I have been reviewing the salaries of the top administrators of LGBT advocacy organizations. (It's part of my job that would be tedious to explain.) The EDs of the big orgs, you know the ones, are bringing home the six-figure salaries. If they get less, sooner or later they're going to be looking for a new, better paying gay-for-pay job.
This is part of the overall professionalization of non-profit and service jobs. Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that doing good work should mean living on bread and water and wearing sackcloth. I don't expect people to be Simone Weil. But when the cost of doing the work means paying huge salaries in this movement. I wonder about the return on investment.
We're possibly on the cusp of repealing DADT and maybe the trans-inclusive ENDA will get voted on before Congress scurries home for the summer and campaining. These are huge things. But was the motive force for these things the national LGBT organizations? It's hard to say.
More likely, it's the combination of a couple of things.
First the greater visibility of LGBT people (we're not so scarily other) and the increased sophistication of many Americans. This has come about because of a slow change in our culture. This change has taken place in one of the most conservative parts of the nation, the armed services. If the military has no objection to overturning DADT (and as far as I can tell, there's precious little resistance, high and low, except for some Pleistocene relics), then it's a change whose time has come.
Second, there's a center-left president in the White House who will sign the bills if they get to his desk.
Neither of these things is the result of X organization lobbying on Capitol Hill or schmoozing with elected officials. It was LGBT individuals, not organizations, meeting non-LGBT individuals, people knowing their lesbian neighbors or gay co-workers or transgender family members or bisexual friends. And the gays did not elect Obama. Not single handed any how.
When I think about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X (whose birthday it is today) I think they had comfortable lives. From the pictures, they had what pretty much look like middle-class African American homes from the middle of the last century. There wasn't a lot of money in social change then. There was (and will always be) a lot of money in selling people a story they want to believe. That's what Daddy Grace did and that's why lots of people gave him lots and lots of money.
To be fair, Daddy Grace also built houses and created a pension fund for elderly parishioners and ministers. And to be fair, the national LGBT organizations have done something in the struggle to social justice, but not nearly enough for the cost.
2 comments:
Re: salaries, there's something structural at play across all of society. If individuals get paid x dollars to do certain work, their supervisors don't settle for even 2x, they are going for all the market will bear... up to x-squared for the CEO/senior administrator. Education (my bailiwick) suffers from this too. We get the occasional outraged article about this but then the focus is back on teacher pay like we should work for peanuts. (Yum!) No one can figure out whether administrator pay is worth what we're getting (if educated grads are the, uh, what we're paying them for).
I think people will work for pay that seems more "reasonable" to others only when it's a true calling. So an ED of a non-profit is good for a while at average pay, then (this being capitalism and all) they want more pay to deliver more whatever. So are they delivering is the question. Would, for example, DADT be heading for repeal now if there weren't LGBT orgs backing the very personable military rebels (e.g. Dan Choi) who have come out over the past couple of years? I suggest it takes such support.
Re: so-called center-left president, God bless 'im, DADT is a good example of why one should watch one's back. Gates and Mullen already told him (& Congress) it should be repealed but now they have to check and make sure? No one checked with the troops when it was implemented, they just did it. (I was there.) So they've gone all disingenuous and need to move slowly, assess the impact, blah blah? Right. Don't fix discrimination, do another study.
True enough what you say about the societal tide of compensation. I read something not that long ago that said in 1970 Detroit the multiplier (x worker's salary = top executive salary) was 8, now it's closer to 67.
The thing is the big LGBT orgs, like HRC, are not where Choi got his backing. He got more from the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which is focused on this issue.
I think there's a conservatism that sets into large orgs of whatever size unless the management is conscious about keeping things live. HRC only backs DADT repeal now because it seems like a winning horse. It wasn't even on their radar last year.
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