After College Ends, So Does Activism

Jaime Nelson could make anyone feel lazy. Over the past four years, Nelson, an undergraduate activist at the University of Michigan, has led writing workshops with Michigan's incarcerated, organized voter registration drives to battle the anti-affirmative action ballot initiative in 2006, and united local immigrant rights and labor organizations through the Restaurant Workplace Project, a coalition that sought to expose the dangerous working conditions faced by undocumented employees of Ann Arbor's dining establishments.

She did this on top of a work schedule -- divorced from her political work -- that would make Horatio Alger squirm. As a supervisor at the university library, Nelson checked out books five nights a week until 2 a.m. Two summers ago, she took a job as one of only two women on a road-paving crew in her native Kalamazoo. When she worked as a full-time unpaid intern for the public defender's office in Washington D.C., she logged an additional 30 hours a week as a hotel attendant.

Why would anyone put herself through this? Nelson had to balance her conscience with her checkbook. Paying for college was her responsibility. "My parents just didn't have money and I didn't want to ask them for it," she says, "so everything that I had, I had to pay for basically by myself."

In April, she graduated with almost $30,000 in student loans. So she's keeping her job at the library at night while searching during the day for work in progressive politics, which she knows won't pay enough to cover both her cost of living and her current debt. "School debt is the best kind of debt to have," she says, "but it's still debt." Nelson is quick to point out that others have it much worse than her, but her story illustrates a growing trend among the recent crop of college graduates. Despite a job market that will treat the class of 2007 favorably, employment in progressive politics is a dicey enterprise for many left-leaning activists and thinkers. The value of jobs varies across industries and organizations, but few are economically sustainable or intellectually stimulating, which is a problem for students and progressive veterans alike. Political McJobs

That few entry level political jobs exist is part of the problem, as documented by Columbia University sociology professor Dana R. Fisher in her book, Activism, Inc. Fisher spent two years studying one of the country's largest canvassing companies, part of an exploitative industry that has employed millions of young Americans. In the late '90s, progressive organizations -- concerned with raising money and membership totals but conscious of their costs -- began outsourcing their organizing campaigns to centralized intermediary organizations. This model is efficient but problematic. "Outsourcing makes sense if you're just thinking about your bottom line," Fisher says. "The problem is that it doesn't make sense if you're trying to build lasting connections with future progressive leaders or with local people."

Under this canvassing system, young organizers become contingent labor, susceptible to low pay, long hours, no benefits and no training in the real skills necessary to succeed in building local power. In some ways, the model cultivates a culture of deprivation; young people are taught to think that sacrifice is a prerequisite for progressive change and thus they tolerate exploitation for the sake of the movement. And because most organizations outsource these jobs, participating in this crooked system is one of the few avenues for paid work. "One could question," says Fisher, "whether Saul Alinsky, Ralph Nader or Cesar Chavez would have become successful at leading different aspects of the progressive movement if they came up through the model we have today."