Do You Have a Minute to Save Progressive Politics?

There's a word that gets tossed around in canvassing offices to describe people like Christian Miller: "scrappy." That's not because of his skinny frame and sparse, wiry chin-scrabble. Rather, in an industry where the average career lasts two weeks, Miller, 28, canvassed door-to-door throughout Los Angeles for four years.

In the last 30 years, canvassers like Miller have become the most common -- if unsung -- figures in political activism, going door-to-door or standing on busy street corners to talk to people about various public interest issues. It took Miller a minute to tick through the long list of campaigns for which he'd raised money: solar energy bills, forest protection, Sierra Club, Human Rights Campaign. All were operated by the same company: the Fund for Public Interest Research (commonly known as "the Fund"), a national nonprofit founded by the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) in 1982. Since then, canvassers for the now-ubiquitous state PIRGs have raised over $350 million and gathered more than 20 million signatures for causes ranging from environmental protection to gay rights. The Fund holds a near-monopoly on the canvass industry, running 30 to 60 offices each summer, with thousands of canvassers working on dozens of campaigns.

And yet, the canvassers are not members of any particular organization -- they are outsourced labor, often making less than minimum wage. It's not surprising that the average career is so short -- few of them stick it out.

"The money was enough to live on and keep me from going further into debt, and I enjoyed the work," Miller says of his remarkable four-year stint. "I was able to experience the benefits immediately -- just by going up to people's homes and putting these issues on their radar."

I met Miller in June, near his home. He was wearing a denim jacket sporting classic rock band buttons, looking every bit the unemployed dude living in L.A. -- which by that point, he was. Six weeks earlier, the Fund had shuttered his office. It seems he was too scrappy for his employers, particularly in his role as a union steward.

Fighting for progressive politics, and fighting unions?

The L.A. Fund had three offices: a street office, which coordinated canvassers on street corners or at events, a door-to-door office, which coordinated door-knocking canvasses, and a telephone outreach program office, (known as TOP) which handled phone banking. While the door-to-door and TOP offices were in the same building, the street office was across town.

When Miller was hired in the spring of 2002, the street office was closed; he didn't even know one had existed until a year later, when the Fund reopened it. Some months later, he discovered the reason for the lapse: In early 2002, the street canvassers had requested a petition to unionize from the state labor board. Within a week of the petition's filing, the street office was shut down by the Fund.

"That made some sense of the things I had seen in the last year and a half," says Miller, who had begun to notice erratic reimbursements, paycheck miscalculations, slippery vacation days and other office policies that the streeet canvassers' petition had cited. "But I still thought that [unionizing] was a drastic step," he says.

As the years passed, that attitude would change. "I got sick and tired of coming into work and finding that somebody who'd been busting their ass for months was suddenly gone," he says. Miller became a protective uncle to many of the younger canvassers, helping them navigate the Fund's complicated work and pay policies, and advising them on how to pace themselves.

By 2005, the L.A. door-to-door office had seven canvassers with more than six months of experience -- all of them close friends. "Four of us had been there over a year, we had 11 years between the seven of us, and the average age was 28 -- which is practically unheard of," Miller says.