I worked for the PIRGs for well over a decade, and after reading various blogs and stories regarding how they treat their employees for several months, I thought I would add my comments. I had many good years at PIRG and think the staff has done and continues to do some great work, but I think it's important to give some insight to not just how unfairly PIRG treats its employees, but also the hypocrisy of Doug Phelps and his senior management team, who act like a 1970's Soviet politburo by enforcing numerous rules to control staff while not applying those same rules to themselves.

Here are some examples:

PIRG staff in major cities are expected to house (without compensation) out of town staff who come in for meetings to save the organization from having to put them up in hotels. If you live in a city like Boston, Denver, or Santa Barbara, you could end up having to house 2 or 3 people up to 2 months out of the year. In the 1990's, PIRG paid Susan Rakov, one of Doug Phelp's prized assistants at the time, $300 a month to compensate her for housing staff throughout the year. That's $3600 a year, and she only got it because she was Doug's primary loyalists and enforcers.

For many years, staff were expected to pay for their hotel rooms at PIRGs December meetings in December. But Doug Phelps never had to pay for HIS room. PIRG always paid for it.

PIRG paid for Phelps' cell phone throughout the 1990's when other staff had to foot their own cell phone bills.
When Phelps rented a house in Santa Barbara, PIRG paid for part of his rent because he sometimes worked from home. No other staff enjoyed that luxury even though many of us worked from home. And up until very recently PIRG staff had to pay for ALL their cell phone calls, and many still due because of PIRG's confusing and bureaucratic reimbursement rules.

PIRG staff have had to pay for their own gas when they drive to regional meetings and retreats for many years. Phelps always got reimbursed for his own gas.

Any PIRG staffer can tell you of the bureaucratic BS they had to wallow through to get approval to get a new fax machine or copier for the office. The battle for the $300 to buy the equipment could last for months, and more often than not, the request would be rejected. But when Phelps wanted $3 MILLION in 1996 to buy ads for his pet campaign finance reform initiative, he got the money instantly. And the initiative got creamed at the polls anyway.

Everyone both in and out of PIRG knows that PIRG pays much lower salaries than anyone in the nonprofit movement. A key cornerstone of PIRG philosophy that everyone is supposed to blindly follow is that PIRG pays lower salaries so it can hire more people to more work to bring about social change - you can do more with 2 people making $20,000 a year than 1 person making $40,000 a year. PIRG also prides itself on the fact that it has strict pay ranges that keep everyone within a particular range so people with the same level of experience will always make the relatively same amount of money. It also gives management a convenient excuse if someone wants more money. Anyone who has asked for more money in PIRG has heard the familiar line "we can't give you more money - that wouldn't be fair to all the other people who have the same level of experience". But PIRG conveniently overlooks this policy when it is to its advantage. When I worked there, I saw many examples of people who asked for more money paid much more money than others with the same level of experience because PIRG management didn't want them to leave staff. The best recent example of this occurred when Doug Phelps offered an advocate a $20,000 raise to match an offer that she got from another organization. The advocate ended up leaving anyway, but if she had stayed, she would have been paid WAY more than anyone other advocates with her experience. Phelps has also used payoffs from Grassroots Campaign Incorporated (GCI), the for profit canvassing group he started, to pay off PIRG staff to keep them from leaving while allowing him to keep salaries artificially low. A few years ago, when a talented regional canvass director was going to leave staff over more money, Phelps authorized GCI to pay him a $3000 "bonus" to compensate him for work he did to help train GCI's canvassers. PIRG didn't have to change its salary structure, and since GCI is a private company, no one would see the payment in its books. How convenient.

Another example of PIRG's hypocrisy is its annual subsidized staff retreat in Aspen. Every year, PIRG pays for virtually all the costs of a week long Aspen ski vacation for any staff who want to attend. When I worked at PIRG, people in the financial department told me that PIRG spent between $200,000 and $300,000 on the event, and that was decade ago when PIRG had about half the staff it does now. Since the Aspen vacation has been going on for over 20 years now, it is reasonable to say the PIRG has spent several million dollars paying for lots of staff to get drunk, ski, and have sex. If PIRG truly followed its salary policy, wouldn't you think it should be using those millions of dollars to hire more activists and bring about more social change? I'm not saying that saying for the Aspen vacation is wrong but it certainly not consistent with the PIRG mantra of spending money meagerly so that it can hire more activists. You can't be righteous about how little you pay staff and then spend millions on vacations.

Another PIRG irony - long known for being one of the stingiest organizations with regard to giving money to many local campaigns with other groups, PIRG is actually one of the richest nonprofits in the country. Many PIRGs, including those in California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Washington, and Oregon has literally millions of dollars in the bank. Some of these PIRGs along have in excess of $5 million. But local PIRG staff directors have no control over this money. In fact, you will never see it in their bank accounts. That's because most of the money has been generated by years of canvassing, which most people know is done for the PIRGs by the Fund for Public Interest Research (started and controlled by Doug Phelps), and as the Fund collects the money from canvassing, it puts it in Fund banks accounts, not PIRG bank accounts. So if you look at MassPIRG's financial statement, you may see a few hundred thousand dollars, but you won't see the millions of dollars that is in the Fund canvassing account for MassPIRG. MassPIRG will never get any of this money without the approval of Doug and key senior staff. And if you work for a foundation, you will never know how many millions a PIRG has because it will not show up in its financial information.

I think the most disingenuous thing the Doug Phelps has done was to pimp PIRG member names for his two for profit organizations - Telefund Inc. and Grassroots Campaigns Incorporated. By using the names, as well as many of the fundraising techniques, of the PIRGs, Phelps has become extremely wealthy. He owns 2 multi-million dollar houses in Santa Barbara, CA as well as a very expensive loft in Denver. Meanwhile, while Phelps is making millions from his private fundraising operations, he is manically determined to keep staff salaries as low as possible and continues to make staff wait up to two years to wait for salary increases. Ironically, PIRG uses the fact that it doesn't sell its member list to other organizations as a selling point to potential donors, but I guess that rule didn't apply to Doug. The funny thing is, for years, Phelps has made it well known to PIRG staff that he doesn't take a salary from PIRG, but the only reason he quit taking a salary was to prevent any conflict of interest from him running GCI, a private companies that runs political campaigns, and PIRG, which is nonpartisan.  Of course, while he gallantly refused to take a salary from PIRG, the money from his 2 private companies kept pouring in.

I get the point of this essay is to give some more insight as to how hypocritical Doug Phelps and PIRG upper management actually are. And even though most of the examples that I have noted are about Phelps, his senior staff cabal are just as guilty as they know what goes on yet continue to ignore it. They righteously spout that one of the key things that makes PIRG different from other groups is that PIRG staff hold itself to rules and higher standards than other groups, but they don't hold themselves to the same standards that they expect staff to follow. This has to change. Clearly, there is a lot of impetus for change coming from outside PIRG, but nothing will change unless PIRG staff force it.