The week after you've been fired by an organization may be the best time to examine it. Or the worst. But this is about a real issue, not just the angst that drives me to report on it. Please excuse the jargon.
Last Friday, I went in to the office at 1PM. I was expecting the normal routine--2 hours of mandatory volunteer training, a ride to turf with a stop to buy lunch, 5 paid hours of greeting people at their front doors and asking them for money, followed by a final hour or two of mandatory volunteer travel and paperwork. I would probably have been strongly encouraged to go out with my co-workers afterward, too. I was wrong.
Instead, I was fired, but that isn't the point. I am (was, I mean) a door canvasser. It happens to us all the time. This one came as a surprise, as it wasn't over quota or because of a meltdown in the field, but it wasn't for an uncommon reason. I was fired for asking questions.
Now, these are not the old style of canvassing operation, where groups ran their own offices, and even those that collected money directly often operated without significant profits. The primary goal in those days was to advertise, more than anything else. Now, canvassing is outsourced. And so the offices have to continually prove their worth to their client-causes by turning a very significant profit. And so, the modern canvass is a sweatshop. Management has a little bit of job security, but the pressure on everyone to bring in ever-greater contributions is relentless; and if you can manage to keep yourself together long enough, if you never quit, then you will be fired. These groups preach a doctrine of fostering `professional activism,' wherein politically minded individuals can earn enough to support themselves at a reliable job while saving the world. But the profit motive precludes this practice, and even higher management and the best of fundraisers can only expect a few years at most (the turnover ratio approaches unity within a year). The result is that canvassing groups lock up the cream of the cream into positions where they are burned up and then thrown away, while discouraging and alienating hordes of aspiring activists.
The sweatshop atmosphere, combined with the incredible turnover rate, creates other major problems. On the street, canvassers burn their turf in search of immediate gains. In the office, innovations and individual strengths are quashed in favor of an accepted standard of competence. The level of hypocrisy in the way these organizations treat their workers exceeds that of Starbucks.
Well, that brings us full circle. I'm not saying my situation or the behavior of my employers is unusual in the American workplace. I simply want to propose that groups working for social justice and protections for normal citizens should practice social justice and protect those citizens who also happen to have the misfortune to work for them. It hurts the progressive movement in infinite ways when our standard bearers do not practice what they preach, when we do not demand that they practice it. The last thing I said to my boss before she made the decision to fire me was to ask, and this was during my volunteer time I might add, if a minor point of procedure was strictly necessary. She was visibly upset and ended the conversation abruptly. You already know the rest.