So this post will be somewhat rambling, as my fingers are fueled by adrenaline, but I just have to say absolutely fuck the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC).
I work at a relatively small nonprofit of 20 employees, with 5 being in South Africa. While the nature of our work in reproductive justice has us understandably busy of late with the recent broadside of legislative and judicial attacks on reproductive autonomy, we're completely burnt out: overworked, underpaid, and disrespected.
What is sad is that this burnout is not due to the external challenge of beating back the boomers, but instead comes from the grating and undeniable awareness of just how exploitative, hypocritical, and dishonest those who publicly present themselves as being champions of pay equity, fairness, and progressive politics can be.
Our Executive Leadership is totally obsessed with getting more and more funding. This would be okay if they were equally committed to doing the work and honoring their obligations to the communities they use to attract money. However, their greed has led to them overextending themselves (aka their employees).
We have over 26 open projects, each requiring roughly 2,300 total labor hours/year, or around 59,000 each year. Each employee is 'supposed' to work 40 hours/week, so there's only 38,400 hours available per year. This 21,000 hour deficit must come from somewhere right? Of course it comes out of our weekends, our days off, or evenings with family and friends, etc. All the while, they refuse to give raises except for the Executive Leadership Team (twice in 2 years). It would take every employee 62 hours a week with no days off, no sick time, nothing, just to keep up, and they're still pushing for more projects that we cannot even possibly complete.
So I sent a breakdown of the math to our “HR” person, who is also our de facto VP. What was the response? First it was “I'm emotionally drained from a personal issue this weekend, so I don't have the bandwidth to respond”. A few days later, I get a call basically explaining that they had to fire “underperformers”, so that's why, completely ignoring that regardless of productivity level, its mathematically impossible for us to “perform”. I was then gaslit and told that we don't have the money for raises because they're hiring new people, and things will get better. The person on the phone reassured me that management really understood and they were committed to making things better. What's the remedy, a fucking Christmas party and a $500 Amazon gift card at the end of the year.
If this weren't insulting enough, today I found that they are paying $15,000 for “mindfulness meditation training” to one of the Exec Director's friends! I told them that we can get the Calm app for work, which would cost us only $1000 per year for the entire organization. So we don't have the money for cost of living adjustments, bonuses, or increased benefits. We don't have money to hire someone in my 2-person communications department, which technically works on all 26 projects. We don't have money to pay our interns, or to pay our contractors on time, but we do have money for some guy to play YouTube videos about meditation (literally what the 'training' consists of) for $15k? An utter joke.
There is a lot of funny accounting and “lost” funds in the six-figure range every year. Happened upon a CC receipt that showed our Exec Dir spending $5000-$6000/month on the company card on personal expenses. But this latest bs was the final nail in the coffin for me. To be gaslit and lied to about why I should feel grateful to live off of credit cards paycheck-to-paycheck, only to discover that they can generate $15,000 for totally frivolous bullshit out of thin air days later? I can't take it anymore.
So I've applied for us to unionize. I encourage any other nonprofits in a toxic workplace to do the same! (will post link in comments)
This was definitely a venting rant post, but hopefully it encourages people to create a solidarity network within their own workspace and to tap in to existing resources of support out there.
Management wins when we stay silent and isolated.