This video showed up in my Original Plumbing feed today.
It's the testimony of somebody who worked for what I have come to know as a "liberal sweatshop," it's a canvassing contractor used by a lot of large lobby organizations like the Human Rights Campaign. And I totally was a canvasser for them, so this is a very personal thing for me.
I graduated thinking I was totally going to go into some sort of activist-minded career. I was kind of over-idealistic and I'd had a taste of what I thought activism was, having done phone banking and canvassing and picketing and all that fun stuff. They interview me and say I have a load of experience and that after a stint as a canvasser they'd see if I could be promoted. They even asked me what pronouns I preferred. I was excited, I thought everything was going great.
So I get there for training, and there's a nice variety of people there. We're told we're going to be canvassing to get money for an environmental organization I'd never heard of but which they claimed would be "as visible as Greenpeace" in a couple months (it isn't, and this was a few years ago). We're told that we'll be fired if we don't make a $210 quota, but not to worry, because if we really try hard anybody can do it. And all we need are three people to give us their credit card information, and that's all we need because each counts for like a hundred bucks. Easy! Piece of cake!
I had to take the bus for an hour to get there... it involved my Dad taking me to the bus station on his way to work, getting on the long-distance bus businesspeople use, and getting on a different bus. I couldn't make it on weekends and I needed to get on the bus by 6:00 or I'd have to ask my dad to drive an hour each way to pick me up. I told them that. They knew that. But they still expected me to stay late and come in on weekends to cold call people asking for money. It was "voluntary activism" but they acted like you were a traitor to the cause if you didn't do it. It was a haven of shame.
So we go out for our first try and for some reason, at like 9:00 in the morning, we stop at Whole Foods. I buy a juice and drink it. Then they told me, afterward, that that was our lunch break. I had packed a lunch and didn't get to eat it because nobody had told me they we were going on "lunch break." So by our 5:00 end time I am really hungry, I've been standing all day, and I've been feeling like an asshole because when I knew I wasn't going to make quota I was nearly pleading people to give me their god damned credit card information. Of course, they didn't give it to me, because I was some random person on the street.
I couldn't make quota. It was "my fault," of course, because "anybody can do it" if they try hard enough. The woman training me kept saying dipshitty things like "I don't understand why people can't make quota most of the time, I think it's easy!" as she flipped her blond hair and batted her eyelashes at every male who walked past. She didn't make quota that day, either.
By the end of my first day, most of the people they'd trained that day had quit. Our boss said something stupid like "Some people just don't have the dedication to succeed in this field." I couldn't handle it. That mind fuck of a job was a gross disrespect of human dignity. They take young, idealistic liberal activists, people who want to make a difference in the world, and they chew them up just to spit them out on the sidewalk. And I learned that I was not even close to the only one who had that experience. So I quit. I don't aspire to be a professional activist anymore. I still do activism, and I do a lot of activism, but I no longer subscribe to the idealism of making it my day job. It is exactly the opposite of an anti-oppression workplace. And I don't claim that all places that do paid canvassing are like this. Not all activist work environments are going to shit on their workers. But this place did, and it continues to do so.
When I'd applied for this job they called me back two minutes after I'd sent it. Literally. I'd clicked enter and was just about to check my email when I got a phone call. When I emailed them asking when I was supposed to pick up my final paycheck, they did not get back to me. After repeated attempts. I have a feeling they swallowed that paycheck up, which goes against their own written policy, but I just don't give a fuck anymore. I don't want to deal with that trash ever again.
