Non-Profit(?) Abuse
I got a phone call from a friend yesterday who was recently laid off, along with a couple of dozen others, from what used to be a large non-profit organization here in Hawaii. It seems they weren’t making money fast enough to keep up with the huge salaries and benefits they were paying their top executives. Which is really a shame because the mission of the organization was to help troubled youth. Isn’t it odd that non-profit really doesn’t mean what it sounds like?
I think people tend to think that charitable organizations are full of these "self-sacrificing" people who just want to do good deeds for their community, and certainly there are alot of those. I do have to add, however, that in my experience there are probably more people in these organizations who simply want to suck as much out of an organization as they can before it runs out of money. Is there really justification for paying a president over $100,000 per year, plus benefits, when the people who are actually doing the work make just slightly over minimum wage because it’s "non-profit?" I guess it’s only the lowly workers who need to be the self-sacrificing types.
Oh, and of course it’s the lowly workers them selves who are blamed for the lay-offs, not the executives and board members who voted themselves the pay raises and benefit increases.