It beats bagging groceries though. I guess.

“A study out today shows that a career as a university academic pays less than almost every other graduate profession. Only secondary school teachers and further education lecturers fare worse.“

Thanks for that, I’ve just glanced at it but will read it properly later.

Canvassing suuucks. The canvassing job I had, we were paid like 50 or 60 bucks a day as long as we hit quota. If we didn’t make enough, they’d pay minimum wage. There was a ton of unpaid hours (wage and hour violations) and if you failed to hit quota enough times then they canned you. Two of my coworkers were homeless and sleeping in a park sometimes, one of them got fired for not making quota. The bosses were all under 24, one as young as 18, paid by the hour but treated like salary and totally overworked, which helped make the treatment worse.

On a related note, some other stuff related to a canvasser organizing drive that happened as part of the IWW a while back - http://www.iww.org/en/unions/iu650/acorn

take care,
n8

[Don’t sweat the other thread, I understand life is hectic!]

http://www.sleepykid.org/blog/2007/01/13/army-of-altruists/

Great, great piece, in my estimation.

At the bottom rungs of NGO work (namely, phone and door-to-door canvassing) it’s not uncommon to find oneself shamed and humiliated by hippie taskmasters who make working for Greenpeace feel like Glengarry Glen Ross, except your commission is a pittance. Super weird. I’m sure it varies, but the division of labor (and the status accrued, etc) in NGOs is often more exploitative and anti-labor, for the reasons outlined in this talk, than the for-profit “sector.”

[Nate, sorry for dropping off the thread re: Badiou, parity, and Rise Against a while back… ]

sol,
nic

ps - u still in London?

totally brillant - exactly my thoughts on it (well, a more articulate version). I have tended to avoid working in anything i would concievably do anyway, which is where some of this comes from. It is seductive though, the idea of being paid for something you would concieve of doing anyway (community organising or media, writing, work place organising, or, in my case, media production). Now i tend to just aim for the highest income up until management (i may be a barsted, but im not a fucking barsted)(he he). but no, there are some jobs i wont do, cause i still belive that if you can make a minor difference, then you should try up until a certain point. It’s interesting how the art side of it comes into the creative industries - have you read Rosalind Gill’s ‘Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat?‘? It address this point perfectly - that the new industries rely on unpaid labour and the absolute identification of human create activity with labour, which i think is the point with NGO work as well - and, Marx’s as well. Though he doesnt do it very well, and obscures the social dimension of how labour and exchange are constructed, he does point out that labour appears as a commodity, and we can say that all of human activity tends towards subsumption under the commodity form, and hence all activity looks like work - even when we try to escape it and find someone else meaningful, we find ourselves falling into ‘meaningful work’. I do think its worth adding in some of Graber’s points about political struggle being struggle over the forms of life to be valued, and unwaged NGO style labour being about access to non-monetary ‘good’ capital, and how that creates a system where some people have access to non-monetary value, and others dont… (from the commoner). anyway, rant over.
nic