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In 2009, San Francisco law firm Rudy, Exelrod, Zieff & Lowe won a $2 million settlement on behalf of Fund employees who claimed they were not paid overtime. In December 2004, a year after GCI's formation and shortly after it began campaigning for the Democratic National Committee, a group of canvassers from Oregon claimed they had not been paid the state's minimum wage. They later received an undisclosed settlement. In 2008, San Bruno lawyer Rob Nelson won a class action suit in San Francisco on behalf of former GCI employees who claimed they too were not paid minimum wage or overtime. Though GCI argued that the plaintiffs were a special class of exempt employees, as it did in the Oregon case, the California employees received a $600,000 settlement. Another settlement from a 2009 case against GCI awaits finalization in San Francisco Superior Court.
Perhaps an episode in Chicago best highlights canvassers' uphill battle for answers and support from the charities and GCI. In 2008, Tim Pool came from the Fund to GCI to make more money by fundraising for the ACLU. Pool quickly became a star fundraiser. His star began to dim when he questioned whether he and his coworkers were being compensated correctly. His plight evoked the sympathy of a director at the office, who spoke to us but requested not to be named. We'll call her Justine.
Justine said that when she took Pool's frustrations to GCI headquarters, the national team was more concerned with why he was questioning the status quo. Unable to resolve the problem in-house, Justine accompanied Pool and two other employees to the ACLU of Illinois, hoping for guidance. According to Justine, what they got instead was free ACLU paraphernalia and a call informing them that the organization would have to recuse itself because of a conflict of interest.
After starting an effort to unionize, with the help of the National Labor Relations Board, Pool and two coworkers were fired.
Justine asserted the person who fired the three employees didn't know it was illegal. "The people I experienced who were directors at Grassroots Campaigns knew nothing about being a staff manager, nothing about HR or any of those things," she said. "It's a company that is wide open to these kind of lawsuits." The NLRB ultimately took Pool's case and won him back pay. Justine quit as soon as Barack Obama was elected president.
Engel, the ACLU's deputy director, said that if GCI was not in compliance with the law before, she has been assured it is a non-issue now. "They're always able to put our minds at rest that there's not a problem.... People get upset. It doesn't mean they were mistreated; it means they didn't have a good experience."
But the charities and the California Attorney General's office also say there simply isn't enough manpower to keep tabs on all fundraisers. Case in point: In what Jones called an "administrative oversight," GCI did not file the majority of its annual reports for 2006-2009 in California. Nor was the company notified of this by the Attorney General's office, until SF Weekly requested the documents.
Through conversations with present and past GCI employees, it appears that many do not challenge what happens inside the office and outside on the streets during the short amount of time they work for GCI. In fact, Justine said GCI's retention rate is so poor — generally, two to three weeks — that not a day went by when she wasn't conducting interviews, at times averaging five or more a day. Those who do not quit can be fired if they fail to raise enough money.
A handful of canvassers said they still took the job despite finding unflattering accounts of GCI by disgruntled former staffers online. Too trusting, idealistic, or just hard up for work, the new employees entered the office prepared to endure the hardships for the good of the cause.
"They find people who are true believers, and they cultivate this idea that you're either with us or against us," said Nelson, the lawyer who successfully sued GCI in San Francisco.
Take Efe Ogbeide from Alameda, who worked in GCI's San Francisco office for approximately four months in 2009. Then 18, Ogbeide said going door-to-door and pressing people for contributions during the recession weighed heavily upon her. Nothing about the job was glamorous, but she stuck it out because, as she put it, Save the Children was getting 90 percent of the donations — one of the few exceptions to the "100 percent" response.
"I was telling people 90 percent so that they weren't thinking the money was going to a corporation," she said.
Robin Van Etten, the associate director of sponsorship marketing at Save the Children, confirmed 90 percent is the organization's go-to response. "All of the money that comes into this organization, 90 percent of it goes to programming expenses," she said.
This does not address where the donor's individual contribution goes — the fundraising pot.
According to the Attorney General's documentation, 0 percent goes to programming.
"It's funny," Ogbeide said. "I recently ran into a Grassroots kid who was promoting Amnesty International. I was laughing about the job, and I ended up giving him money. I still do feel that the work is for a good cause."
For Justine, the facts — and the math — don't add up. To this day, she does not understand GCI's finances. When she learned that GCI got back most of the money her office raised, she paused. "I'm not happy about that," she said.
Caroline Chen and Dean Schaffer contributed reporting to this story.
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