21st Century Indulgences, Chugging and Corporate Ch Ch- ing.

by Paddy Rua - WSM (personal capacity) Thu Dec 08, 2005 15:07

I was going through the article posted by my good freind Pinhead and I can't let unnoticed a number of inaccuracies and abuses that are there mainly, I suppose, for literary self-indulgence. Mainly the most obvious one, is that it's just not possible to have an insight into the world of street fundraisers without having a look into the world on NGOs and charities -and the fact that there's a lot of diversity there. I wouldn't dare to compare the awful role of USAID with the one done by other organisations that are certainly making some little difference. And again, aid agencies have a very different approach than, let's say, Amnesty. But the most obvious inaccuracies in the article are:

"I’d been through the interview process for chugging once or twice before, for groups like Concern and Amnesty International, both of whom have in house fund raising operations paying over the odds of €14 per hour".

That's false. The rate is €13 flat hour rate for those and no comission included.

"I was to be transformed over night into a salesman familiar with the routine of “Stop! Pitch! Ask!” This was the corporate newspeak covering up the old routine of sales targets, a PLC-ing of charities, disguised among a chummy, “we're a gang, and a what do a gang have? Balls” mentality, clearly designed to sap away any individual intuition that this charity talk was a load of tosh and you were standing on the precipice of the world of cold selling".

It depends again on the agency and the NGO you are working for... many of them would genuinely have an approach of not turning their street fundraisers into sellers or pushers and that's what they try to make clear all the time in training. That's mainly truth for charities whose fundraisers are members of staff.

"Feeding people my hook line of “excuse me, but do you know where the little people live?" Before rapidly proceeding into my spiel."

For charities like Concern and Amnesty, the sole use of that line would cost you to be fired, as there is a Code of Practice agreed between the main charities using street fundraisers. It's a strict code that does not allow the use of moral pressure or obstructing people on the streets. Again, it is easy to tell who is adjusting to the code and who are blatantly ignoring it by the behaviour of street fiundraisers. I've signed up for a couple of them, and at no moment Ive felt obliged to. I did it because I wanted. If I feel I've been pressurised I straight away would have said "no". I have enough personality for that.

"This was selling a modern form of indulgences: this truly was a parallel world of “this week we have a special offer on children between the ages of five and ten suffering from polio, ten of whom you can cure for minimum of €19 a month. Take out a tax efficient subscription of €21 a month and that'll school eleven young girls left orphaned by parents with HIV, suit you sir? Well, step over here where you can purge your consciousness of guilt, and renounce your social responsibility all in one foul swipe of your signature and a series of numbers sent to your bank?”

Again, that depends on the way the fundraisers work (as discussed above) For the most respectable charities, such a line would mean you are fired. And personally, I think if you used that line, it is despicable and a show of quite a low moral status.

"I did one day on the job, it was emotional prostitution, with a face physically aching from so much fake smiling."

Many of the people I've encountered in this "industry" have a quite different approach of not prostituting themselves but letting people know what their charities are doing and letting people havbe their own choice -again, this depends on the charity. And the general good mood can be kept by many ways with no need of resorting to fake smiling.

And certainly a number of them are quite well motivated by the fact that they DO want to help in a way. There's nothing wrong with that, and I think that without being a solution to the problems of the world, certainly many NGOs are bringing necessary relief in times of need -though by their very nature they wouldn't address the roots of the problems in their capitalist nature. The fact that you obviously don't share this view is maybe the best proof of why you could only cope with it for a day.

I am personally tend to be inclined that you can work with serious problems like global inequality at different levels, and I think in many cases, it is easy to make small differences that become significant if you've not much at all: for example, the people in Niger that nowadays are suffering from famine wouldn't think that NGOs helping them with therapeutical food are a bunch of idiots. And certainly pinhead, you would love them if you were ever in that situation (fortunately, you won't, and you can talk about "charities" in a dismissive way from the comfort of a jaded European point of view). You would love something like Amnesty if you ever experienced living under a dictatorship -trust me, not a nice feeling. If you were a child labourer (instead of having gone to college), believe me that you would love organisations like HIVOS that have taken a massive number of kids our of work and bring them back to school.

Again, not every chairty is the same, there are different approaches and certianly, many of them have a quite disputable role, I wouldn't disagree on that one. And I wouldn't disagree if you say, but the roots of the problems of famine and child labour are left untouched. That's why I'm saying charities are not enough. But the fact that you have to deal with the roots of capitalism does not mean that you don't have to deal with its rotten fruits. And at this point I think there is a number of respectable initiatives like "Make Poverty History" that have made a wider public aware of things like external debt and other urgent problems that keep millions in absolute poverty (and trust me, those are not getting the dole and don't have the chance of turning in their beds next morning and think to themselves "I won't work")

I don't think there's nothing contradictory between struggling for revolution and at the same time for reforms; in the same vein, I think there's no contradiction between supporting a serious organisation dealing with some problems of local inequality, while at the same time you fight imperialism. (By the way, I think it is far more valuable someone helping a charity, no matter that person does not do anything else, than someone not doing anything at all about social injustice!)

And the folks are doing their job at the end of the day, with different motivations, some being more honest than others. And as long as they carry their job in a decent way, there's no problem and no need for walking away doing your mobile phone trick. Have a bit more of personality next time and politely say "no" if you don't want to stop.

by Pinhead Thu Dec 08, 2005 23:07

"I was going through the article posted by my good freind Pinhead and I can't let unnoticed a number of inaccuracies and abuses that are there mainly, I suppose, for literary self-indulgence. Mainly the most obvious one, is that it's just not possible to have an insight into the world of street fundraisers without having a look into the world on NGOs and charities -and the fact that there's a lot of diversity there. I wouldn't dare to compare the awful role of USAID with the one done by other organisations that are certainly making some little difference."

I think you've some how missed the entire point here, not only missed it but given it a wide berth the size of several football fields. Of course it's not possible to look into the world of on-street fundraising without looking into the world of charity. That's why I devoted two paragraphs to the origins of on street fundraising and the clash of traditions and purposes between charaties and the corporate fundraising agencies many of them are forced to resort to using given a chronic underfunding from the state, or the public. My focus how ever weighed down on the side of the agencies, and my subjective experience of how one operated for the day or two I could stick it.. When I had the idea in my head to write this article I wasn't intending on providing an analysis of the role of charities today, I was however intent on pointing out that chugging is an industry. That there are some agencies who have less scruples than perhaps your own employer, that these agencies are not linked to charities except for a business arrangement and that these agencies hold the illusion over their staffs heads that they are working for a charity to motivate them to work harder, carry on with the fake smiling or else they are letting the {insert a specific charity's cheif clients here} down.

Its glaringly obvious to me that you would not have adopted the same moralising tone in your reply if I wrote an article in the same first person, narrative style about the emotional prostitution of those who are engaged in forcing smiles on to ensure a tip from a bloke eating in a restaurant, nor would I have expected a similar tone if the article was focusing on how the state holds the special role of carers over their heads to ensure they continue to work long and unpaid hours to make up the failings of the health service. I don't see why charity should be held over anyones head, in order to convince them to push themselves harder, work longer and as I said, auto-reduce their own wages so the profits of a company can be kept up.

"For charities like Concern and Amnesty, the sole use of that line would cost you to be fired, as there is a Code of Practice agreed between the main charities using street fundraisers. It's a strict code that does not allow the use of moral pressure or obstructing people on the streets. Again, it is easy to tell who is adjusting to the code and who are blatantly ignoring it by the behaviour of street fiundraisers. I've signed up for a couple of them, and at no moment Ive felt obliged to. I did it because I wanted. If I feel I've been pressurised I straight away would have said "no". I have enough personality for that."

Again, you miss the point. Cross-breed profit with charities and naturally enough you will have a dropping of standards. Equally in the pressure cook enviorment of what is a essentially a wing of a marketing company who is riding high on the back of charities, you can expect the same sort of logic to apply. In fact I was specifically told, that what was wanted was the opposite of the "excuse me, do you have a minute for {insert charity here}?" approach. On the team I was on, that meant anything from dancing to singing, to offering to tell a joke. Hey, hallelujah, ya know if you hire a marketing company to do a job for you and the public storm pass their campaign and ignore it, thats the sort of degeration you can expect as a method of getting the "stop" before the "sell" can be given. I don't use these terms off the top of my head, they were the terms used in my induction.

You seem to think that it is charities that are at the but of my article, when as surely the title suggests it is their colonisation by corporate methods, if not by wholly distinct corporate entities. Entities such as http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=dlgg.ob for instance.

Now as I said, this article was meant to be a personal account of one particualr expereince working as a chugger. If I wanted to write an article about the role of charities, it'd be a whole different piece, with an entirely different focus. You can take issue with the "literary self-indulgence" all you want, but for this article I wasn't particularly in the mood for po-faced, sub standard attempts at Chomsky-lite.