in a labor dispute

Many friends and I are converging on Providence, RI for the annual American Democracy Project conference. It is in the Westin Hotel, which is subject to a union boycott. Unite Here called a boycott when the hotel cut salaries and raised health care premiums. Just last week, the Westin laid off 50 workers, who will be replaced with contractors. The boycott has a Facebook page that you can visit.

The union is understandably calling for ADP to join the boycott. According to an email that I have received with identical text from 18 different individuals (so far), “The American Democracy Project is supposed to promote democracy, but patronizing this hotel supports the Westin Providence’s violations of democratic rights. Please boycott this hotel and please do not cross the union picketlines there.”

The problem, however, is that canceling the hotel contract would cost ADP so much money that I believe the organization would die. A boycott, as opposed to a strike, does not release ADP from their legal obligations to pay the hotel. And ADP is a small, scrappy, nonprofit outfit that serves public colleges and universities, with a strong emphasis on low-budget, non-selective institutions.

I have therefore decided to stick with the conference, although I am minimizing my own payments to the Westin. I will attend the union’s teach-in and rally, but I will also enter the hotel for several sessions, including a plenary discussion on Friday morning about how to address issues like this one. Indeed, I will moderate that plenary. I plan to encourage participants to think about what we should do in the future.

This has been a tough call, and all of us are complicit–whether we patronize a hotel that exploits its workers or potentially kill an important nonprofit. I may have made the wrong decision, or there may not be a right one. I believe that all our work in democracy education is serious business. We do not just discuss, observe, and study institutions and teach young people to do the same. We populate, fund, profit from, and run institutions that regularly make and break human lives. Without taking ourselves overly seriously or giving ourselves too much credit, we need to recognize the heavy responsibilities we bear.

populism and “the government”

Today’s most prominent populists depict the government as alien to “the people.” They say the government is a threat that needs to be checked and hampered.

A different populist tradition says, “This is the people’s government. We paid for it, we built it, and it should serve our needs better.” The clearest recent national voice for that strain of populism was John Edwards, in the 2008 campaign, but the tradition goes back to William Jennings Bryan and before.

For my own part, I’d put the matter a little differently. It is our government: of the people, by the people, and for the people, in Lincoln’s phrase. Even in its current form, it is generally for us. Anyone is entitled to criticize the way the federal apparatus is run, but more than 80 cents of your tax dollar goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, interest payments on the national debt, and defense. Those purposes are supported by vast majorities of Americans. The government is by us in the sense that we determine its priorities, in rough strokes–for good and ill. We want low taxes and high spending, and that’s why we get a deficit. The accumulating debt is not only “ours” because we must pay it off; it is ours because we demanded policies that necessitated borrowing. Finally, the government is of the people because the individuals who run it and work for it belong to regular American society and culture. They may not be statistically representative of the whole population, but they are not all that far off.

Having acknowledged that the government is ours already–we own it, legally and morally, and must take responsibility for it–we can turn to the ways it is not of, for, and by the people. In broad strokes, it may come from us, but money influences its decisions far too strongly. There are no realistic pathways for many Americans to enter politics and public life. In the government, power is distributed in ways that make it difficult for the public to hold leaders accountable. (For example, the present administration should be able to determine economic policy so that the public can vote up or down in November; instead, abuse of the filibuster creates deadlock.) The public discussion is structured so that we can’t deliberate about common interests and learn from one another, but instead fracture into interest groups whose aggregate demands are irrational. Finally, the government is not of us sufficiently because it does not tap people’s energies, ideas, and values sufficiently to solve public problems.

That diagnosis leads to a positive program that seems much more worthy to be called “populism” than any simple diagnosis of the government as the enemy of the people.

engaging working-class youth

I am in a retreat with leaders who work with young people (ages 18-29) who have not attended college–basically, America’s working-class and marginalized youth. Our colleagues provide a diverse range of opportunities, but all have civic or political engagement as one of their purposes. CIRCLE is the main organizer of this retreat, although we collaborated closely with our practitioner partners to design the agenda and facilitate the discussion. The conversation so far has been theoretically rich and challenging. I won’t be able to reflect on it for some time, because my first task is simply to take it in. Most of our own research on this topic is collected here.

overhead and the nonprofit business model

(On an AirTrain flight, Logan -> BWI): If you’re a nonprofit that tries to run solely on grants and contracts from the federal government and foundations, you basically can’t make it work. The grants and contracts will cover your expenses for funded projects, plus an appropriate share of overhead (also known as facilities & administration costs). But those revenues cannot be used to cover the cost of grant-seeking, which is time-consuming work, especially since no fundraiser succeeds with more than one proposal in three. Also, the grants and contracts basically will not cover R&D or public relations. But you cannot run a nonprofit enterprise without spending significant funds on development, R&D, networking, and PR.

Many nonprofits survive (and even flourish) by adding profitable fee-for-service work or by soliciting private donations by mail, in person, or in annual banquets. Those are appropriate strategies, but they can detract from an organization’s mission if, for example, it starts serving clients who can pay its fees, or if its energies go into private fundraising.

Overall, I think Dan Palotta is right in his book Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential. It’s too common to view all “overhead” in the nonprofit sector as waste, whereas R&D and development are treated as investments in the for-profit world. If the government and foundations want to help build and sustain institutions that do good in the world, they should be willing to pay the real cost of business, not just the itemized cost of each particular project.

in search of status

(Washington, DC) Apparently, if you walk into a Russian club in Brooklyn or Cleveland on a Saturday night, you will see two or three gigantic parties seated in the dining room, each around a towering flower arrangement of a different color. The guy who bought that bouquet–and all the guests’ meals–is a big cheese.

On the streets of downtown Lisbon, I saw groups of teenagers: cheerful, friendly-looking kids. I have no idea what combination of clothes, interests, and idioms allow a teenager to hang out with one of those groups or become its leader, but I am sure the recipe for inclusion is very precise and difficult to master.

If I blew all my savings on a vast banquet, everyone would think I was weird. And I (evidently) don’t care about clothes. But I’ll labor for weeks or months to write a piece that can appear in one obscure scholarly journal instead of another, and then take great pride in adding it to my CV.

We are a funny bunch of primates, aren’t we?