The Fund for the Public Interest, one of America’s largest grassroots political fundraising networks, fails to pay employees’ wages, shuts down offices without prior notice, and fires workers if they do not collect enough donations.

This is ironic because the Fund claims to be a defender of workers’ rights.

According to their website, the Fund for the Public Interest, commonly known as the Fund, is a non-profit organization that is hired by other political non-profits, such as the Sierra Club, Human Rights Campaign, and Greenpeace, to run their fundraising and membership canvassing. Since its founding in 1982, the Fund has gathered over 20 million petition signatures. Last year alone, the FUnd raised more than $20 million for its partner organizations.

The Fund is most well known for its door-to-door and street fundraising. The management style is simple — a director teaches officers, usually young people, on the issue they are working on and on how to interact with people. These officers then go door-to-door or stand on sidewalks and ask people for donations to support their cause. Donors can give either a one time donation or sign up to have a certain amount deducted monthly from their bank account.

But the Fund, which campaigns for workers’ rights, violates the rights of its own employees. Former employees have made several complaints against the Fund, alleging failure to pay wages and benefits, unfair working conditions, abrupt closings, and fraud.

“We have many problems with the Fund’s management structure and employment policies,” Christian Miller, a former employee who raised money for Sierra Club, Human Rights Campaign, and Greenpeace among others, said. “Fund employees frequently work for what amounts to less than minimum wage.”

Miller, along with several of his former co-workers, filed a class action lawsuit against the Fund in 2006 stating that they were not paid minimum wage or overtime. Employees are paid based on the amount of money they bring in, thus, if a canvasser is unable to bring in a substantial amount of money, their pay may be below minimum wage.

“They’re the Wal-Mart of nonprofits in every way imaginable,” Miller said in a 2009 interview with the Daily Beast. “They basically look at the next generation of social change as the next source of cheap labor.”

Employees also often work over 60 hours a week. According to the Fund’s own website, a typical workday for a Fund employee starts at 9:30 and doesn’t end until 10. And employees aren’t paid at a higher rate for working overtime.

“There is constant pressure to become involved in ‘voluntary’ overtime projects,” one Fund employee said.

The lawsuit ended with a $2.5 million settlement. For the past several weeks, the Fund has been mailing checks to thousands of former employees like Miller.

Employees have tried to improve their poor working conditions. In 2005, workers in the Los Angeles office tried to unionize and, according to Miller, voted to organize with the Teamsters. As soon as the Fund found out about the unionizing, they shut down the office. Directors were fired over voicemail, and the next day when employees went to work, they found they had all been fired.

“They changed the locks on the doors and they were gone,” Miller told the Daily Beast. “We were shut down overnight.”

The Fund has also been accused of facilitating voter fraud. In the summer of 2008, three people working for the Community Voters Project, which was affiliated with the Fund, were accused of filing fake voter applications in Virginia. The three found names from telephone directories and then, with made up Social Security numbers and birth dates, submitted the forms to election registrars.

A former employee has also written a book about the Fund. Dana Fisher, who worked for the Fund in 2001 and is now a sociologist at Columbia University, claims in her book Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America, that the Fund mistreats young, idealistic people.

Her book states that young canvassers are used as interchangeable parts, many only staying on for a few weeks before getting fired or quitting because of poor conditions. The training they do receive is often insufficient.

Fisher also believes that outsourcing grassroots organizing has led to the decay of the grassroots infrastructure.

Unfortunately, the Fund was unavailable for comment on any of these issues. They have promised to change some of their policies in light of the recent lawsuit, but it is not yet clear if those promises will be fulfilled.

Despite the Fund’s stated objective–to help change the world–many of its employees feel disillusioned.

David Lowe, a lawyer who represented the employees in the lawsuit against the Fund, criticized the Fund’s hypocrisy.

“It is shameful that an organization that claims to be working in the public interest is itself mistreating workers,” Lowe said in a press release.

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