Brother, can I get a living wage?

Sony NetMD Blastin':
Opeth: Deliverance
Iron Maiden: Live After Death
Testament: First Strike Still Deadly

Got into a conversation with Boogie, an old friend and ally, via AIM about the crappy wages and long thankless hours that movement organizations force their staff to endure. D had just gone through a workshop about taking what you need to make sure that you can do this work for the next 30 years, and I don't think that slave wages were part of the equation. But it seems that more groups than not don't take their workers welfare into account when doing their accounting. In a lot of ways, this is wholly hypocritical of organizations claiming to fight for social justice. Happiness starts at home. Or more appropriately, do unto your own as you'd have the world do unto its workers.

So why do so many of these organizations pay such low wages? Part of the equation is clearly that the work itself is not valued on the market, and thus organizations have a hard time rustling up the funds to pay a decent salary to their workers. But I sometimes think that a part of it is also a whole culture of struggle that's taken over the consciousness of the conscious. That you aren't completely legitimate if you aren't really suffering, like "the community." At times it feels like an over-idealization of the state of the have-nots, that status in the movement is inversely proportional to your comfort in your personal life. That "the struggle" has to be more than a metaphoric or representative condition, but instead must be a much more literal struggle in your own daily life. Hyper-reality, perhaps, especially as more and more privileged folks with professional credentials enter the field and displace some of the folks who actually hail from the communities that the movement hopes to organize and bring towards self-determination.

It's not that I fully agree with the notion that authenticity in the movement only comes from going through the physical struggle in your past. But I definitely don't agree that you have to struggle while doing the work to be considered authentic. And how are we supposed to sustain this movement and recruit and train new leaders if we burn through ourselves by pushing ourselves at the brink of tolerable working conditions? Is it a wonder that so many people burn-out and drop out of sight for stretches of time or even for good? We have to critically evaluate the way that we treat ourselves and those around us in this work. Or else we'll end up with a lot of bitter, disillusioned drones, and the wrong side will have won the larger battle.

You cannot win the larger struggle by having pissing contests with your allies about who's a more authentic advocate. Let's focus, people. And let's build a conscious movement that takes care of everyone who shares in its vision.

UPDATED:
I just remembered two other things that I wanted to include in this. First, I'm fortunate that I work somewhere that pays competitive wages in the nonprofit sector. I may bitch about leadership and mission drift and the detachment of the org from reality, but I definitely have to be thankful that I'm being paid for that privilege. Second, part of what fueled this strand of writing was a site visit that we conducted with a group that we work with last week. The executive director told us that the board voted to cut senior staff's salary by 1/3 so that the organization could move into a more accessible space for the community. That's honorable, but the salaries were low to begin with. He told us that he made $20K in 2004. That's just ridiculous. You can make more working in a bookstore.