothing and tchotchke line that raised money for AIDS research. (RED), Bono and his colleagues insisted, was not a charity but “hard commerce,” a thing the pop star incredibly likened to “punk rock.” The model has proliferated, making giving into something one can consume—buying a T-shirt or a pair of shoes makes one into an “activist” in this model, the work of caring shrinking down to the price of purchase. Nonprofit workers often feel they are treated the same way, bought and traded by funders like this week’s trendy item. The obs
ession with data commodifies their projects into “deliverables” to be handed back to funders as proof their money was well spent, and funders often shift gears in search of the next hot item, leaving established groups high and dry.36
This short-termist outlook tends to create high turnover. Nonprofits are sometimes forced to close their doors for lack of funds before they’ve had a chance to figure out what works. That’s what happened to the organization Amara H. Pérez worked in, Sisters in Portland Impacting Real Issues Together (SPIRIT). The organization was just over three years old when it was shuttered. Pérez wrote that as SPIRIT got off the ground, most of the advice they received was not on how to effectively organize in their community, but rather how to raise funds. The work they did in the community, she wrote, was very different from the work of sustaining the organization. The staff had to move back and forth between the two, juggling two different sets of skills. The “business culture” imposed by funders’ demands, wrote Pérez, preempted the real work of the organization even as it demanded to see results. And the work of reflecting on what works and what does not was not considered work at all. The whole system required staff to work longer and harder, giving more of themselves, tending toward burnout.37
Burnout is complained of by a wide variety of workers, but it varies from sector to sector. In retail, it might be the struggle to paste on a smile for yet another eight-hour shift; with nonprofit workers and others committed to a cause, it’s a bit different. The World Health Organization characterizes burnout as “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy.” Such a definition, of course, assumes that one had a mental connection to one’s job and positive feelings about it to begin with; only the “exhaustion” part applies equally to all workers. Burnout, in other words, is a problem of the age of the labor of love, and it’s no surprise that it is often discussed in the context of nonprofit or political workers. These workers are expected, like Ashley Brink was, to give their lives over to the work because they believe in the cause; but it becomes harder and harder to believe in the cause when the cause is the thing mistreating you.38