So last week I blogged about
how canvassers for the DCCC, employed by Grassroots Campaigns Inc, were protesting their sub-mimimum wages. Right-wing blogs picked up on it,
GCI veterans blogged about it at MyDD, and then
the DCCC cancelled its contract! Awesome.
But GCI also has a contract with MoveOn, which Greg Bloom has written about a lot here. MoveOn hired GCI in 2004, and their campaign was a disaster...but MoveOn rehired them again! And guess what? Yeppers--their campaign is still a disaster!
Now a big group of MoveOn field organizer veterans (they call themselves the MOFOs, haha) have organized to tell about the awful campaign. They're like posting the hell out of MyDD right now.
Check it.
From
Martin Casas:
My experience with GCI left me not just angry -- but a little embarrassed. I can't believe I got used like that. I can't believe I let myself use others for that. I fell for it hook line and sinker.
They hire from an endless supply of impressionable idealists who will buy their story, they make them work incredible hours with impossible demands, they pay them dirt and wear them down so they can't look for a new job, so they have no where else to go, so you have to keep working for them.
GCI is not a progressive organization fighting for change; they are a company that is fixated upon growing its own model larger and larger, for less cost from them or their clients, by shifting as much cost as possible onto their staff. They are in business to stay in business, and it is so important to the progressive movement that this cycle is put to an end.
And from Kelly Nagy today:
One of the big questions among all of the MOFOs was about how much MoveOn knew about the outrageous working conditions. Communication with MoveOn was pretty much nonexistent -- we worked entirely through our field coordinators at GCI. There was a web-survey page that supposedly went straight to MoveOn, but at some point that got re-routed to GCI. MoveOn didn't really want to work directly with us -- that's what GCI was for, I guess. But this is very much MoveOn's campaign in any way -- its' history that we were selling, its' members we were burning through, and GCI really wasn't in a position to answer in MoveOn's capacity. Nor did they care to be.
It has been almost a year since I was fired, and I still feel like I never want to organize professionally again. GCI didn't wear me out, I wasn't burned out, I ran a major national organization for years -I can do hard work and manage hundreds of people. I could have kept working. No - I felt violated by this job.
MoveOn had better start caring --not only about what GCI is doing to its volunteers, but also how it is draining a generation of progressive activists. I repeat myself -- MoveOn had better start caring.
Go read their stories, or if you already know how bad it is, they tell you to do the following:
Again, if you find our stories compelling, and you agree this issue must be addressed by MoveOn, please send an email to Eli Pariser (eli@moveon.org) and cc us at ChangeGCI@gmail.com (or just contact us directly there, and we will update you with further information about how you can make your voice heard to MoveOn).
Come on people this is important.