What interests me about nonprofits is the way that an economic-political formation trickles down to impact individual’s lives. 

The first challenge to understanding this relationship is how to think about nonprofits as an industry.  It’s an industry without the clear winners and losers, as in other kinds of industry, but an industry nonetheless. It’s an industry because it transforms a kind of human desire – for a better world, for justice – into energy to perpetuate an institution (or class of institutions), and benefit the people who head them.  The benefits accrued are diffuse and systemic, and not necessarily personally outlandish, but tend towards perpetuating ineffective political institutions. 

What distinguishes nonprofits from other social change agents is tax status, and with it the accumulation of capital that creates jobs and other kinds of alienated labor.  The nonprofit institutionalizes a hierarchy – board members, executive directors – and maintains it via the power of capital.  Capital transforms social change work into paid labor, and gives the institution a lifespan independent of its relationship to the problem it seeks to solve.   It allows social change work to become alienated – that is to say, the forms of work and institutions that create it can exist without a necessary need, utility, or support from the people who carry out the work. 

I think the impacts of this alienated labor follow two distinct trends. 

The first is basic exploitation of labor –underpaid, or unpaid labor.  Another word is overwork.  I’m particularly concerned about this in the cases where someone’s nonprofit labor is their primary income source, but I think a case can be made to critically examine volunteerism and internships as part of this phenomenon as well.  A double standard prevails.  Employees are expected to maintain the decorum of traditional employment – deference to the boss, standards of conduct – while also expressing the passion of someone dedicated to a cause.  That means two forms of self-sacrifice: to pay the rent, and to change the world.  Of course, these things rarely pragmatically coincide, and the language of social good can easily run cover for the real function of the work as wages.  Or, in other cases, because someone does care about their work for its own sake, they can be asked to endure deeper cuts to wages, increases in work time, or other reductions in compensation. In either case, the cause or paying the rent suffers.  In either case, nonprofit workers face a double jeopardy for self-sacrifice. 

The second trend is comfortable inertia.  Nonprofits, because of endowment or reputation, can exist beyond their usefulness, or simply perpetuate ineffective strategy.  A simple human inertia lies at the core of this phenomenon: people who are employed tend to want to stay that way, and can bend their perceptions of the relevance of their work to suit this need. There’s a special kind of deep-seeded self deception that comes from an unwillingness to question the things that keep us in our homes, well fed, and clothed. Even when employees can see clear-eyed about their work, the depth of the dependence can keep us from implementing critique of our work.  Self reflection is easily stifled.  In this case, workers can become the indirect beneficiaries of the intractability of the problems they seek to fix, and maintain a standard of living off of doing less than enough to change the world.   We don’t have a relationship of direct exploitation towards injustice, but one that profits off it nonetheless.

So with these trends in mind, what does a nonprofit workers collective look like? 

The centerpiece needs to be an ongoing commitment to a better world.  That’s meant in a mission driven, pragmatic sense that views problems as systemic and institutional, not just personal.  We won’t ever have the world we want by just taking care of ourselves, we have to build better ways of working together to get the change we want.  We can’t just fight to win rights for workers at the cost of institutions and then expect social change to continue. 

That said, in the context of the nonprofit industry, a right of workers should be to be effective in their work.  Addressing our collective impotence is a point of organizing.  The answer seems to be some version of engaged critique - critical distance and experimentation with the solutions we examine.  That critical distance requires an institutional capacity, not just a mindset shift – we cannot think our way out of a structural problem.  A workers collective actually seems to be a very sensible form for this kind of engaged critique to take. 

Ideally, a collective would build capacity for critical thought, and flexibility in our work environment to carry out that thought into action.  In the right context, folks working in nonprofits could offer advice and time to reflect on our practice in a semi-structured environment that allows follow-up and sustained critique.  Also, a network of practicitioners can build flexibility for any of its individual members by creating connections and support for job changes or other lifestyle shifts that might appear necessary as a result of the critique we do together.