Exploiting the poor, the progressive way

Everyone knows that the left loves the poor, because they constantly tell us they have a monopoly on helping the less fortunate. However, to quote the great movie, This is Spinal Tap: "Money talks and bullshit walks". When well-funded progressive organizations have an opportunity to redistribute some of their wealth, it is reasonable to expect them to pay a decent wage to their human capital.

These groups praise a higher minimum wage, or even the concept of a living wage, often pay their employees chump change. Left wing blogger Chris Bowers takes on the skinflints on the left with these admonishments:

I preface this post with that story because it is probably the most gratuitous example from my personal experience that demonstrates how progressive organizations view their supporters as people to be exploited, not praised or helped.

and

The longstanding practice of progressive organizations to exploit their most dedicated workers by forcing them to live ascetic lives in order to help "the cause" is being repeated with the way many progressive organizations and campaigns are now treating the blogosphere and the netroots.

and then he asks these left wing champions of the working class to:

Stop thinking that the best way for progressive activists to help the progressive movement is for those activists to live in poverty. You can't do your best work when you struggle to pay your bills.


There are also others who chimed in about their treatment by the oppressive and greedy liberal machine:

During those three weeks raising money for the DNC, I experienced the same cycle that the vast majority of PIRG/Fund canvass veterans will describe: intimidation followed by exhiliration, hard work increasingly beset by frustration, and then finally (as the priorities of our operation came into starker relief) disillusionment. If for some unlikely reason I had taken that job on its own, without the MoveOn campaign dangling in front of me like a lure, I would probably have lasted the average career span of a PIRG/Fund/GCI canvasser--two weeks--and then I would have walked out,

and further down the thread, a poster responded with:

I was a local volunteer with MoveOn's field effort in 04 and also housed a paid organizer -- and found it to be as horrendous as you suggest. From the beginning, they were resistent to input from local folks who had been doing local organizing for years and insisted everything had to follow an absurdly top-down model that fell apart completely within 2 weeks of the arrival of the paid organizers. The entire staff was let go and then when these 12 kids found jobs with another progressive campaign, MoveOn called me and told me that I should no longer house the staffer. IN other words, tell a 21-year old woman who had come to town to work for what amounted to sub-minimum wage that she had no place to stay.

That is some cold blooded behavior, while a company like Ford Motor Company reduces its workforce with buyout packages that offer six figure payoffs, paid retraining, or a continuation of benefits. So while shouting about the evils of Walmart, about how paying a living wage with benefits to employees is a human rights issue and that if you can't afford it, you shouldn't be in business, these liberals fail to live up to their own rhetoric.