Our campus PIRG chapter may be nominally “student-directed,” but the larger PIRG network to which it would funnel your fee is about as far from ground up student activism as an organization can get. Indeed, as Greg Bloom noted in a followup to his article on PIRG union-busting, “simply figuring out the structure of the PIRG family tree is a difficult task,” since the network is stuffed with duplicate groups and headless committees. PIRG’s bloated, Byzantine structure encourages waste, not grassroots change.
Check out the misleading way they handle 'refundable' student fees.
And here- another sample:
PIRG doesn’t pay its workers. Right now, the PIRG Fund is facing a class action lawsuit from former canvassers. From the official complaint:
Plaintiffs allege on behalf of themselves and all similarly-situated Defendant employees (”Nationwide FLSA Collective Plaintiffs”) that the Fund unlawfully classified Plaintiffs and Nationwide FLSA Collective Plaintiffs as exempt from overtime payments under Federal law and failed and refused to pay Plaintiffs and members of the Nationwide FLSA Collective Plaintiffs overtime pay for overtime worked, minimum wages for all work performed, and also that the Fund failed to keep time records as required by law.
Furthermore, the PIRG Fund, while ostensibly supporting “progressive” causes, nevertheless worked tirelessly to prevent the unionization of its workers.
First comment to the latter post:
The main problem with the PIRGs is the fact that they’re using student money to subsidize the paychecks of professional lobbyists. This is a completely inappropriate way to allocate mandatory fees.
You hear a lot from PIRG supporters about how the PIRGs “give students a voice in the government”. That may or may not be the case. It is, however, a completely irrelevant point that PIRG boosters use to obfuscate the fact that mandatory student fees are being funneled off-campus into the bank accounts of lobbyists.
So it's more than a wee bit disingenuous for PIRG reps to be dismissing the grass roots opposed to the CPSIA as written on the basis of libeling and slandering them as fronts for Big Business Interests. Pin It
