...no doubt about it. Just plain evil, and I could go on.

For all of my qualms about Ralph Nader's election role, I think that the sources you cite show no connection between him and the Fund for Public Interest. I'm not from Missouri, but show me.

Also, the door-to-door, street and telephone canvas are complex political and fund raising techniques. They have great uses and can impose significant costs on individuals and the organizations which use them. Because they generate cash flow and present serious administrative head-aches many groups contract out these functions. Sometimes the contractors are no good. That's what seems to be the story here.

claims no Nader connection. It lists Nader-affiliate US PIRG as a customer (also the Sierra Club). I agree that Nader helped set up the state PIRGs years ago. I still think the Nader connection is not shown to the anti-union actions of this past summer. Many of the canvass firms are private or -- if non-profits -- are effectively staff controlled. The Fund's site does not list a board or explain its organizational structure. If Nader were connected with an organization I ran, I might brag about it. Are you certain?

Trade unions were the first and most determined exploiters of union staff. Many union leaders have firmly resisted attempts by their employees to organize. Similarly, advocacy groups often fight or flee when their employees demands better wages, hours and working conditions. Canvassers are used by those employing them; its a grueling job and those who do not do well are fired. Some canvassers learn good skills from the canvass use the job as a way into other political and social action employement

The original In These Times article (or one of the diaries) claimed that THE FUND doesn't even generate much money for the organizations that contract with it. Most of the money it collects goes to cover its own overhead. What the contracting organization gets is 1) repetition of a message and 2) a donor list.

I just posted the sixth entry of this series. By far the longest and most expansive (and i guess the messiest) but it covers the issue.

http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/12/1/151553/798

There will be one more post in this series.

I have some experience with these groups, having been a Fund canvass director for a bit, and having also been a GCI organizer on the MoveOn 2004 campaign. So hopefully I can clarify a couple questions raised here and put in my own two cents.

Any relationship between the PIRGs and Nader is long over. Nader and a couple of his Raiders wrote a book back in the early 70s urging students to start groups called PIRGs to lobby for their interests, and Nader went on a speaking tour both before and after the book came out to promote the idea. Students in a few states decided to run with the idea. But Nader never worked for the PIRGs, was never on any PIRG boards, and never had any formal relationship with the PIRGs. I'm sure there was some interaction back in the 70s, but Nader quickly went on to other groups and projects. And when Nader started running for office, the PIRGs had to put more distance between them (the PIRGs and Fund have non-partisan status; plus, I know many of my friends at both groups where pissed with Nader over his presidential runs). And the Fund didn't start until the 80s, long after Nader's influence was long gone, so they had zero relationship with him. The Fund and PIRGs never raised money for Nader, and as far as I know never took money from him. So I wouldn't blame Nader for anything the PIRGs or Fund have done (I also don't think you can really give him any credit for anything they've accomplished either, given how long it's been since he had any involvement with them).

There are also some weird claims on a few of the linked threads saying that the senior management at the Fund and GCI is getting rich off these canvasses. The fact is that pay at the Fund and GCI is very frugal, even at the highest levels. A mid-level organizer at most unions makes more than the top brass at either group. Any money these groups make goes back into the organization's next campaigns.

From what I hear, it's true that Greenpeace hired the Fund to run their canvasses for a few years, and then stopped because the renewal rates for their canvass members was lower than they were used to. But that hardly seems scandalous, and Greenpeace has said that the canvass was an effective tool for them (it cause a huge increase in their membership and visibility in just a couple years). However, it's natural that the new members who the Fund actively recruited through the canvass would renew at lower rates than Greenpeace's extremely loyal direct-mail members who have been giving to them for years. Any time you recruit new supporters, you can expect them to be less committed than your base.

In both jobs (as a Fund canvass director and GCI organizer), I never saw the kind of bizarre labor practices that are mentioned in these posts. We definitely weren't encouraged to do any of the kind of staff abuse described here, and I knew canvass directors who were fired for lesser examples of poor staff management. The senior managers I worked with sincerely cared about the canvassers and treated them well.

My main critique of working for GCI in 2004 was just that the group grew too fast. I thought the organizing model worked fine. We worked hard, but no harder than anyone working at the various 527s or campaign offices for either party; when you work on an electoral campaign, long hours are the norm. The problems I saw usually had to do with the staff - GCI hired a couple hundred canvass directors very quickly to work for the DNC, then hired a couple hundred more to work on the MoveOn project. With the rapid schedule and pressure to fill slots, some of the canvass directors who were hired just didn't have the skills to do the job; their poor management of their offices then caused problems for their canvassers.

I encouraged this guy to post here as well, but he may have posted it and not come back, so I will post it for him. Here is a dissenting view of THE FUND:

Sorry to write such a long post, but I've had a lot of experience with the Fund, and this story sounds nothing like anything I ever saw. I canvassed for a couple summers in the mid-90s, and again recently, and on each of those occasions my experience was much like what you described back in the early 80s - the work was hard but exciting, the pay was mediocre but acceptable, and the other rewards more than made up for it (getting to work on issues I cared about, work with fun people, learn about politics, etc.).

The two-week average lifespan of a canvasser that you describe is probably accurate, but the average is deceptive. In reality, you have two groups of people. The first group has an experience like yours; they come in for a day or two or maybe even a week, but they don't canvass well and don't make quota and so they leave. The second group is made up of people who canvass well and embrace the work and end up canvassing for a couple months or the full summer (and a lot of people I met who fell in that category plan to come back and canvass for a second summer or even longer). I think that breakdown is natural - some people canvass well and enjoy the work, and some decide it's not for them. That seems appropriate and understandable to me.

To say that the Fund has a monopoly on canvassing also doesn't ring true. That statement ignores all the other progressive groups that do canvassing: ACORN, for example, runs canvasses all over the country, as does Clean Water Action. So do many unions; the state and local offices of various political parties; the campaign offices of most political candidates; and probably lots of other groups that I'm forgetting. Plus, that doesn't even mention the many groups and firms that do paid petitioning, where they hire people to canvass for signatures (rather than money). But in my personal experience, canvassers from many of those other programs would sometimes come over to canvass for the Fund because they found the Fund office a more fun and rewarding place to work.

The complaints people write about seem to fall into two categories - low pay and administrative mistreatment. In terms of low pay, I don't understand how people can seriously complain about the pay. The canvassing base pay when I worked there usually worked out to $7-8 an hour. And the good canvassers (I was always pretty mediocre myself) often made more like $10-12 an hour. That range seemed totally appropriate for what was typically a summer job for college students. The only way you make lower than minimum wage is if you don't make quota, in which case you're generally gone in a couple days. (In the telephone office, the phone canvassers made more. That job was inherently a part-time job, since you can only call effectively in the evenings. Callers with experience would make from $10-14 an hour, plus bonuses.) Personally, the pay always seemed fine to me. I considered it a privilege to be able to spend my summers getting paid to work on issue campaigns; most other political jobs I could have worked would have been unpaid internships.

I'm not sure what these disgruntled canvassers are asking for - it sounds like some would like an end to the quota system? Personally, that sounds like a disaster to me. You'd end up paying a lot of money to people who came in and didn't raise anything - I imagine that would eat up most of the donations that were supposed to be going to help run campaigns.

In terms of all the complaints about late checks, etc., I never saw problems like that when I worked in Fund offices. Not that things ran perfectly, but the occasional paperwork screw-ups were always at the local level and quickly resolved. These complaints sound like a case of poor management by someone at the local level. From what I saw, the Fund senior managers were rarely around and didn't involved themselves in the payroll or reimbursement process. The idea that they were micromanaging people's benefits in order to short the canvassers doesn't jive with anything I saw going on. And I got to know the canvass directors I worked for pretty well - they were not people who would ever do that sort of thing.

Ultimately, I guess what I'm saying is that my own experience with the Fund was quite good, and I don't think people should condemn the whole organization based on the complaints of a few people in Los Angeles (complaints which I don't think are reflective of the organization as a whole).

I feel this still wouldn't excuse the union-busting, but it is good to hear a more positive view.

I had a similar experience to the person who you posted who had a good and productive time with the canvass. Not everything is perfect, but I find so many things in this whole exended discussion that are not accurate that it calls in to question how seriously to take the whole thing. A lot of it, who knows, but there are enough things that I just know to be wrong or distorted - inlcuding my own sporadic experience - that this seems like a pretty significant waste of time and not even doing service to the folks with genuine complaints.

Hmm. Never thought about it like that before, but how is Greg Bloom benefiting from all of this? Is he in fact the blog equivilent of the cable news industry, making self benefiting hay by distoring the suffering of others.

It really does seem like this person is making a little career out of over-amping dramas like that evil Nancy Grace.

Who is or will be paying his bills?

BTW, I am a reformed Nader Voter. Not all state votes count the same, but what was once a fantastic story of American organizing has turned in to a weird tale of a crazy old man.