Zack -- there might be a little bit of point-missing here. In this post, I'm talking about a specific action from senior management, and I'm explaining its ramifications.
It's ugly stuff, that's for sure -- but I only decided to write this series when I was certain that it could build to some recommendations, specific and general, that would be constructive. I think I proved myself there in the conclusion of my series, "Strip-Mining the Grassroots." I'm arguing that the model is not fatally flawed -- it could be a powerful force -- but it is being implemented un-progressively. It's not just that organizers are being over-worked -- it's that they're being overworked in bad faith. The model's priorities are imbalanced towards quantity at the expense of quality -- and that causes serious negative externalities and hidden costs. The model could be better -- it would take patience and resources and difficult negotiations, and it might have to be scaled down at first, but it could move forward. It's a matter of making it more professional -- about holding it to standards of both progressive ideology and good business. Right now, it doesn't comport with either.
This should not be such a far-out charge to level. The progressive movement is currently in a period of retrenchment -- it needs to be both expansive and inwardly-reconstructive. The "leaders" we are talking about here have been doing this for more than 20 years; they have left a lot of waste in their wake. Their methods and philosophy resemble the same ruthless corporate world that they initially set out to fight. I think, considering where the Left is right now, that any questions about "the way things have been done for twenty years or more" are worthy of consideration. I am not alone in this. My argument is very much in line with a critique -- made by historians and community leaders and Kos and Armstrong themselves -- of the diminished state of civic engagement on the Left and throughout the country. I think MoveOn could be a positive force moving forward out of this quandary -- but that only makes it more important to think critically about this.
With regards to the current MoveOn/GCI operation, it seems that the wrong lessons were learned from 2004. In future posts, I'll suggest ways -- short-term and long-term -- in which the right lessons can be learned. For now, I'll leave it at: it's first and foremost an issue of accountability.
Greg, I think we're probably more on the same page than what you might think. Your second paragraph sums up a lot of what I think as well. GCI can definitely be a force for good while being good itself (although I think the former is more likely). And we can offer some suggestions.
So what do you think they are - care to add on here prior to another diary entry?
As far as general issues, I think some can be identified with your own words here actually:
-overworked (though not neccessarily in bad faith, that is often situational and per staff director) -emphasis on quantity not quality -a corollary to the previous - focused on a model for the model's sake
And I think some other things include:
-what kind of tool GCI (and perhaps other groups) will be -top-down versus bottom-up -allocation of resources -basic HR (pay, benefits, etc.) -recruitment pools for staff managers -placement and position of staff managers/directors
This conversation is kind of driving me crazy because there are so many different points in play here, and none are being treated with very much depth or clarity. In any case, none are being treated separately.
I can think of these:
What ties all these together is that they are being raised by Greg's really important stories from '04. But if this discussion is going to produce useful results, let's get clear and specific and treat one thing at a time.
Zack, when Greg told me he was going to write this series, I thought 'oh boy, this is going to be messy.'
In the earlier posts, some PIRGbots seemed to be surprised to find that Greg wasn't complaining about the hours and the pay; I wasn't surprised. I knew that's not his issue here. But I gotta be honest -- I did expect Greg to write about things like the housing mixups, the delayed paychecks, the illegal gas mileage compensation, the tendency to motivate through nagging guilt, the crippling opacity, the slavish adherence to hierarchy, the wasteful and degrading obsession with roleplays, the fact that several offices were sent incorrect voting information to distribute to their voters in the final weekend, the total neglect of persuadable voters, the failure to prepare for the particularities of individual state's electoral systems, and the general contempt for any piece of information that wasn't a number. Among other things.
But look, Greg hasn't mentioned any of that -- and his argument makes all of it peripheral. By their own frickin frackin model metrics they blew it. And MoveOn blew it by hiring them back. That means this model is broken -- and it needs to be fixed.
I know for a fact that on the PIRG side of things, the admin folks are working hard, and have always worked hard, to make sure that pay and other admin issues are dealt with professionally and in a timely manner. When it doesn't happen, it's because of a breakdown at the office-level, which, while not excusable, is somewhat understandable - in light of putting a bunch of 22-25 year olds in charge of something with which they have no experience and most find rather foreign. I'm not excusing it, just saying I understand it. I am proud to say that never once did my offices ever have issues with that kind of thing. My RDAA was awesome, and she always helped me with the technical aspects that I might need.
At the risk of quibbling, while the gas mileage rate is wholly unfair, it's not illegal. There's a rate suggested by the IRS. If you're not compensated at that level, you're allowed to write it off on your taxes.
There's more to respond to, but I need to go to bed.
This is absolutely not the case with GCI. In my time as a Director/Organizer, my office didn't screw up a single reimbursement request--but we waited for many of them for months. 100% of the dozens of payroll problems that we experienced were the fault of the finance office in Boston.
Out of the blue one week, my paycheck (my name is "Patton Price" and I was working in Cincinnati) was sent to "Preston Pierce" in Fort Lauderdale. That was not the "office-level," it was the result of making a functional payroll system an extremely low priority. I think your explanation is a little insulting. Filling out a half-page form and stapling a receipt is not "foreign," and 22-25 year-olds are generally not as stupid as you give them credit for.
Patton, this is NOT true. Believe me, I worked in finance. EVERY office screwed up requisitions and payroll spreadsheets. If you really want me to tell you stories, I can. Let's start with the dude who called to complain when he didn't get his money. The accounts payable staff asked him where the requisition form was, and he got really quiet for a second, and then said it was still in his desk drawer. Or maybe the guys who got parking tickets, and decided that leaving them in the glove compartment would get them paid off. Or the people who didn't understand that "fill out your budget information" meant "don't leave it blank." Let's not even talk about the people who tried to claim both milage and gas reciepts for their travel expenses. Or the people who decided that nick names were cool, and their legal names didn't have to go on their forms. Or the people who thought that "send in your payroll spreadsheet by noon on saturday" meant that noon on monday was cool.
Stapling the reciept to a half page form may not be foreign, but can you honestly say that you sent in every single reciept? If so, you would be a rare soul, indeed, in the midst of the campaign chaos. Hell, I did payroll for boston door for months, and me and two other boston directors basically designed the cash out procedure, and I KNOW I made mistakes, and I'll be the first to admit it.
This is really not a fight I want to have, but what you should try to understand is that every time one of those mistakes happened, it meant that the finance staff had to spend time fixing it. Which meant that the people who didn't mess up had to wait for their money while the mistakes were fixed. As for payroll, with only one computer with the software on it, and at times over 1400 checks to do in 3 days, well, of course mistakes happened. (back to that forward planning thing again, it would have cost around 500 bucks to network the payroll software, and let more then one person do and check the work, but nooooo). And considering the lack of institutional support, the fact that people quite often were working round the clock to get payroll done, and we were literally racing to the airport to get fedex packages out at the last possible moment, well, let's just say that there was not exactly high morale among the central staff people.
Again, I really don't want to get drawn into this fight, but I do think that most (not all) canvass directors and organizors were NOT hired for administrative skills, and it showed on the finance end.
respectfully, why does there have to be a fight? it sounds like some offices did better than others locally and centrally there were huge problems that put enormous strain on both human and object resources.
both POV seem valid and both seem GCI's fault:
more importantly, this seems like one of the forest/trees issues from the outside - both issues spring from the more malignant GCI viewpoint that motivated and committed volunteers and employees are chattel to be treated with limited attention, no forethought, and apparently no respect.
or am i missing something?
If you don't want to get dragged into a fight, don't make it one. I don't have any doubt that everyone in the finance office worked hard. I have no doubt that everyone at GCI works REALLY hard, and that isn't my point.
I'm sure that I didn't screw up any of my own reimbursement stuff. I wasn't the one who handled most of that stuff directly in my office, so I can't be as sure about everything else, but it was handled by two people who had worked in business before (our CD, for instance, had worked in management for a large corporation for a few years before working on this campaign). I don't doubt that there were idiots staffing many of the offices, but we desparately tried to maintain a professional atmosphere in my office (San Diego Door, but the same goes for street, though it did take them forever to get permission to fire the AD who was getting drunk with canvassers in the office at night), and our efforts were destroyed when paychecks would arrive two days late and reimbursements would never arrive at all. This is not to mention the wacky web of "new hire" paperwork we would ahve to complete each time GCI would spawn--and relegate us to--a new legal entity.
IF you honestly think that the payroll and remibursement system worked well and was only hampered by the mistakes of the director/organizers, than we are just going to have to agree to disagree. That is so far afield of my direct experience that I don't think we can even agree on the basics of what happened and when. I don't mean for anyone to take any of this personally. Even the highest up people at GCI who I met and interacted with were really impressive and admirable people. I like them.
In a previous thread, I made the suggestion that GCI just outsource all the payroll and "officey" shit to a company like ADP or something. You didn't like that suggestion, and that's fair, but it's like I'm totally opposed to being constructive about this.
It's not like I'm totally opposed to being constructive.
"IF you honestly think that the payroll and remibursement system worked well and was only hampered by the mistakes of the director/organizers, than we are just going to have to agree to disagree."
No, I don't think that at all. I think there were two main problems:
1) The people who are great at recruitment, training, staff managment, and motivation are not always the same people who are good at administrative stuff. GCI hired for the former, not the later. And then they had week long trainings where the admin stuff was squeeeeeezed into half of the last day. So organizationally, the people in the field were not prepared to do the stuff they needed to get paid on time. And, becuase the organization is rightfully focused on the "campaign" stuff, no one was ever really blamed when they got the "finance" stuff wrong, so there was little accountability in the field.
Again, this is not to lay blame on individuals, but I never really saw anyone take any ownership for their mistakes, and this stuff wasn't a priority, so there were mistakes made in the field.
Considering this is getting on to two years old now, I don't remember exactly what offices did what, especially with the street and door splits like SD. But let me be clear on this. On VERY BASIC THINGS like getting the payroll spreadsheets emailed in in a timely manner, no office was perfect, except maybe the cape cod office and one or two of the smaller offices in the southwest like tucson. No office was late every pay period, but again, the problem was that a mistake by one office meant that payroll staff couldn't work on getting the checks out the doors for the offices that did get it right, so mistakes compounded one another. In terms of your personal requisitions, I don't remember your name coming up as a problem, but, well, in addition to stapling every single reciept ever, which would make you a saint, can you also honestly say that your budget spread sheet was kept up to date and mailed in regularly? That your debit card spread sheet was also? That your office never sent out a canvasser without having them fill out tax forms? That new hire information (that annoying web that actually had to be done to get people paid...) was sent in on time?
Gah, I really shouldn't be spending this much time on this, so point 2 will be briefer:
2) This gets back to Jax's point about the forest and the trees, but from a different angle. The problem as I saw it was that there was no forward planning. People in finance were more overworked and less apprecieted then in any other part of the organization. (I was an AD, did national recruitment, and finance, so I can speak with some authority there...)
In addition to the (rightful) lack of focus on the admin end, there were two sub problems: a) no forward planning: as refered to above, they refused to hire people in advance and get them trained up before they were snowed under b) you simply can't do the same amount of work doing admin stuff as you can doing organizing or recruitment. staring at spreadsheets for 14 hours is signficantly more draining then a mix of phone work/recruitment/training/canvassing etc over those same 14 hours. and when you make a mistake on the admin end, it messes with someones money, and you can't simply go on to the next role play or door, which makes it more draining still. Maybe that is more personal to me, but I think that's fairly universal.
In terms of being constructive, I actually think this is the place that GCI has the least work to do going forward. My understanding is that the systems are actually mostly working now. And I really think outsourcing is a bad idea, since an outside company would be much less forgiving of the general screw ups that were fairly universal, which the finance staff at least tried to understand since we were mostly former directors and cared about "the cause."
I do think that the most constructive thing would be to somehow get that "forward planning" mindset in place, since it would prevent a lot of these problems.
Finally, I'm sorry if I read your original post wrong, but it really seemed like an attack on the finance staff, and not a critique of the systems that were set up.
I think I'm going to try to refrain from further comments on this part of the issue, since it sorta makes me want so shoot myself in the face.
I didn't mean to attack the finance stuff. I am not doing a good job of making my point, so I will bail out with one final comment: GCI is not a campaign, it is a business. It is not acceptable for a business to get payroll right "most of the time." If they don't get that, they shouldn't be running a business.
After re-reading your comment, I had to add something. The attitude that it's OK to fall short on payroll because other things are a higher priority is symbollic of exactly what's wrong with GCI. I agree that good activists don't always make natural administrative staff (shit, I can bear that out with my own work history!)--but GCI (and I mean "GCI" not "the finance staff they hired in 2004") needs to understand that it is not only a terribly short-sighted practice to knowingly continue a system that results in emplyees getting paid late and reimbursed inadequately, it is also illegal. If the exact same folks were running an entity called "No on 35" or "Smith for Rep.," I think your argument would hold up perfectly. But they are running a business, called Grassroots Campaigns Inc., for a profit--and they are using practices that are not tenable for entities that want to survuve long-term.
That you, I, and anyone else who worked on any campaign in 2004 would agree that administrative stuff isn't our highest priority is a perfect indicator that we are the wrong people to be handling that particular job.
I was a volunteer. The first day I waited for about an hour to do a ridiculous role play even though I have been a sales rep. Now I'm a teacher and routinely speak in front of large audiences of adults. Go figure.
Then I was sent to canvass with out-dated voter information. Even worse, the list was not a route. I was walking around in circles in the hot, humid, Florida sun . They did not supply me with a map, sent me to addresses that seemingly didn't exist. There were several offices and I have no idea why I had to drive so far away and then return to report my results.
It would have been nice to get a t shirt, I wore my (Dixie) Chicks Vote t shirt on election day. I also helped them input their results on their database. What a clunky piece of software that was and I bet that they paid a pretty penny for it.
I feel the frustration and disappointment with the model. This year I was sent an email soliciting volunteer precinct leaders and responded. I never heard from them again with respect to that. The other malfunction is pr for local events. There is a Rock the Vote registration event in my area and I can't find any information about it on the Rock the Vote site. However, it is listed in the DFA local activist link.
With all that said, I still belong and contribute to MoveOn. I don't know if I will volunteer this time.
To be clear and specific -- this was a campaign that wasted the efforts of its participants because the "leaders" forced organizers to build out at the expense of building in. That's specific to this instance. But it is also a good metaphor for the more general problem with PIRG/Fund and in a sense the Left: burning through the grassroots as fuel to "hit the numbers" and "win" without cultivating a dynamic progressive community.
As for your points: (1) "Working people too hard" is a problem with the fundraise canvass, which is not direct political action, rather a business, and therefore should not demand 12+ hours of labor a day. In a GOTV campaign, 12+ hours a day is pretty necessary.
(2) "Quality of management/leadership" is exactly the issue here, while (3) "technical breakdowns" and (4) "starting campaigns too early" are important only inasmuch as they prompted the management to clamp down, hence the crisis.
With regards to the (5) "top down" nature of the model, I'll be dealing with it in my next post, but in the meantime, please see my last post on the model for a definition.
(6)"Is a canvass machine the appropriate way to do GOTV?" Yes. The right model would be top-down, but would be run with trust, respect, and the ability to listen -- i.e. a capacity for bottom-up dynamics. It would treat people as members, not as numbers -- in other words, it would find attrition to be a bad thing, a sign that something is wrong. By (7) "good faith," I mean that these people are devoting their lives to this work. If they are working on false pretenses ("raise money to 'beat Bush!'"), if they are ordered to act in a way that is not in the interest of the cause ("you have to cold-call for eight hours today"), and if they can't get an honest and respectful answer when they inquire in regard to those issues, then...well I actually don't want to accuse anyone here of "bad faith," but jeez doesn't anyone want to take some responsibility here?
Wait a second here, a fundraising canvass is indeed direct political action. The idea is to identify people who support your political efforts, get them to give you money, and get their name/address/phone/email on your list. Then you go back to those people again and again via phone calls/emails/etc.--you engage them with calls to action (sign this petition) and fundraising appeals to provide ongoing support for your cause. All of this furthers your organization's political mission.
Really any outreach the DNC does is direct political action, especially when you're asking people to get involved in the political process in as fundamentally important a way as giving $ to support your efforts.
This context for all of this will all change dramatically of course when we get public financing for elections :)
That was a joke, right? You were trying to be funny?
