Sorry to write such a long post, but I've had a lot of experience with the Fund, and this story sounds nothing like anything I ever saw. I canvassed for a couple summers in the mid-90s, and again recently, and on each of those occasions my experience was much like what you described back in the early 80s - the work was hard but exciting, the pay was mediocre but acceptable, and the other rewards more than made up for it (getting to work on issues I cared about, work with fun people, learn about politics, etc.).

The two-week average lifespan of a canvasser that you describe is probably accurate, but the average is deceptive. In reality, you have two groups of people. The first group has an experience like yours; they come in for a day or two or maybe even a week, but they don't canvass well and don't make quota and so they leave. The second group is made up of people who canvass well and embrace the work and end up canvassing for a couple months or the full summer (and a lot of people I met who fell in that category plan to come back and canvass for a second summer or even longer). I think that breakdown is natural - some people canvass well and enjoy the work, and some decide it's not for them. That seems appropriate and understandable to me.

To say that the Fund has a monopoly on canvassing also doesn't ring true. That statement ignores all the other progressive groups that do canvassing: ACORN, for example, runs canvasses all over the country, as does Clean Water Action. So do many unions; the state and local offices of various political parties; the campaign offices of most political candidates; and probably lots of other groups that I'm forgetting. Plus, that doesn't even mention the many groups and firms that do paid petitioning, where they hire people to canvass for signatures (rather than money). But in my personal experience, canvassers from many of those other programs would sometimes come over to canvass for the Fund because they found the Fund office a more fun and rewarding place to work.

The complaints people write about seem to fall into two categories - low pay and administrative mistreatment. In terms of low pay, I don't understand how people can seriously complain about the pay. The canvassing base pay when I worked there usually worked out to $7-8 an hour. And the good canvassers (I was always pretty mediocre myself) often made more like $10-12 an hour. That range seemed totally appropriate for what was typically a summer job for college students. The only way you make lower than minimum wage is if you don't make quota, in which case you're generally gone in a couple days. (In the telephone office, the phone canvassers made more. That job was inherently a part-time job, since you can only call effectively in the evenings. Callers with experience would make from $10-14 an hour, plus bonuses.) Personally, the pay always seemed fine to me. I considered it a privilege to be able to spend my summers getting paid to work on issue campaigns; most other political jobs I could have worked would have been unpaid internships.

I'm not sure what these disgruntled canvassers are asking for - it sounds like some would like an end to the quota system? Personally, that sounds like a disaster to me. You'd end up paying a lot of money to people who came in and didn't raise anything - I imagine that would eat up most of the donations that were supposed to be going to help run campaigns.

In terms of all the complaints about late checks, etc., I never saw problems like that when I worked in Fund offices. Not that things ran perfectly, but the occasional paperwork screw-ups were always at the local level and quickly resolved. These complaints sound like a case of poor management by someone at the local level. From what I saw, the Fund senior managers were rarely around and didn't involved themselves in the payroll or reimbursement process. The idea that they were micromanaging people's benefits in order to short the canvassers doesn't jive with anything I saw going on. And I got to know the canvass directors I worked for pretty well - they were not people who would ever do that sort of thing.

Ultimately, I guess what I'm saying is that my own experience with the Fund was quite good, and I don't think people should condemn the whole organization based on the complaints of a few people in Los Angeles (complaints which I don't think are reflective of the organization as a whole).