“Why does a willingness to accept lower wages (much lower wages than for-profits) seem to be an indicator or qualification for one’s job in the nonprofit sector?”
From Commons Magazine comes this San Francisco story: An interview with Brewster Kahle, founder of Alexa and the Internet Archive, reveals his plan to “make housing affordable for non-profit workers.” As the interviewer puts it, “By placing a covenant, or legal clause, on a recently purchased apartment building in the Richmond district of San Francisco, Kahle will be able to offer units to the staff of Internet Archive and other partner nonprofits at cost.”
On the face of it, this looks like a fantastic opportunity for nonprofit employees in San Francisco, one of the most expensive cities in the country and one that’s being rapidly gentrified by the dot com and social media industries. Under Kahle’s plan, employees could save around $23,000 by paying 30 percent of the market rental rate.
It’s understandable that nonprofit employees, many of whom are barely scraping by with enough for groceries, and struggle to make rent.
So why did I find myself fuming as I read the interview?
At its heart, this project implicitly and explicitly perpetuates the idea that non-profit workers should in fact continue to be low-paid and over-exploited. There’s no acknowledgement on the part of either Kahle or his interviewer that the problem with nonprofit salaries is not that there isn’t enough money to pay employees well enough to afford housing, but that traditional nonprofits are in fact top-heavy in their payment scales. Go to Guidestar.com and search any nonprofit you’re interested in. With rare exceptions, it’s the very top-tier employees, like Executive Directors, who make the most, often in the range of hundreds of thousands (yes, hundreds of thousands: granola ideology can be profitable for the right kind of people). But scroll down to the next tier, beginning with, say, assistants to the directors and, in the case of social service agencies, social workers and administrators, and the numbers begin to shrink drastically. Nonprofits aren’t required to list more than the salaries of their top five executives, so it’s unlikely that the disparity will ever become clear to the casual researcher.
The general public understands the nonprofit world in hazy and idealised terms, and is usually only in contact with its foot soldiers, like the social workers who work directly with individuals and families, and it understand these professions in vocational terms. For the most part, these sorts of employees are not trust fund babies doing this for a lark but people who are actually deeply committed to their ideals of a better world. Sadly, both the the public and, to a great extent, the employees, have internalised the idea that such employment should in fact be underpaid. As with teachers, as I’ve written previously with regard to the Chicago Teachers Union strike, the attitude is that anything more than a horsehair budget is deplorable. Or, as Simone Joyaux asks, quoting a colleague, “Why does a willingness to accept lower wages (much lower wages than for-profits) seem to be an indicator or qualification for one’s job in the nonprofit sector?”
Horror stories and critiques abound, but none of these make their way into mainstream media or, for that matter, the alternative press (which is filled with its own ghastly ideas that writing isn’t even labour, but that’s another story). Colleagues of mine have had to work on unionising employees of large corporations, particularly on the grounds of absent healthcare—even though their employer didn’t provide them with any, and they relied on emergency care. Nonprofits are notoriously hostile to unions, and this makes sense in a work environment that, contrary to its stated objectives of dreams for a better, more equitable world, in fact relies on top-down, hierarchical modes of operation.
In other words: non-profit employees, like adjuncts, aren’t paid shittily because there isn’t enough money in the non-profit world. They’re paid crap (and treated like worse) precisely because there’s a lot of money in the non-profit world (yes, yes, I know, I’m not talking about all non-profits, you know which ones and what type I mean), and because it relies on replicating the inequality and abuse that we only expect in the corporate world.
Kahle’s idea sounds like a great fix to a problem, but if he’s that concerned about the cost of housing expenses for his and other nonprofits’ employees, he might consider simply paying them a lot more, even if that means streamlining operations. Surely, a more effective workplace is one where fewer but much better-paid employees are able to focus on their work without having to constantly and literally worry about the roofs over their heads and food on their table. But as matters stand right now, nonprofit employees, already under massive amounts of stress from their economic conditions, often struggling to pay back student loans and terrified of speaking out against tyrannical bosses, are overworked and underpaid, and can’t afford to agitate for better conditions.
Creating a “Foundation House” for nonprofit employees is worse than a band-aid problem: It serves, in the long term, to actually justify paying employees badly: “But we gave you so much, including subsidised housing, how dare you be so ungrateful?” could well be the response to those who dare, like Oliver Twist, to ask for more.
This is what I call the soup kitchen approach to social justice: First, create and/or sustain a system that compels people to live in circumstances of precarity and need, and then create a system that allows you to swan in as the Grand Benefactor, piously spending two hours of every Saturday ladling soup to your hungry employees who are there because you don’t pay them enough.
And that, in effect, is what’s happening here, with a nonprofit deciding to provide subsidised housing to its employees, but without making any commitment to actually change the system so that nonprofit employees can actually make more. Or, for that matter, with little visible effort to combat the rampant and horrific gentrification that is sweeping through San Francisco, pushing out those who don’t get rides to work on buses or boats.
You want change? Agitate for kick-ass salaries and better living conditions for nonprofit employees. Otherwise, this is the soup kitchen approach.
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