| Activism Inc.
In Activism Inc., Dana Fisher studies and critiques the main source of paid employment in social action work for college students and graduates in America: canvassing. She begins and ends her book with the story of a Columbia student, Laura, who,
after spending more than $100,000 on an Ivy League education . . . was unable to find a job in progressive politics that would take advantage of her intelligence and unfettered idealism. . . . [She] was disappointed that she couldn't start making a difference right away and get a paycheck.
At the end of the book poor Laura ends up going to Law School, but "would consider working on another electoral campaign."
In a deep sense, Fisher's book is as much about this broad problem as it is a study of problems with canvassing, as it is currently designed. Her core complaint is about the lack of a political infrastructure to hire people like Laura in fulfilling jobs.
While I believe that Fisher is right that this issue is critically important, there is a deep absurdity in this worry about incredibly privileged students who will have to settle, sadly, for jobs that not infrequently make more in a year than many working-class and poor people (and even many other middle-class people) will make in a lifetime.
This absurdity is intensified when one realizes that what many social action groups are fighting for, at the core, is higher pay, benefits, and assorted protections that will give poor people access to working-class jobs and working-class people some economic stability. And these jobs are generally not that fulfilling-working in low-level, often boring or back-breaking positions in business, manufacturing, and service.
Work and Life
I will discuss how organizers conceptualize public and private relationships in a later post. Here I just want to note that middle-class professionals often have a very different vision of the relationship between work and the rest of their life than do workers. The middle-class is raised to seek "careers" in which boundaries between their private and public engagements are blurred. One's desires and aims at home and work are often deeply interrelated. One is expected to seek fulfillment of one's private desires across all the settings in which one lives.
While some working-class jobs are quite fulfilling, jobs for workers are often just that, jobs. Having a job may be key to self-respect, but in the end a job is mostly just that, work that allows people to put food on their table and support their families. For workers, while social connections between people known at work and at home may be strong, the work itself is usually isolated away from the real focus of one's life-one's community, one's religion, and one's often extended family.
Labor unions, the key locus of worker social action, are an add-on to work, at the best (although not frequently enough) a school for democracy that provides workers with political tools and power. Labor union engagement is not integrated into the actual labor, for example, of home health care, industrial assembly, or food service.
Middle-class professionals expect jobs to serve a range of their emotional needs that workers have learned is unlikely to happen in their work.
And the middle class is caught in a dilemma, here. They are privileged enough to be able to get unfulfilling high paying jobs, but they are not so privileged that they don't need jobs at all.
Contradictions of Fulfilling Jobs
My program evaluation professor, Larry Mohr, used to say that in his experience he had been unable to find many significant effects of most of the social programs he had examined. One of his favorite sayings was: "most people run programs because. . . they like to run programs."
In our cities, today, we can see a proliferation of non-profit organizations, most of them providing an incredibly diverse range of services, from community gardens, to community centers, to food distribution, to counseling. In general, the higher paying jobs in these organizations are held by relatively privileged professionals who could be making even more money elsewhere, but who have found their fulfillment in "serving" communities that most of them do not actually come from or live in.
These groups fight like hell with other quite similar organizations for money-grants, government contracts, etc.-often, in large part, so that they can maintain these wonderful positions for themselves. Of course, they are also supporting a range of lower-paid employees, often from the local community. But in most non-profits, the jobs that really "pay" are the ones at the top, and the renumeration drops precipitously as you go down the line, just like in corporations.
There is no doubt that we need many of these services. But there are deep questions whether we really need all of them, or that we need so many organizations providing them, or that we need them in the form that these organizations provide them. How many would disappear tomorrow if the people running them didn't have a vested interest in maintaining their own fulfilling employment?
Service Not Politics
Fisher is right that part of the problem, here, is that the fiscal infrastructure has not been created to funnel this interest into political engagement. As I have noted earlier, because social action, by definition, cannot be funded by government and other organizations that will inevitably end up being targets, most of these jobs are service oriented. As Janet Poppendieck notes in Sweet Charity (h/t janinsanfran):
The proliferation of charity contributes to our society's failure to grapple in meaningful ways with poverty. . . . this massive charitable endeavor serves to relieve the pressure for more fundamental solutions. It works pervasively on the cultural level by serving as a sort of "moral safety valve"; it reduces the discomfort evoked by visible destitution in our midst by creating the illusion of effective action and offering us myriad ways of participating in it.
Part of the issue Poppendieck is talking about are the professionals that often run charity programs. This destructive pattern is magnified by the fact, as she points out in her particular case of food distribution, that the most effective way to deal with the hunger issue in our society would be simply to increase the employment or food stamp distributions to hungry people. But food stamp distribution doesn't create the kind of need for a wide range of engaged professionals in the way that complex food provision efforts do. It doesn't take a range of engaged professionals to send someone some food stamps. It doesn't take a wide range of fulfilled employees to enforce a higher minimum wage.
By foisting charity and service solutions on society, the right wing and large corporations provide outlets for energy that might otherwise serve political and community organizing. And they create the need to maintain these organizations, they create interest groups oriented not towards basic social transformation but instead towards maintenance of this proliferation of organizations.
In this way a particular solution becomes the goal, not actually solving the underlying problem that this solution usually covers with a band-aid.
Who Should We Pay to Be Socially Active?
The problem with Fisher's framing of this challenge is that her solution is that we need to raise a whole bunch of cash and use it to pay people who are not exactly in dire straits themselves. Let's face it, an inner-city high school student would be incredibly lucky to be able to spend $100,000 to get an Ivy League education and, more importantly, an Ivy League credential.
Those with credentials like these are those who end up being able best to compete even for the few social action jobs there are. It is no accident that a large proportion of community organizers in poor areas are relatively privileged middle-class folks. (Barack Obama is an example of this, actually).
In part this is necessary. If you are going to fight the power of bureaucracy run by the middle-class, and if you are going to be able to engage successfully with complex information and research, you need at least some people with the education to help you do this.
But it means that organizations serving poor people can spend a lot of time raising money to hire people that don't look or think like them to help them out.
And yet, as Fisher notes, what else are you going to do? People like Obama may be relatively privileged, but they cannot work for free-they need to support themselves. And because they won't actually live in poor areas, they need to be able to support themselves with a middle-class lifestyle or they won't stay. If you don't pay them, people like Laura will, in fact, end up either in the non-profit service complex, or in jobs that often just end up oppressing the very people they had hoped to help in their earlier idealistic days.
Thinking Differently About Fulfilling Employment
Ronald Reagan pushed the destructive idea of the "thousand points of light," volunteerism that would somehow replace the need for government support and social changes like a living wage. But what if we re-framed this vision of volunteerism?
Part of the challenge facing middle-class graduates is that if they end up working in high-paying jobs, they will often end up working much more than full-time. Part time work at higher levels remains fairly hard to find, and those in part-time positions are likely not to advance as much as others. What if we could find ways to change this reality?
What if progressive employers linked up with social action and politically active groups, following something like the legal pro bono model? What if I could get a half-time high-paying job that was linked to a half-time unpaid position in community organizing or political action? I would probably make at least as much, if not more, money than I would as a full-time employee of the action organization. And yet the organization would get me for free.
Any money raised could go towards supporting people who couldn't get such privileged jobs-people from the actual community being served. It would get us beyond the absurd position of worrying about finding jobs for privileged people to help unprivileged people who are the ones who can't find jobs in the first place.
An added benefit to this solution is that it puts more privileged workers on a more equal basis with other employees of action organizations. And it puts the professionals in a similar situation with other workers, spending much of their time doing relatively unfulfilling work in order to give them the income they need to live the kind of life outside work they most desire.
The specifics of such an arrangement would need to be worked out. Do you pay nothing for the 20 hours of fulfilling work, or a salary more like that of non-professionals in the same organization? How, exactly, would the two positions be linked? How would incompetence in the "volunteer" position affect the "real" employment situation? Etc. I'd be interested in hearing about examples of arrangements like this.
While I doubt this would actually happen on a broad scale, I think it is useful to think about seemingly odd options like this. It helps us realize that the tensions we are caught within are not necessarily impossible to overcome. It helps us realize that creative thought can help us find new solutions instead of continuing to groan about the fact that the easy solutions that we can see just won't work.
(By the way, as a white, middle-class college professor, I probably count, myself, as one of those relatively privileged people with a fulfilling job supported by people without such jobs). |
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