Current Project: Connecting Nonprofit and Charitable Labor Then and Now

The idea that nonprofits are a highly sought-after but problematic place to work has been at the corners of my consciousness for a while, but I had never fully appreciated the historical continuity of these issues before delving into my own research. Along the way, I've encountered a variety of materials in which charitable organizations presented negative portrayals of their own workers due to existing labor disputes or the mere potential that workers might demand better treatment. Though this is not the main point of my project, it does present enough interesting connections to the present that I wanted to draw them out a bit here.

To work for a certain sort of nonprofit is often a way for one to ally their personal or political commitments with their career-- to work towards a social dream while also working towards a paycheck. Yet as good as this sounds-- or as good as the goals of an organization based on helping, giving, and changing society can be-- the idea of these organizations as the best possible solutions to social problems has also been challenged. The group INCITE!, for example, in their collection The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, presents critiques of the goals of these organizations as mere sustainers and beneficiaries of social inequality, and usurpers of the momentum of grassroots movements.

Moreover, these organizations aren't always good to their workers, expecting long hours for low pay with a cheerful countenance fueled by one's passion for the work. This can lead to implicit or explicit inequities in selection for such positions; for example, a person who doesn't have the family support to take a very low-paying but status building job, or the recent case in which a federal program that funds workers in temporary community service positions engaged in discriminatory hiring practices, rescinding offers after demanding disclosure of medical information. Moreover, they can be actively antagonistic to organizing-- it took Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains months to cease fighting to prevent their workers from organizing.

As the introductory essay to the INCITE! collection hints, many of the problems with nonprofits' impact and their relationships with clients are rooted in the origins of the nonprofit industrial complex, which stem from the tax evasion and wealth accumulation of Gilded Age aristocrats as well as Progressive Era tendencies toward approaching reform as an individualized, controlled, and hierarchized project. (Indeed, what American problem doesn't have links to one or both of these? But I digress.) In my research on disabled children in the early to mid twentieth century US, I often examine sources from the perspective of Progressive-minded social workers and philanthropists, who saw their roles as being improvers of the race, and thus passed judgment on their clients with abandon in both public and private records. Linda Gordon's Heroes of their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence and Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare are great secondary resources for getting a sense of this rhetoric (these links offer some interesting reviews of both).

I was oddly unaware, however, that tensions existed between workers and management within charitable organizations before the late twentieth century, perhaps due to my uninformed assumptions that these were largely made up of volunteers. My trip to Minnesota's Social Welfare History Archive was the first on which I really noticed the anti-labor sentiment of some of the private charity organizations. 

Several of these were affiliates of Christian churches or denominations, and relied on religious sentiment to critique workers' interest in higher pay and better benefits. The Lutheran Orphan's Friend, for example, reported on recent staff turnover by narrating a brief cautionary tale: "Word once reached us that one of our workers ventured the opinion that if we all got together, they could all get more. She got out. How can such a person serve Christ at a place like this!" The very idea of organizing with coworkers was not only troublesome to management; it also indicated that such a person did not understand the mission of the organization or even Christian charity itself. 

Other organizations dropped the religious emphasis, but kept the anti-organizing sentiment. The superintendent of Sheltering Arms, a convalescent hospital in Minneapolis, noted that their concern was financial. In an item slipped at the very end of her Report for September of 1947, Superintendent Josephine Poehler noted, "Sheltering Arms is included in the Twin City Hospital Council's meetings regarding the nurses' demands, which will result in UNION tactics on the part of nurses and higher salaries. We will do everything possible to keep costs down!" This drama continues throughout several months of reports, though I have not had the chance to look more deeply into the outcome of the nurses' bargaining.

There is, of course, an irony to all of this. Why would people who set out to provide aid to others have no interest in providing compensation to their own employees? I see this in part as a weird side effect of the professionalizing of expertise, particularly medical expertise, in these sorts of institutions. The charitable model is in some ways built on the idea of free labor, on volunteerism for no reward other than the satisfaction of doing the right thing. However, if your organization was going to keep up with the times, you needed to include professional experts, and many of these trained experts wouldn't labor for free. Some doctors volunteered their visits, but nurses were needed consistently, not on a "pop in when you have time" sort of basis; they were also not earning wages high enough at any position to allow them to do things on a voluntary basis at other hospitals. Despite this reality, I suspect that those in charge of these organizations resented the idea that anyone would not only demand payment, but fair compensation for work that they felt should be volunteered in the spirit of charity. (This was likely a particularly acute issue at Sheltering Arms, which had spent sixty years as an orphanage before moving into the medical arena in 1943 in response to increasing concern about poliomyelitis.) These qualms are not dissimilar from modern arguments about one's lack of commitment to a cause or organization if not willing to work free overtime, be on call at all hours, or accept wages below the poverty line.

Although these cases are both from the 1940s, these tensions precede the midcentury era. Upon seeing the sources discussed above, I reflected anew on a source I'd already seen, some organizational documents from the Blanche Van Leuven Browne Hospital-School in Detroit in the 1910s. Blanche Van Leuven Browne, a polio survivor who opened a home for "crippled children" based on her own experiences of disability, demanded quite a bit of investment from the nursing staff she hired. Perhaps the first list item of her employee policy is the best example: "Absolute, unquestioning loyalty and obedience." Of course, Browne's position is a bit more complicated-- it's likely that her demand for respect was in direct response to the difficulty she faced having her expertise taken seriously, as her qualifications were based in having been a disabled child rather than a medical professional. I plan on exploring these tensions in greater detail as my project develops.

These sorts of connections are interesting, of course, but I think they're also a useful thing to highlight in comprehending our own career choices in the modern world. The problems that many of my students will face in choosing their career trajectories, particularly if they want to choose careers in charitable, nonprofit, or other professions associated with "service" or "helping", will have echoes of these tensions. Often historical context reveals to us just how long problems have been happening. This can crush our hopes that things will just get better on their own, but it can also spark us to critique and to action on our own behalf. 

Any suggested readings on the history of labor and philanthropy/charity, the rise of the

nonprofit, and the relationship between these things and governmental social welfare programs? Any themes or incidents seem familiar to you as a volunteer, a worker, or a client? Let me know in comments!

Thanks to the amazing folks who helped with sources and encouragement for this post in response to-- you guessed it-- an Internet Ask. Special H/T to Greg Butchello and Caitlin Dryke for their source suggestions.

Archival Citations: 

Lutheran Orphan's Friend, Oct. 1941. Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota.

Superintendent's Report, Sheltering Arms, Sept. 1947 . Board Minutes 1943-47, Box 1. Sheltering Arms Records, 1882-1983, SW-95. Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota.

Blanche Van Leuven Browne, "Policy of Van Leuven Browne Regarding Employees 1917 Dec." Box 1, Folder 8. Blanche Van Leuven Browne Papers, 2017039 Aa 2.  Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Blog Note: This will be my last post of the year-- thanks for sticking by me through 2018. If you have favorite posts, items you'd like me to revisit, or themes of the year that you've noticed, I'd love to hear about them. Otherwise, I'll see you all in the new year!