Nonprofits “organize,” but foundations serve as the organizational vehicle for wealthy people’s money. They pay almost no taxes in exchange for supporting, usually through grants, the various organizations that Go Out Into The World and Do The Work of advancing the policies or public works that the foundation supports. But the foundations and their “grantees” are functionally very similar in the faith they place in the elite to fix the world’s problems. No matter how progressive the receiving nonprofit proclaims to be—or how committed to “organizing”—the larger philanthropy ecosystem will bind the nonprofit to its wealthy patrons (and their often very vague demands), unless the nonprofit relies solely on grassroots donations.
Meeting the needs of millionaires is not easy. When their needs are vague and undefined—or poorly thought through and unsuited to the needs of local communities—it requires labor and stress (and ulcers) to keep them satisfied. It also requires a great deal of exploitation: the people working the hardest at nonprofits often make the least. People will work themselves to literal sickness chasing vague grant imperatives and using their dedication to The Work as a justification for their physical and mental burnout.
The treatment of workers in the nonprofit industry is perhaps its most disturbing feature, and it often goes unnoticed by larger society. There is a confusion, a frustration, that arises when you don’t see society changing at the scale or speed with which you’d like it to, especially when that “change”—however vaguely defined—is your literal job. But as long as nonprofits exist, it will be this way. This is because nonprofits exist to manage the contradictions of capitalism.
A social and financial divide is forming — between those who have student debt, and those who do not — that will have ramifications for decades to come.
When I finished my PhD in 2011, I began repaying my student loans on an income-based repayment plan. In a phone call shortly after, I asked my loan servicer, Navient, about Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and was assured that if I was working in public service as a teacher, I would simply need to make consecutive payments for 10 years, at which point I would apply and receive forgiveness for the remainder of my balance. That advice was wrong — and if I had followed it for the next 10 years and applied to the program, I would likely have been told that none of my payments qualified, and I would need to start over again.
The biggest issue with my loans was one faced by hundreds of thousands of other borrowers who believe they are enrolled in PSLF: I was with the wrong servicer. In order to participate in PSLF, you must transfer your loans to FedLoan. But many servicers — including Navient — may be reticent to guide clients toward this option, because if a loan is transferred to FedLoan, they lose their servicing fees.
Even if a borrower does figure out that their debt needs to be transferred to FedLoan, it’s only the beginning of the battle. Two years after the 2007 announcement of PSLF, the Department of Education realized the lack of guidelines about what type of employment could be considered “public service” might be a problem, and implemented a “certification” process. Dozens of borrowers who told me they had believed themselves “on track” for forgiveness had no knowledge of this new qualification, and were never notified; one told me she’d been working in public service for five years before learning she needed to certify — and only because a friend had told her.
[Frustration] stems from just how illogical and intractable the system remains. If you pay even one dollar more than your set income-based repayment, the payment doesn’t count toward forgiveness. If you make the payment a day early, it doesn’t count. If you make a payment on the one-day gap between switching from one public service job to the next, it doesn’t count. If, for whatever reason, you cannot make a payment for one month, your loan will then go into forbearance. For many borrowers, though, it can take up to a year of waiting time before the servicer completes the paperwork to transfer you out of forbearance and back to your original payment plan — which means losing time, and payments, that could have been spent working toward forgiveness.
A $15 minimum wage is an antidepressant. It is a sleep aid. A diet. A stress reliever. It is a contraceptive, preventing teenage pregnancy. It prevents premature death. It shields children from neglect. But why? Poverty can be unrelenting, shame-inducing and exhausting. When people live so close to the bone, a small setback can quickly spiral into a major trauma. Being a few days behind on the rent can trigger a hefty late fee, which can lead to an eviction and homelessness. An unpaid traffic ticket can lead to a suspended license, which can cause people to lose their only means of transportation to work.
[...]
A LIVING minimum wage buys prescriptions and rest and broccoli, yes; but it also provides something less tangible. Low wages are an affront to basic dignity. They make people feel small, insignificant and powerless. Subjectively experiencing these feelings can have real health consequences beyond the material hardships of poverty. This is why the poor exhibit better executive control and a heightened willingness to participate in social services when they have been affirmed, making them feel more capable and proud. It is why patients who are treated with dignity by their health care provider are more likely to follow doctor’s orders, adhering to their medical care. When we feel seen and valued, we are more likely to tend to ourselves.
The point about the concept of “productivity” is that it isn’t merely about getting things done, or doing a lot. Most of us want to do things in life; we might want to create what doesn’t yet exist, or perhaps demonstrate how what is now could or should be changed for the better. Many of us have goals and aspirations, ambitions we want to fulfill, and we’re willing to work hard to make that happen.
But productivity, as a goal, is about governance of a particular type. Productivity isn’t just about making things, it’s a concept that’s part of a larger system; it’s an economic concept, one that denotes a relationship between inputs and outputs. This is how efficiency is measured, so to be put to use “productivity” needs to be demonstrated in terms that work for the model of governance being used.
If academic work is about knowledge, and we come to apply the concept of “productivity” to this work without questioning the implications, then what are we saying about how knowledge happens – and the nature of knowledge itself? The epistemological question flows from the question of governance. If we govern universities on the same terms that we manage factories, we change our relationship to knowledge and also the nature of what we “know”.
As “knowledge workers” we also change ourselves, and our relationship to what we do. Of course it’s possible to divide our time into manageable units, and perform our work accordingly – to act as we’re encouraged to act, as the production line of knowledge. We may come to accept that accounting for ourselves means counting our selves, in an institutional culture where work is an identity and a way of life; and it will be in some ways easier to accept these things and work with them, especially in the current competitive academic job market. To be non-compliant at the early stages of one’s career is to take on a personal risk, the outcomes of which are validated (one way or the other; “maverick” or “failure”) by a meritocratic culture.
With the bleak future millennials are facing, it must be asked: Will the cultural capital of middle classness retain the same meaning as the middle class in America continues to erode? Or will class culture and consciousness evolve?
Often millennials’ financial predicament is either undermined (“they’re entitled!”) or painted as completely hopeless (“they’re screwed!”). But millennials’ harsh reality is that, despite middle class beginnings, their poverty is often a product of downward mobility.
The bizarre split in the media landscape between “entitled” and “screwed” is precisely because of what is happening with millennials and class; it is a reflection of how downwardly mobile millennials’ class status requires a both/and logic to unpack fully, rather than a binary of either/or. There is both privilege and precarity here.
There is a difference between how downwardly mobile millennials are treated in the media versus the working class — both are admonished for failing to measure up to middle class standards, but there is significant anger towards millennials because they were supposed to meet those standards and fell short. The sheer amount of hand wringing about millennials failing to reach “adulthood” signifies this. In reality, though, the markers of adulthood that are always mentioned — buying a home, a car, investments, saving for retirement — stand in for middle class status, an odd slippage that is rarely parsed out. The implication is that to be poor is to be infantilized, no matter if one is a millennial or not.
***
Millennials recognize that growing up middle class comes with privilege, but are often too hesitant to claim their current and future financial precarity as a class issue for fear of not wanting to seem like they are complaining, or drowning out voices of more marginalized working class folks. The ways in which they vocalized their circumstances also reflected the reality of austerity politics — we have become so used to doing with less, we think we are more fortunate than we are.
Millennials have also learned to do with less in the workplace. Under the current iteration of capitalism, the “gig economy” has become more and more popular with both blue-collar and white-collar employers. However, while things like remote freelance work and shared workspaces carry the cache of middle class privilege, gig economy employers rarely offer more than paltry wages, job insecurity, and no benefits. Because it’s not factory work, we’re less likely to associate driving an Uber with being working class, even though few can pay rent on a job like Uber alone.
***
As reflected by the statistics, millennials are struggling with a descent into a lower socioeconomic bracket. While these young people certainly did not lose all their previous privileges from middle classness, it would be unfair to call their new class consciousness a false one, regardless of cultural capital. Many millennials’ tastes — such as in organic food or fashion — may reflect the cultural capital of privilege, and a distinction away from mass culture. Some of my interviewees even confessed to occasionally splurging on high-end makeup or skincare, food, and clothing, precisely because they felt saving enough to get ahead was impossible. Those items are no longer the privileges of the middle class, but the “vices” of the lower class.
With the disintegration of the middle class, what will it mean to have the façade of a middle class background without the material reality of a middle class life? While cultural capital surrounding class is always influenced by race, gender, and other identity markers, what is happening to millennials requires a more nuanced conversation about class that both acknowledges the privileges many millennials have but also recognizes that possessing cultural capital does not necessarily yield a livable income, and will likely make less of a difference as the middle class continues to erode over time.
“How the idea of fetal rights gained currency is a story of social reaction — to the Roe decision and, more broadly, to a perceived new permissiveness in the 1970s — combined with a determined, sophisticated campaign by the anti-abortion movement to affirm the notion of fetal personhood in law and to degrade Roe’s protections.
Political ambition has also played a powerful role. Out of concern for individual freedom, the Republican Party once treated abortion as a private matter. When Ronald Reagan was governor of California, he signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the land, in 1967. As late as 1972, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Republicans thought that the decision to have an abortion should be made solely by a woman and her doctor. But after Roe, a handful of Republican strategists recognized in abortion an explosively emotional issue that could motivate evangelical voters and divide Democrats.
The creation of the legal scaffolding for the idea that the fetus is a person has been the steady work of the anti-abortion movement, at the national level and in every state. Today, at least 38 states and the federal government have so-called fetal homicide laws, which treat the fetus as a potential crime victim separate and apart from the woman who carries it.
The movement has pressed for dozens of other measures to at least implicitly affirm the idea that a fetus is a person, such as laws to issue birth certificates for stillborn fetuses or deny pregnant women the freedom to make end-of-life decisions for themselves. Some of these laws are also intended to create a basis for challenging and eventually overturning Roe.
In the hands of zealous prosecutors, cautious doctors and litigious attorneys, these laws are creating a system of social control that polices pregnancy, as the editorials in this series show. Because of the newly fortified conservative majority on the Supreme Court, such laws are likely to multiply — and the control to become more pervasive — whether or not Roe is overturned.”
The failure to recognize the value of breast milk contributes to gender inequality in wages and the labor market.
Today in the U.S., one-quarter of mothers return to work less than 2 weeks after giving birth. Before the tears from deliveries and C-section scars have even healed, many women are leaving their newborns in the care of someone else, most typically as an economic necessity. As for feeding, they have two options: buying expensive formula for a caregiver to feed them; or if she is willing and able, take breaks to pump during work hours, spend (nonexistent!) spare time pumping in the evenings to build up supplies, store, freeze, transport this milk, and carve out the time to clean, sanitize, and maintain the pumping gear. No country in the world comes even close to the U.S. in breast-pump proliferation. Given these constraints, it’s no surprise then that living at or close to the poverty rate means you’re less likely to breast-feed exclusively for the first six months than those who are wealthier.
But the obstacles don’t end here. As someone who grew up in Europe, I noticed a striking paradox after having children here in the U.S.: Breast-feeding is heavily promoted, yet there is hardly any time for actual nursing if you’re a woman who needs to work (and that’s most mothers). High-fives all around if you are one of the lucky women who seamlessly pumps during conference calls, in your private office with full control over scheduling calls at a convenient pumping time–when you’re presumably also relaxed and well-hydrated! In general, however, while workspaces are supposed to provide some women with pumping breaks and facilities, the employer is not obligated to pay them for time spent pumping, and workplaces with less than 50 employees can claim that such breaks impose “undue hardship” and not provide a woman with any accommodations.*
And the reality is that even under the best of circumstances, pumping and nursing are not the same activities: many women who made the rhythmic sound of milk expression an integral part of their work day will tell you that their milk supply began to dwindle over time, and they ended up having to supplement with formula. In other words, they had a resource that they were not able to maintain.
New research suggests that corporations pollute more when there aren't local papers to hold them accountable.
Besides reporting on local government, community newspapers cover nearby corporations—and on the toxic emissions released by those corporations' facilities. In doing so, journalists wield a powerful tool when it comes to forcing companies to clean up their act, according to a recent paper by Pamela Campa, assistant professor of economics at the Stockholm School of Economics.
Specifically, Campa looked at the top 20 polluters in each state in the U.S., deriving her data from the Toxics Release Inventory, a data set collected by the Environmental Protection Agency based on information gathered by companies themselves. Then, she searched for examples of news stories about these plants. Using a newspaper archive called NewsLibrary, she searched for any articles in local newspapers that covered the annual release of this data set.
Unfortunately, coverage was rare: Only 4 percent of the top 20 polluters in each state received any coverage at all, perhaps owing to a lack of environmental specialists at local papers, Campa speculates. But among those that were subjected to negative press attention, the effect of coverage on emissions was often stark.
In 2000, for instance, the NRG Energy-owned Somerset Power Plant, a coal- and oil-fired power plant in Massachusetts, was responsible for almost a million pounds of toxic emissions, the bulk of which came from hydrochloric acid (the data set doesn't include carbon dioxide, which is included in a separate inventory). In 2002, the Herald News reported that the Somerset plant was the third-biggest emitter in the state. The data submitted by the plant later that year showed that emissions had suddenly dropped to just 400,000 pounds—a reduction of around 60 percent.
While Campa can't draw a direct line between newspaper coverage and emissions reductions for any particular plant, she argues that the regularity of such occurrences suggests that the power of newspapers to shame plants into better environmental regulations is systematic, contributing to the reduction of hazardous toxic substances across the U.S.
As new figures show the rising cost of unpaid work, we spoke to the people whose careers were changed by being priced out.
Such an important article!
I definitely suffered from this. When I was in grad school, I wasn’t in a position to take some of the unpaid internships that were around. Biggest mistake of my life. The tens of thousands I spent on school were nothing. If you had a good internship, built up those relationships, then you had a MUCH better chance of getting a job. (In retrospect, I kinda regret going to grad school. I could have used that money to help afford internships, and probably would be way ahead than where I am now.)
Excerpt:
A degree is worth “absolutely nothing” without unpaid internships, according to graduates who say they were left disheartened and disadvantaged when they couldn’t afford to work for free to progress their careers.
Unpaid work that can last for months has created an elitist system, meaning that “only the rich or London-based applicants stand a chance” in some careers, young people said, after it emerged that it now costs over £1,000 month to do an unpaid internship in the capital.
Charlotte Rollin, a 20-year-old fashion student, was forced to turn down a number of unpaid internships - including her “dream opportunity” at a high-street brand - when her savings ran dry after a four month stint working for free during the placement year of her degree.
“Within the fashion industry, experience is everything - without any internships under your belt, it would be nearly impossible to secure a job post-graduation,” the University of Huddersfield undergraduate said.
Rollin said she found the situation “extremely disheartening”.
From A Disability History of the United States by Kim Nielson. Another section (linked) describes signed languages as extremely common of most Indigenous groups to North America.
image text:
The Spanish explorers assumed they encountered discrete gestures–not a language. Today’s scholars confidently argue that signed language among indigenous nations served deaf and hard of hearing people as well as the communication needs of peoples of different languages. European explorers benefited from already existing signed languages or signed communications, but dismissed them as unsophisticated hand signals.
Spanish explorers were contemporaries of the Spanish Benedictine monk Pedro Ponce de Leon (1520-1584), who was just beginning to argue that deaf people could be educated and is credited with developing the first manual alphabet.
North American indigenous sign languages thus existed long prior to any signed language in Europe. (France, the home of other early explorers, became a leader in deaf education, but not until the 1700s.) Members of indigenous nations believed that people born deaf had intellect and personal capacity. European peoples tended to believe the opposite.
The Trump administration has proved again and again that it doesn’t actually have to repeal the ACA to do enormous damage—there are a myriad of ways to throw people off of their coverage.
Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families released its annual report that, this year, shows the number of uninsured children in the country rose for the first time since they started publishing these reports in 2008. In fact, no state aside from Washington, DC saw its number of uninsured children decline. A majority of the children who lost their coverage lived in states that did not expand Medicaid; overall, coverage from public sources (such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program) declined last year.
“Never before have we seen such uniformity in state behavior,” Joan Alker, one of the co-authors of the report wrote in a blog post, pointing out that children losing their insurance was an extremely troubling trend, especially in a time of overall economic strength. (Workers’ real wages, however, remain stagnant, as they have for decades.)
The report notes that a majority of children who aren’t insured—56.8 percent—are actually eligible for Medicaid or CHIP. So what could have possibly happened in the last year to keep parents from seeking or knowing their kids were covered?
Maybe it was the repeated efforts by Trump and the Republican Party to repeal the Affordable Care Act over the past year. Or the fact that Republicans let CHIP expire for months, forcing many states to send out notices to parents that their children’s health insurance was going to end. Or perhaps it’s that Trump slashed the advertising budget for the ACA, so that fewer people enrolled. Or maybe it had to do with the fact, as the report points out, that one-quarter of children in the country have an immigrant parent—many who are rightfully terrified right now to have any interaction with the U.S. government.
Big coastal cities don’t have a monopoly on truly progressive organizing.
I remember all the negative responses I got from my New England friends and family when I told them I was moving to Tennessee. There is so much rad work being done in Appalachia. I wish more people knew about it.
Mobilized by the nation’s divisions on race and Donald Trump’s presidency, black women are using networks forged in segregation to turn out voters this fall.
In San Juan County, a majority Navajo population has lived for decades with a primarily white, Mormon government. This election could change that — if people can cast their vote.
Indiana’s maternal mortality rate is twice the national average. A new report maps areas without hospitals, providers and women without health insurance.
“The United States has the highest rate of maternal mortality in developed nations, and Indiana’s is one of the highest in the country – 27 percent of its counties are considered maternal care deserts, or a county in which access to maternity health care services is limited or absent, either through lack of services or barriers to a woman’s ability to access that care.”
A ballot amendment in the November election could restore voting rights to 1.5 million felons in Florida, one of just three states that permanently bars felons from voting.
“Today, Florida has one of the nation’s strictest felon-disenfranchisement policies, but nearly all states place at least some restrictions on felons’ right to vote. (Just two states, Maine and Vermont, allow felons to vote while in prison.) Many critics of the policies point to their racially disproportionate impact: In Florida, more than 21 percent of black adults are disenfranchised because of this policy.
Felon-disenfranchisement clauses date back as far as America’s colonial period, when voting was limited to white men. [...] Florida’s policy only began to impact black residents after the Civil War and the end of slavery. In 1865, Florida tried to prohibit freed slaves from voting, but Congress didn’t allow that; instead, Florida granted black men the right to vote in 1868 while at the same time restating its commitment to the felon-disenfranchisement clause of the state constitution. “What really happens after the end of Reconstruction is [states] start passing laws making everything a felony,” Eric Foner, a historian who studies Reconstruction and the American South at Columbia University, told me. “You steal a chicken, it’s a felony; you go to jail and you lose the right [to vote] … You have more and more people being thrown into jail, and mostly blacks—these laws are not basically applied to whites very often.” One modern example illustrates this disparity in felony classifications: In Florida, theft involving $200 or more is considered a felony, while Texas’s theft threshold is more than 10 times higher, at $2,500.
Still, felon voting restrictions did not affect a significant number of people until the 1970s and ’80s, with the rise of mass incarceration. In 1976, just 1.17 million Americans were barred from voting because of a felony conviction; today, that number is more than 6 million. And more than one and a half million of those people live in Florida, making up more than 10 percent of the state’s voting-age citizens.”
A new report from Advancement Project and Alliance for Educational Justice amplifies the voices of students of color who are demanding police-free schools.
“Although the number of law enforcement officers in schools has grown in the wake of shootings like those in Parkland and Columbine, their presence can be traced all the way back to the 1950s and the Civil Rights Movement, the report outlines. School policing coincided with student movements for an end to racial discrimination, as government officials attempted to suppress and delegitimize student movements. It continues as students face under-resourced schools, harsh disciplinary measures and zero-tolerance policies that funnel them into the school to prison pipeline.
Today, students face police officers in school more than ever before. Per the report, there are some 1.6 million students in the United States who attend a school that employs law enforcement officers, but not a single school counselor. Children of color, students with disabilities and LGBTQ students are especially vulnerable to over-policing. Black and Latinx students are arrested at rates that are disproportionately greater than their White counterparts. And while Black girls make up just about 17 percent of the overall school population, they make up 43 percent of the kids who are referred to or arrested by police.”
