by Sarah Jaffe
Yet nonprofits resist improving working conditions. When the US Labor Department under President Barack Obama moved to raise the overtime threshold, meaning more employees would get overtime pay, several major nonprofits put out statements claiming that paying more overtime would put them out of business. Pitting their staff against the people they serve, nonprofit managers argued that if more money went to salaries, services would have to be cut. And the salaries are quite low to begin with: one 2014 study found that over 40 percent of nonprofit employees in New England, one of the most expensive areas of the United States, made less than $28,000 a year, well below the national median wage. One observer noted, “Too often, I have seen the passion for social change turned into a weapon against the very people who do much—if not most—of the hard work, and put in most of the hours.” Studies have found that nonprofits in the United States and Canada have higher rates of turnover than the overall labor market—a sign that workers are pressured to work long and hard and see little escape from that routine, other than leaving for a new job or perhaps a new sector. The organizations blame tight budgets and tight-fisted funders, but it is also true that nonprofit culture prioritizes “doing more with less.”39
The reality of funders’ influence is illustrated in one oft-retold story. When setting up his Open Society Foundation, billionaire George Soros allegedly got angry with others in the room and pounded his fist on the table, saying, “This is my money. We will do it my way.” Then, the story goes, a voice piped up from a junior staffer: “Excuse me, Mr. Soros, roughly half the money in this foundation is not yours but the public’s—if you hadn’t placed your money in this institute, half of it would be in the US Treasury.” Whether or not the story actually happened, it illustrates how the wealthy exert control over the money that keeps society going, and the reason they can exert that control is that there are rules written into the tax code that allow them to do so. They retain control even over the money they’re giving away. In order to avoid that trap, some grassroots groups have turned to fundraising models that draw money from the communities they serve, arguing that it is to those people, not the rich, that they should be accountable.40
Long-standing structures of inequality mean that wealthy funders are more likely to be white men, and that organizations staffed by and serving people of color have to struggle for funding. As noted above, the funds that do flow to these communities tend to go to NGOs that have a moderating influence, or that provide services, rather than to those that advocate or organize. The problem extends beyond the low wages, though the low wages ensure that it is easier for people who do not need the money to take the jobs (and people of color are more likely to need the money). But when well-off white people dominate the nonprofit jobs, it just perpetuates the age-old assumption that the poor need to be uplifted and taught to imitate the lives of well-off white people. Black women, who might have a different idea of how to improve the lives of the poor—by tackling structural racism, say, or challenging the way wealth is accumulated in the first place—are seen as troublemakers. And when funding cuts come—as they inevitably will, especially in difficult times, such as the coronavirus-induced recession—they fall hardest on organizations led by and serving people of color. Often, wrote Vanessa Daniel, founder and director of the Groundswell Fund, in the New York Times, philanthropists “gentrify” social change work. They start out by “noticing the success of strategies innovated by women of color,” she said, “but instead of funding them at the source, they are writing checks so that larger, white-led nonprofits can replicate their work.” Daniel, whose foundation does make grants to organizations led by women and transgender people of color, noted that “it’s far easier for a young affluent white man who has studied poverty at Harvard to land a $1 million grant with a concept pitch than it is for a 40-something black woman with a decades-long record of wins in the impoverished community where she works to get a grant for $20,000.”41
In movement moments like the one that began in the spring and summer of 2020, as the cries of “Black Lives Matter” rang once again from streets around the world, the question of who gets funded to do the work is particularly important. An incredible outpouring of support—donations in small amounts, $5 and $10 and $20—flowed into bail funds and grassroots organizations like Reclaim the Block and the Minnesota Freedom Fund in Minneapolis, organizations that had been working for years. But the experience of organizations in the wake of the previous uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, was instructive; as Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote, donors came to Black organizations not out of solidarity, but because they were “trying to connect the inherent progressive character of social movements to their ‘brand.’” The scramble for dollars—particularly as they began to dry up—noted Taylor, left organizers competing with one another for scarce funds. “With more resources came more authority because of the ways it elevated the profile, presence, and voices of some,” Taylor wrote. “This dynamic eventually cut into the kind of unity in purpose necessary to confront the challenge of stopping police abuse and murder.” Those most able to get funding were often those who spoke the language of incremental change, not the words of rebellion echoing in the streets.42
It is not an accident that the people most likely to get nonprofit funding look a lot like those most likely to get funding for a tech startup. The people making the funding decisions, after all, come from the wealthiest parts of society, and these days, it’s tech and finance billionaires doing a lot of the investing or donating—with the same mindset applied to both. This kind of results-oriented consumerism among funders leads to intense pressure on the workers to produce results that make their work look like a good “deal” for the donor class, even if that “deal” is a Band-Aid on a gaping wound.43
NGOs spill out across the rest of the world the same way they do across the advanced capitalist nations, bringing do-gooders and their model of change to developing countries. If philanthropy serves as a form of political power within a country, allowing the wealthy to shape public policy with the directed flow of their dollars, it also works as such when it is directed outside of national borders. The model of the middle classes dictating to the poor how they should behave maps, Silvia Federici noted, onto the “new international division of labor,” where the poor countries do the production for consumption in the rich ones. Thus, women from the wealthier countries become the supervisors of women in the poor ones, integrating them into global capitalism through NGOs and aid as well as the workplace. The movements for change that already exist in the Global South are circumvented by the tastes and priorities of the wealthy in other nations.44
If the donors are a specific class of people expecting the organizations they fund to fit a certain idea of what “works,” what do the workers think? The expectation to work long hours for little money isn’t just coming from the top—the culture of “movement” work also tends toward self-sacrifice. The assumption that “activists” are a different type of person, more committed than the rest of the world, replicates the old division between the volunteer service worker and those whom they served. The professionalization of the nonprofit sector has now made it more acceptable a workplace for men, but it has also made it relentlessly middle class. The influx of men has added a new inflection to the tradition of feminine self-sacrifice already embedded into the history of the NGO sector: the “cowboy mentality” that comes from political and labor organizing, that values the toughest work, the biggest commitment, as a mark of dedication to the cause. Work-life balance is something that these workers choose to give up, missing the way that their choices quickly become job requirements—something that only shows up later, when they want to take time off. Both gendered tendencies produce burnout, and those who do burn out are judged as insufficiently committed or insufficiently radical. Those who have moved up in the organization through such a style of work then impose it on others.45
This culture of sacrifice, whether swaggering or self-abnegati
ng, leads workers to stay past closing time—in the room with a client, on the phone with a funder—or up late at night planning a program at home. Yasmin Nair, cofounder of the radical queer editorial collective Against Equality, wrote of the way nonprofit workers were expected to share personal stories and reveal vulnerabilities, all in the name of love: “We were not only expected to love our work—and what that meant for those whose work was unpaid or underpaid was quite unclear—but to love each other, to believe that we were all in the struggle together.” Some of this work may be noticed, appreciated, seen as heroic; some of it is likely ignored (who does the cleaning up, who sets up the folding chairs for meetings—who, indeed, reminds people to clock out and go home early when they’re tired?), but all of it is the reproductive work that allows not only the organization but capitalist society to go on ticking.46
Nonprofit workers are used to being pitted against their clients when they make demands for themselves; like teachers and health-care workers, if they ask for higher wages or organize or threaten to go on strike, they are accused of being insufficiently caring, of neglecting their jobs. If they get too close to their clients, however, they are accused of being unprofessional—a suspicion leveled particularly at nonprofit workers who come from similar backgrounds to those they serve. This double bind manages in either case to differentiate the worker from the client. It is true that nonprofits are underfunded, and that they hesitate to spend money on overhead—which includes base salaries for staff as well as training and equipment and decent office space—but it is not fair to expect that the workers will be the ones who pick up the slack. One’s willingness to go above and beyond is read as passion for the work, but this modus operandi leads to people justifying the exploitation of those passionate workers.47
At the last count, there were some 12.3 million workers in nonprofits in the United States, which amounts to over 10 percent of total private-sector employment. At the same time, there were over 800,000 people working in the charity sector in the United Kingdom. This is a massive workforce, and though some of these staffers are well-educated professionals bearing graduate degrees in “nonprofit management” or something similar, most of them are workers lower on the rungs who got into the work because they believe in it. Many of them are laboring under something like the conditions Ashley Brink described. “The working conditions of nonprofit workers, whether in direct service, community organizing, health care, or education, represent the value of that service and advocacy work,” wrote Chicago organizer Ramsin Canon at Jacobin. “When they are exploited, overworked, and when turnover is high, the implication is that the value of that work is low.” It is not surprising, then, that many of those workers have turned to unionizing to protect themselves and improve their conditions.48
But when nonprofit workers try to organize, they run into the contradictions of their position. Bosses who preach equality and dedication to the cause are suddenly fierce opponents of the union. The New York–based organization StoryCorps, inspired by the work of labor advocate and journalist Studs Terkel, fought its employees’ union drive tooth and nail. The organization’s founder and president, Dave Isay—author of a book titled Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work—sent staff an email arguing that a union at StoryCorps would “build walls, harden divisions, create a more regimented and formal workplace, and foster an increasingly adversarial culture.” The union resorted to picketing outside StoryCorps’ annual fundraiser, part of their more than two-year process of winning their union election and bargaining a first contract. “We thought, like many progressive organizations, they would understand that the same values we communicate through our work we would ask for in-house,” Story-Corps worker Justin Williams said.49
StoryCorps was far from the only organization with such a story. The National Center for Transgender Equality saw the majority of its workers leave in the midst of a similar dispute. They filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), saying that the staff had, in effect, been forced out after they announced their intention to join the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union (NPEU). “Ironically, organizing a union and negotiating a contract that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity is the only way for transgender workers to have explicit legal protections in the workplace in over half the country,” the union noted. Southern Poverty Law Center workers, too, pushed for a union and were met with resistance from management. The center’s administrators hired a prominent union-busting law firm to represent them and drew criticism for their heavy-handed response, particularly in the wake of the departure of the cofounder and president of the organization over allegations of sexual harassment, racial discrimination, and other mistreatment of staff. The NPEU has seen an uptick in nonprofit organizing, more than doubling its number of bargaining units in a year, and it is not the only union that represents nonprofit workers. In the United Kingdom, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain (IWGB) launched a charity workers branch in early 2020, promising to organize not only around working conditions, but around the political direction of the sector.50
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, the NGO double bind was ratcheted up. More people needed services, and more people wanted to organize, but the accompanying recession meant that funding for the nonprofit sector was likely to dry up. The virus, said Kayla Blado, president of NPEU, “created an added uncertainty about what the workplace will look like if/when we return to normal, and if management will have had to lay off workers by then.” Nonprofit workers who had already been looking to unionize were motivated to do so quickly in order to have an influence over the future of their work.
“In a sixteen-day span in mid-April, the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union announced seven new units had asked for recognition from management,” Blado explained, and they were, at the time of this writing, talking to “hundreds of other nonprofit workers who are in the early stages of organizing a union.” Many of NPEU’s members, Blado noted, are carrying heavy student debt. They graduated into the recession, and they have uncertain access to health care and housing.51
The pandemic, IWGB’s charity branch wrote in a statement, “has both highlighted and exacerbated existing issues and inequalities within the charity sector.” In particular, the union noted, charities led by Black people and other people of color are facing dramatic losses of funding. Organizations took advantage of the government’s furlough program: “We have had reports of furloughed staff being pressured to ‘volunteer,’ despite this breaking the conditions of the Job Retention Scheme, alongside employers using the ‘training’ exception as a loophole for staff to continue working whilst furloughed.”52
To rephrase Canon’s statement and to borrow a formulation from the Chicago Teachers Union, the conditions in which nonprofit employees work are also the conditions in which their clients or members receive services and support. Overworked, burned-out workers are not simply extra-passionate: they are exploited. The system allows rich philanthropists to reap the tax benefits of their charitable giving while maintaining control over their fortunes. But nonprofits are so deeply embedded in the capitalist system that even grassroots donors—such as the hundreds of thousands who gave to Planned Parenthood after the 2016 election of Donald Trump—can feel a sense of entitlement. Backlash ensued on social media when the Minnesota Freedom Fund—previously a tiny organization—could not spend all of the $30 million in donations it received after the uprising in Minnesota immediately. The impulse to demand deliverables had spread from big philanthropy through to the rest of us.53
This kind of short-termism, whether from wealthy donors or Twitter backlash, is antithetical to actually making real changes—racism or even cash bail will not be eliminated in a matter of weeks. Such grassroots donations could point the way to a better model for making movement work sustainable, for allowing organizers to be accountable to the community rather than to the same people already controlling so much of our world. They could help those o
rganizers move past the stasis in which they so often exist, mopping up around the edges of capitalism’s never-ending crises, and toward a more lasting change, a different equilibrium. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote, “the purpose of the work is to gain liberation, not to guarantee the organization’s longevity.”54
ASHLEY BRINK’S MOTHER HAD LONG BEEN A UNION MEMBER; OTHER members of her family, too, had union jobs. So when a fellow health-center staffer at Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains (PPRM) asked her if she’d be interested in unionizing, she was immediately on board. “What is the harm in unionizing? It only helps workers,” she said.
The pay cut she’d taken in order to take the job was on her mind, but the thing that really ramped up their union campaign was the announcement, in May 2017, that PPRM was going to close several clinics in the region, including the only Wyoming health center. The decision was financial, they were told—the clinics weren’t getting reimbursed enough from insurance and Medicaid to stay in operation. To Brink, who had spent time in all of the clinics slated for closure and knew their staffers and their patients, this decision was upsetting. “No one from health centers were brought in on these decisions. We weren’t consulted, we weren’t asked, we were just told this is what is happening and these are the decisions that had been made.”