Is 2024 the New 1984? We Change the Path We Are On Thoughtfully and Incrementally
Subtheme: The Time Has Come for a National Conversation About Large Non-Profit Corporations and Employee Compensation
The 1984 movie, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is based on George Orwell’s novel of the same name written in 1948. Today it could be titled Twenty Twenty-Four as the trajectory of history is heading quickly toward creating a society, not unlike the one depicted in Orwell’s novel.
But it’s not necessarily so. The present is the period before the dystopian ideal is realized or not. That is when and why we need to be especially aware of the changes coming into being and how those changes interact with the current trajectory.
Such awareness is stirring in the Great Resignation, a rapidly evolving mass rejection of the corporate grid, in all its faces and formations.
The disruption of the corporate world order is instigated not by humans, only. Nature is also in an uprising with coronavirus and climate change.
I read Nineteen Eighty-Four in the 1960s. Then it seemed that Orwell’s book was about a hypothetical foreign world in a very distant future. In the sixties, the middle class was large and relevant but toward the end of the decade, the federal government silently passed an act that structured a nationally centralized economy empowered with authority to redistribute wealth.
Today as I watch scenes of public hangings in the 1984 movie, the memory of a gallows at the national capital of the United States is not far away. It is in the recent past. It happened in 2021. What were they thinking?
The popular series, The Walking Dead, takes place after the collapse of civilization. The zombies are not the problem. The characters kill zombies as if brushing flecks of dust off their shoulders. The most threatening danger the protagonists confront is diabolical humans.
Total collapse is on our collective minds, but there is an alternative. It is incremental change. Incrementalism got us this close to the dystopian nightmare. Analyzed and redirected, incrementalism can create a better future. Incremental change is in the details. Incrementalism is patiently impactful and often intentionally hides its true agenda.
If the dystopian world of science fiction is not to be the future, then the Great Resignation must transform into an awakening from ideas entrenched during the Industrial Revolution, a period when large corporate powers triumphed and restructured human society to its will. The Industrial Revolution is arguably the last great fork in the road when humanity had a choice such as we face today.
We have moved past the Industrial Revolution and are in the Age of Automation, with very different possible outcomes for human societies, particularly for the workers. Many decisions that were made at the onset of the Industrial Revolution no longer apply in the Age of Automation and need to be revisited.
The focus of Orwell’s novel is the State’s intent to eliminate sexual relations. In the novel, the power of the State has evolved to the point where the State has led society to accept that families must be eliminated.
The State must incrementally eliminate other small organizations before it targets the sacred ground of the family and sexual relationships between individuals.
Today an individual or a small organization might experience the feeling of being targeted by larger and more powerful organizations and wonder why. By making the sexual act the target, Orwell accentuated the goal at the core of the system, to eliminate loyalty to any other than the State.
We must have our eyes wide open at this fork in the road and pay attention to what goes on at every level of our society.
Local focus matters
I was sitting at our booth at the Winter Fair on the Boothbay Commons when a man stopped by who said he volunteers at the Botanical Gardens by driving the shuttle.
Driving a shuttle is an essential service to the Garden's income-producing activities. The entry fees charged by the Garden should provide enough to pay employees, at least that is the way it works in free enterprise and the Gardens is operating in the free enterprise system.
The Garden’s 2019 990 IRS form reports a surplus of $4,300,888.00. The Gardens is a very wealthy organization so why can’t it pay its shuttle drivers?
Small Town Politics
The community on the Boothbay Peninsula of Maine does not have official political parties. It is divided by ideology, class, the rooted versus new arrivals, those who maintain that economic development is about the concentration and redistribution of wealth, and those who see economic development as complexly organized among many points of power.
The centrally managed economy codifies itself an unpaid workforce
When the community leaders of the dominant political party talk about economic development on the Peninsula, the Gardens are always a central feature but what is not said is that most of the Garden’s employees are unpaid.
When the same leaders talk about subsidies and tax-exemptions for large for-profit corporations, the use of public money is justified as serving the public benefit by creating “quality jobs”, exclusively defined as jobs providing “above-average wages and benefits for the area”.
The Botanical Gardens does not offer quality jobs except to its top executives.
The rubric under which the dominant political party unites large non-profit and for-profit corporations and their interchangeable subsidiaries is called “economic development”, which the dominant political party equates with the concentration and redistribution of financial wealth, not job creation because it is only the concentration and redistributive channels for moving wealth around that unites two sides of the common rubric, the non-profit and for-profit sectors.
If one includes labor relations at the Botanical Gardens into the picture of economic development on the Peninsula, it reveals an ideology that drives and a mechanism that expands the wealth divide. The dominant political party on the Boothbay Peninsula believes that expanding the wealth divide on the Peninsula is economic development.
Is it?
In a hypothetical future, super-funded non-profits have taken over most of the economic landscape. To get a foot in the job market one must start as a volunteer. Volunteer workforces have a chance of getting paid when the non-profit organization has a revenue surplus. The workers form a non-profit volunteers workforce organization so they can receive the excess. The nonprofits, that haven’t already done so, create for-profit investment subsidiaries that absorb and divert all excess until the volunteer labor goes on strike and demands a piece of the pie.
Is this the future of work? It’s not so different from the way that algorithm-driven content platforms work.
There was a time when nonprofits enjoyed a reputation for serving the public good. While that reputation still holds true for smaller organizations, the line that separates large non-profit corporations from large for-profit corporations is hard to find these days, other than the financial advantages to the organization.
We need a national conversation about restructuring labor laws pertaining to large non-profit corporations that process large pieces of the pie of concentrated wealth. While the non-profits have merged into for-profits through subsidiary relationships, a different set of standards and rules apply to non-profits and for-profits. There is a conversation about raising the minimum wage for for-profit corporations, but no conversation about non-profit corporations with generous funding that could be used to pay their employees but don’t.
The non-profit purpose of the Gardens does not embrace economic development:
Briefly describe the organization’s mission or most significant activities: THE MISSION OF COASTAL MAINE BOTANICAL GARDENS IS TO INSPIRE MEANINGFUL CONNECTIONS AMONG PEOPLE, PLANTS, AND NATURE THROUGH HORTICULTURE, EDUCATION, AND RESEARCH.
The Garden’s 2019 990 IRS form
I want to be nice. Its Christmas. I want the Gardens to have a successful event but one has to take that purpose statement in its entirety to make any sense of it. The Gardens is situated on a beautiful natural peninsula in woods that were relatively untouched by man until the Gardens turned them into a formal garden and topped it off with a large parking lot in the local watershed and built urbane institutional buildings. The nonprofit purpose of the Gardens is not “To inspire meaningful connections among people, plants, and nature“, it is to do so through horticulture, education, and research. If a person on the Boothbay Peninsula wants to meaningfully connect with nature, or people, walk out the door. No research and education are required. The Garden’s purpose is purportedly about horticulture, not nature, but man’s control over nature.
A Horticultural Concern
I recently visited the Gardens for a family event and saw a lush display of tall grass and learned the name of the species, Chinese Silver Grass. When I got home, I looked it up and learned that it is very invasive, flammable, and considered a wildfire hazard.
Why did the Gardens plant a highly flammable plant in the middle of the Maine woods as climate change is raising greater and greater concerns? Is not public safety a meaningful concern for the horticulturist?
Grassroots entrepreneurs are one of the Boothbay Peninsulas minority political factions, even more of a minority since the centrally managed economy has grown, but all things that grow too dominant and corrupt eventually meet with resistance from the oppressed. We are entering a new age of pushback against the power elite, with an interesting twist. The Great Resignation is not violent resistance. It is a thoughtful uprising.
Let the movement remain nonviolent through the application of other means of reform. From the worker’s point of view, the local economic development conversation needs to include awareness that one of the most lauded drivers of our local economy does not pay the majority of its employees. We should extrapolate what the future of work would be if the majority of employment on the Peninsula, or anywhere, was through non-profit corporations.
According to Nonprofit Explorer The Garden has 134 paid employees and 301 volunteer employees. subtracting top executive’s salaries of $161,051.00 and $136,932.00, and executive other compensation of $9708.00 and $10,434.00 ($318125.00) from a total of $3,143,801.00 for salaries, other compensation, employee benefits, and dividing the result by 134 equals $21,087.00 per paid employee and 301 volunteers. I do not have data on how many hours of paid or unpaid labor those figures represent.
Factor in that Paul LePages Welfare reform
Reinstated work requirements for able-bodied, childless adults on Food Stamps, reducing welfare dependency by over 80%. They must now work 20 hours per week, volunteer or pursue job training to receive benefits.
Taxpayer subsidized jobs negotiated by the State with large corporations are identified by the State as “quality jobs”, with “quality” measured only by the rate of pay and benefits.
The state recognizes no other measure of the value for work than monetary reward and transfers its poverty of values to volunteer employment. Monetary motivation in the form of food rations is injected into the community of non-profit volunteers. Non-profits were originally granted special rules of employment because they were said to be motivated by serving the public good. LePage transformed the motivation for working for a non-profit from community service to forced labor. It’s a subtle but significant change.
An able-bodied, childless adult receiving food stamps is ordered to either work as a volunteer for twenty hours a week for nothing at a non-profit organization and labeled “working for welfare” because non-profit volunteer work does not pay a wage, therefore the employee is not categorized as earning a wage,
Or enroll in job training, which primarily means taxpayer-subsidized job training in the state's targeted sector, which is subsidized, in part, by the untargeted sector of employers.
Where the traditional volunteer worker was working to serve the public good, the new volunteer worker is working for welfare.“Working for welfare” is just a label but labels affect people psychologically.
This is yet another effect of the inappropriate merging of the state and the private sector and the for-profit and non-profit sectors into one uninterrupted interactive state of mutual reciprocity.
The corporate State uses the taxpayer to subsidize job training for its “targeted sector”. The Industrial Partnerships Act passed during the LePage years, repurposes high school education as publicly funded job training for ”state-approved” careers. Generally, small businesses in the free enterprise sector cannot train employees on the job without paying the employee, so the job training that LePage mandated for food stamps recipients is tax-payer subsidized job training in the corporate State’s targeted sector, giving the corporate State advantages over private businesses that are not included the State’s targeted sector.
Through Paul Lepage’s welfare policies nonprofit organizations can acquire volunteer labor who work for publicly-funded food stamps instead of pay. That’s the public-private for-profit, nonprofit wealth concentration industrial complex working together, hand in hand, to the benefit of itself, literally codifying slave labor. Slaves have to be fed. That’s property maintenance 101.
The work requirements are stated as an existing policy and yet there is no statutory reference. I will find it later. Non-profit organizations must have to file a statement of fact that an unpaid employee worked so many hours so that the unpaid employee can qualify for food stamps.
Factor in that Paul Lepage sponsored a bill authored by the IDEXX corporation that codified its own tax credits. The highly profitable IDEXX does not need the subsidies but IDEXX said it could move elsewhere and is too big for the State to refuse, now it will be even bigger, thanks to the free capital coming from Maine taxpayer’s pockets courtesy of Paul LePage and the Maine Legislature.
Can the Gardens afford to pay its volunteers?
The total revenue for the Gardens in 2020 is reported as $12,315,092.00. The net asset or funds balance is $26,894,570.00. Can the Gardens afford to pay its volunteers? How would it affect the economy of the Peninsula if it did so? Would it move the meter on the growing wealth divide a modicum towards a more diversified balance?
Why does the Garden’s IRS form 990 report a surplus? I am not a tax professional and so the surplus reported on the Garden’s IRS Tax return is a mystery that I attribute to my lack of a comprehensive understanding of non-profit tax reporting. My naive understanding is that if a nonprofit has a profit at the end of the year they must donate it to another organization that is consistent with the non-profit’s purpose. Why wouldn’t the organization distribute some of it among its volunteer employees, structured as a normal pay for services? Why is there so much concern about the minimum wage in the free enterprise sector while large profitable non-profits do not pay many of their employees when they can afford to? Why does a large corporation that does not offer quality jobs except to a few executives, hold such an important place in the economic development of the Boothbay Peninsula, in the world view of the dominant political party?
Most of the employees at the Gardens are volunteers who do not get paid by the Gardens.
As a non-profit corporation, the Gardens does not pay property taxes.
The Botanical Gardens is upheld as a great economic development resource for the Peninsula but that cannot be attributed to “quality job creation”, it is attributable to the traffic that the Gardens brings to the region.
The local dominant party equates economic development with wealth redistribution
Several years ago the JECD Group, (the joint economic development council of Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor), decided it would capitalize on the traffic that the Boothbay Botanical Gardens was bringing to the region during Gardens Aglow by appropriating Boothbay and Boothbay Harbor taxpayer dollars to pay for advertising for Boothbay Harbor merchants during Gardens Aglow.
Boothbay residents did not see a benefit but the JECD group was authorized by state law governing municipalities to appropriate Boothbay taxpayer dollars to benefit downtown Boothbay Harbor merchants.
When covid hit, the JECD quickly quit. There have been some murmurings since but it has not been able to re-establish its spending services.
Minority Party Report
The latest economic development initiative to take advantage of the traffic generated by the Gardens is the Winter Faire, self-financed and produced by Lester Spear on the Boothbay Commons.
The Winter Fairer benefits a different sector of the economy than the one supported by the JECD, the Boothbay Harbor merchants. In all fairness, it was not the intent to favor one economic sector over another. Lester Spear invited the Boothbay Harbor merchants to participate but none wanted to and so the Winter Faire is a benefit for the grassroots entrepreneurs. It started last year as a food truck event on property owned by Lester Spear, but local residents complained about parking on the side of the road and so it was relocated this year to the Town Commons.
There was a conversation between Lester Spear and a representative of the Gardens who asked Spear why he did not locate his event closer to Boothbay Harbor to help out the Harbor merchants. The Harbor merchants, rumor has it, rallied to have food trucks banned from the Boothbay Harbor and so canceled that option themselves. My question to the Gardens is why don’t you help out the grassroots economy of this Peninsula by paying your volunteer workers?
That said Boothbay is not Boothbay Harbor and we have a different sort of economic development culture that used to be more conducive to grassroots entrepreneurs as Andersen Design knows well having operated a destination shopping establishment in East Boothbay for many decades.
Andersen Design is receiving many wholesale requests at the Winter Faire but since we no longer have a production or training facility we cannot fill them, so we are focusing on finding three board members needed to establish a Museum of American Designer Craftsmen.
Boothbay Harbor merchants are a separate economic sector, currently aligned with the dominant political party that appropriated public funds to pay for advertising for the Boothbay Harbor merchants, taking over what was formerly a function of the Boothbay Harbor Chamber of Commerce and paid for with member fees.
I have been hearing rumors of mean comments posted on Facebook about Lester Spear and the Winter Fair. Word is that the negative response is coming from a few of the Boothbay Harbor merchants.
The comments criticized Spear for charging a two-dollar entry fee for the event, alleging that charging a fee for the use of public lands is illegal. If this were actually true, Boothbay would lose the Antiques Fair that takes place on the Commons that charges an eight dollars entry fee. Lester Spear has stopped charging the fee, rather than wage war with the negative feedback.
Lester Spear has personally financed the Winter Faire, which includes, among many other expenses, paying his employees. Lester Spear is a property owner in Boothbay and pays property taxes. That is how it works in the grassroots economy existing outside of the State’s public-private for-profit non-profit industrial complex.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the grassroots entrepreneurs would be found among the proletariat, mentioned in the movie by the protagonist as not being subjected to the disappeared words mandated State Newspeak.
