Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  CHAPTER 5: SUFFER FOR THE CAUSE

  1. EJ Dickson, “How Nothing and Everything Has Changed in the 10 Years Since George Tiller’s Murder,” Rolling Stone, May 31, 2019, www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/george-tiller-death-abortion-10-year-anniversary-842786; Carole Joffe and Tracy Weitz, “The Assassination of Dr. Tiller: The Marginality of Abortion in American Culture and Medicine,” Dissent, November 10, 2009, www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-assassination-of-dr-tiller-the-marginality-of-abortion-in-american-culture-and-medicine.

  2. Deb Gruver, “South Wind Women’s Center Prepares to Open, Offer Women’s Care,” Wichita Eagle, February 6, 2013, www.kansas.com/news/article1108157.html; Rebecca Burns, “Planned Parenthood’s Union Busting Could Have a Chilling Effect for Workers Everywhere,” In These Times, June 25, 2018, https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/21237/planned_parenthood_union_busting_trump_labor; Aída Chávez, “Planned Parenthood Is Asking Donald Trump’s Labor Board for Help Busting Its Colorado Union,” The Intercept, May 23, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/05/23/planned-parenthood-union-nlrb.

  3. Anna North, “The Trump Administration Is Demanding That Planned Parenthood Affiliates Give Back Their PPP Loans,” Vox, May 23, 2020, www.vox.com/2020/5/23/21268539/planned-parenthood-80-million-ppp-loans-coronavirus.

  4. Jesse Paul, “These Employees Survived the Planned Parenthood Shooting. They Say the Organization Could Have Done More to Help Them,” Colorado Sun, December 2, 2019, https://coloradosun.com/2019/12/02/planned-parenthood-shooting-colorado-springs-employee-stories; Rachel Larris, “What You Need to Know About Indicted Anti-Choice Activist David Daleiden,” Media Matters for America, January 26, 2016, www.mediamatters.org/james-okeefe/what-you-need-know-about-indicted-anti-choice-activist-david-daleiden.

  5. Amy Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing: Philanthropy’s Creation and Destruction of the Common World” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2019), loc. 742–755, Kindle; Lester M. Salamon and Chelsea L. Newhouse, “The 2019 Nonprofit Employment Report,” Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies, January 2019, http://ccss.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2019/01/2019-NP-Employment-Report_FINAL_1.8.2019.pdf.

  6. Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1163–1288.

  7. Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1180–1182, 1306–1347; Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Vintage, 1993), loc. 302, Kindle.

  8. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, loc. 358; Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1375–1376, 1408–1412, 1456–1457.

  9. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, loc. 212; Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1166–1167, 1378–1379, 1398–1400.

  10. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, loc. 417, 429, 431, 442, 469, 530, 552; Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1514–1518.

  11. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “in the shadow of the shadow state,” in INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 45; Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1167–1170, 1526–1534; Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked: A Concise History (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2018), loc. 1702–1708, 1715–1719, Kindle; Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman, “Without Reserves,” in Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 48.

  12. Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked, loc. 1731–1759.

  13. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 59–66; Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked, loc. 1774, 1846; Andrea Smith, “introduction: The Revolution Will Not Be Funded,” in Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 3; Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1566–1567; Melissa Gira Grant, “The Unfinished Business of Women’s Suffrage,” New Republic, August 10, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/article/158828/19th-amendment-women-suffrage-felony-vote-disenfranchisement.

  14. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2019), loc. 1654, Kindle; Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked, loc. 1789–1798, 1830–1839, 1853–1856, 1864; Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1541–1554, 1579–1581.

  15. Schiller interview with author; Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1556–1561, 1643–1673; Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked, loc. 1883–1900; Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), 122, 126, 127, 131–132; Eva Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality and Disability (London: Routledge, 1999), 126.

  16. Boris, Art and Labor, 131–139, 180–182.

  17. Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked, loc. 1926, 1938–1948, 1953–1956; Boris, Art and Labor, 186–187.

  18. Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked, loc. 1929–1936, 1970, 1972, 1976–1982, 1987–2003, 2007–2019; Mohandesi and Teitelman, “Without Reserves,” 49.

  19. Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1563–1564, 1571–1573, 1583–1588, 1592–1612; Mohandesi and Teitelman, “Without Reserves,” 48–50; Kittay, Love’s Labor, 126–127.

  20. Schiller interview; Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1149–1151, 1716–1743, 1799–1800, 1819–1822, 1827–1838; Leslie Albrecht, “Americans Slashed Their Charitable Deductions by $54 Billion After Republican Tax-Code Overhaul,” Marketwatch, July 11, 2019, www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-slashed-their-charitable-deductions-by-54-billion-after-trumps-tax-overhaul-2019-07-09; Smith, “Introduction,” 4.

  21. Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1633–1637; Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked, loc. 2037–2057, 2072.

  22. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, loc. 1077–1232, 1336, 2710–2713; Boris, Art and Labor, 190; Mohandesi and Teitelman, “Without Reserves,” 55.

  23. Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked, loc. 2145–2165; Smith, “introduction,” 5, 7; Dylan Rodriguez, “the political logic of the non-profit industrial complex,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 23.

  24. Planned Parenthood, “Our History,” 2020, www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/who-we-are/our-history; Megan Seaholm, “Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America by Linda Gordon,” Not Even Past, March 18, 2012, https://notevenpast.org/womans-body-womans-right-birth-control-america-1976; Jill Lepore, “Birthright: What’s Next for Planned Parenthood,” New Yorker, November 7, 2011, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2011/11/14/birthright-jill-lepore.

  25. Lepore, “Birthright.”

  26. Smith, “introduction,” 5–7; Robert L. Allen, “from Black Awakening in Capitalist America,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 54–58; Eric Tang, “non-profits and the autonomous grassroots,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 218–219.

  27. Tang, “nonprofits,” 219; Paul Kivel, “social service or social change?,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 138.

  28. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, loc. 3986–4000, 4439–4570, 4698–5471, 3116.

  29. Selma James, Sex, Race, and Class: The Perspective of Winning (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 127–128, 212.

  30. Salamon and Newhouse, “2019 Nonprofit Employment Report”; Elizabeth Todd-Breland, A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago Since the 1960s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 212; Smith, “introduction,” 7–8; Gilmore, “shadow state,” 45.

  31. Nicolas Lemann, “Citizen 501(c)(3),” The Atlantic, February 1997, www.the atlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/02/citizen-501c3/376777.

  32. Tang, “non-profits and the autonomous grassroots,” 220; Soniya Munshi and Craig Willse, “foreword,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, loc. 136, 255, 263, 272–283, 291, 311.

  33. Tang, “non-profits and the autonomous grassroots,” 224–226; Smith, “introduction,” 7, 10; Tit
hi Bhattacharya, “Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory,” in Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory, 2; Nancy Fraser, “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism,” in Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory, 23, 33; Tithi Bhattacharya, “How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class,” in Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory, 75; James, Sex, Race and Class, 171.

  34. Fiona Harvey and Anushka Asthana, “‘Chilling’ Lobbying Act Stifles Democracy, Charities Tell Party Chiefs,” The Guardian, June 6, 2017, www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jun/06/chilling-lobbying-act-stifles-democracy-write-charities-party-chiefs; “Lobbying: Union Anger over ‘Cynical’ Coalition Move,” June 4, 2013, www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-22760075.

  35. Smith, “introduction,” 7, 10; Rodriguez, “the political logic of the non-profit,” 29–33; Gilmore, “shadow state,” 45–47; Madonna Thunder Hawk, “native organizing before the non-profit industrial complex,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 105–107; Adjoa Florência Jones de Almeida, “radical social change: Searching for a New Foundation,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 187.

  36. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (London: Zer0 Books, 2009), 28; Mark Fisher, K-punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, ed. Darren Ambrose (London: Repeater Books, 2018), loc. 7422–7465, Kindle; Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1936–1937, 2205–2215; Tiffany Lethabo King and Ewuare Osayande, “the filth on philanthropy: Progressive Philanthropy’s Agenda to Misdirect Social Justice Movements,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 83; Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, “we were never meant to survive: Fighting Violence Against Women and the Fourth World War,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 124.

  37. Amara H. Pérez, Sisters in Action for Power, “between radical theory and community praxis: Reflections on Organizing and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 90–97.

  38. Kayla Blado, “The Answer to Burnout at Work Isn’t ‘Self-Care’—It’s Unionizing,” In These Times, August 14, 2019, http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22017/burn-out-work-self-care-union-national-nonprofit.

  39. Jonathan Timm, “The Plight of the Overworked Nonprofit Employee,” The Atlantic, August 24, 2016, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-plight-of-the-overworked-nonprofit-employee/497081.

  40. The Soros story has been repeated many times and can be found in Yael Friedman, “Is Philanthropy Subverting Democracy?,” The Conversationalist, October 25, 2019, https://conversationalist.org/2019/10/25/how-philanthropy-is-subverting-democracy, and also in Christine E. Ahn, “democratizing american philanthropy,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 74; Stephanie Guilloud and William Cordery, “fundraising is not a dirty word: Community-based Economic Strategies for the Long Haul,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 109–112; Pérez, “between radical theory and community praxis,” 97; Alisa Bierria, “pursuing a radical antiviolence agenda inside/outside a non-profit structure,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, 152.

  41. Durazo, “we were never meant to survive,” 115–116; Kivel, “social service or social change?,” 142; Itzbeth Menjívar, “The Social Justice Sector Has an Internal Racism Problem,” Sojourners, June 11, 2019, https://sojo.net/articles/social-justice-sector-has-internal-racism-problem; Kimberly McIntosh, “Race Equality and Justice in the Charity Sector,” Joseph Rowntree Foundation, October 1, 2019, www.jrf.org.uk/blog/race-equality-and-justice-charity-sector; Vanessa Daniel, “Philanthropists Bench Women of Color, the M.V.P.s of Social Change,” New York Times, November 19, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/opinion/philanthropy-black-women.html.

  42. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?” Jacobin, September 30, 2019, https://jacobinmag.com/2019/09/black-lives-matter-laquan-mcdonald-mike-brown-eric-garner.

  43. Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 1882–1916, 2069–2070, 2400–2402; “Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, Dean Spade,” book review, in Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism 1 (2012), https://libcom.org/library/lies-journal-marxist-feminism.

  44. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 177; Schiller, “Caring Without Sharing,” loc. 521–522, 582–585; Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), loc. 66, 70, 74–75, 81–85, Kindle; Hala Al-Karib, “The Dangers of NGO-isation of Women’s Rights in Africa,” Al Jazeera English, December 13, 2018, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/dangers-ngo-isation-women-rights-africa-181212102656547.html; Smith, “introduction,” 11.

  45. Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals (Brooklyn, NY: AK Press, 2017), 33–34, 38; Schiller interview; Daisy Rooks, “The Cowboy Mentality: Organizers and Occupational Commitment in the New Labor Movement,” Labor Studies Journal 28, no. 33 (2003), https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449X0302800302; “Guide for the Exploited Nonprofit Workers,” Tituba’s Revenge, no. 1 (December 2011), https://titubasrevenge.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/tituba_newsletter_1_dec20111.pdf.

  46. Yasmin Nair, “Fuck Love,” YasminNair.com, November 1, 2011 https://yasminnair.com/fuck-love; Bethany Moreton and Pamela Voeckel, “Learning from the Right,” in Labor Rising: The Past and Future of Working People in America, ed. Daniel Katz and Richard Greenwald (New York: New Press, 2012), 34–36.

  47. “Guide for the Exploited”; Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard, “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle,” Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fall 2009, https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_nonprofit_starvation_cycle; Cory Doctorow, “Exploitation of Workers Becomes More Socially Acceptable if the Workers Are Perceived as ‘Passionate’ About Their Jobs,” BoingBoing, May 22, 2019, https://boingboing.net/2019/05/22/weaponized-satisfaction.html; Jae Yun Kim, Troy H. Campbell, Steven Shepherd, and Aaron C. Kay, “Understanding Contemporary Forms of Exploitation: Attributions of Passion Serve to Legitimize the Poor Treatment of Workers,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 118, no. 1 (2020): 121–148, https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000190.

  48. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Nonprofits Account for 12.3 Million Jobs, 10.2 Percent of Private Sector Employment, in 2016,” August 31, 2018, www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/nonprofits-account-for-12-3-million-jobs-10-2-percent-of-private-sector-employment-in-2016.htm; Rachel Swain, “Overview of the UK Charity Sector,” Prospects, September 2019, www.prospects.ac.uk/jobs-and-work-experience/job-sectors/charity-and-voluntary-work/overview-of-the-uk-charity-sector; Ramsin Canon, “Nonprofit Workers Need Unions, Too,” Jacobin, August 19, 2019, www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/nonprofits-industrial-complex-socialist-organizing.

  49. Stephanie Russell-Kraft, “The Aggressive Anti-Union Campaign at StoryCorps,” The Nation, July 17, 2017, www.thenation.com/article/the-aggressive-anti-union-campaign-at-storycorps.

  50. Sarah Jaffe, “Nonprofit Workers Join the Movement to Unionize,” The Progressive, November 19, 2019, https://progressive.org/dispatches/nonprofit-workers-unionize-jaffe-191119; Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, “Nonprofit Professional Employees Union Files Unfair Labor Practice Against National Center for Transgender Equality Leadership for Retaliation Against Staff Organizing,” November 15, 2019, https://npeu.org/news/2019/11/15/nonprofit-professional-employees-union-files-unfair-labor-practice-against-national-center-for-transgender-equality-leadership-for-retaliation-against-staff-organizing; Ellen Davis, “SPLC Management Won’t Voluntarily Recognize Labor Union,” Nonprofit Quarterly, November 15, 2019, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/splc-management-wont-voluntarily-recognize-labor-union; Independent Workers of Great Britain, “IWGB Charity Workers Branch,” 2020, https://iwgb.org.uk/page/iwgb-charity-workers-branch.

  51. Kayla Blado, personal communication with author.

  52. Independent Workers of Great Britain, “IWGB Charity Workers Branch Statement on COVID-19,” 2020, https://iwgb.org.uk/page/iwgb-
charity-workers-branch-covid-19-statement.

  53. Canon, “Nonprofit Workers”; Sigal Samuel, “Racial Justice Groups Have Never Had So Much Cash. It’s Actually Hard to Spend It,” Vox, June 19, 2020, www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/6/19/21294819/minnesota-freedom-fund-donations-police-protests; Samantha Cooney, “Planned Parenthood Has Received 300,000 Donations Since the Election,” Time, December 27, 2016, https://time.com/4618359/planned-parenthood-election-donations.

  54. Gilmore, “shadow state,” 51.

  55. Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards), Twitter, June 27, 2018, 7:30 a.m., https://twitter.com/cecilerichards/status/1011980006086578182; Caroline Lewis, “Kirk Adams & Cecile Richards,” Crain’s New York, accessed August 8, 2020, www.crainsnewyork.com/awards/kirk-adams-cecile-richards; Sarah McCammon, “After Years in the Trenches, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards Will Step Down,” NPR, January 26, 2018, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/26/580733009/after-years-in-the-trenches-planned-parenthoods-cecile-richards-will-step-down; Burns, “Planned Parenthood’s Union Busting”; Natalie Kitroeff and Jessica Silver-Greenberg, “Planned Parenthood Is Accused of Mistreating Pregnant Employees,” New York Times, December 20, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/20/business/planned-parenthood-pregnant-employee-discrimination-women.html.

  56. Kitroeff and Silver-Greenberg, “Planned Parenthood”; Jessica Rubio, nurse practitioner, quoted in Erin Heger, “Planned Parenthood Has a History of Trying to Beat Back Labor Unions,” Rewire, July 19, 2018, https://rewire.news/article/2018/07/19/planned-parenthood-history-trying-beat-back-labor-unions; Coworker.org, “Planned Parenthood Employees Need Paid Parental and Medical Leave,” Coworker, www.coworker.org/petitions/planned-parenthood-employees-need-paid-parental-and-medical-leave.

  57. Claude Solnik, “Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Refugee Charities Get ‘Trump Bump,’” Long Island Business News, April 26, 2017, https://libn.com/2017/04/26/planned-parenthood-aclu-refugee-charities-get-trump-bump; Kitroeff and Silver-Greenberg, “Planned Parenthood”; PPRM Bargaining Unit, Facebook, June 17, 2018, www.facebook.com/PPRMBargainingUnit/photos/a.243437136213043/255802201643203.