PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

Thoughts on Working America and Jenn Jannon?
by Philip Shropshire Sunday, Apr. 27, 2008 at 10:56 AM
pshropshire@yahoo.com (email address validated)

I'm curious about this community's experiences with Working America.

I'm currently involved in some litigation with Working America. Since this is the hub of progressive Pittsburgh I was wondering what experiences people here have had with Working America and their manager Jennifer Jannon. Or any of its field managers such as Chris West or David Ninehouser. All experiences, quotas, job expectations and overall impressions of the organization good bad or indifferent would be appreciated.

Sincerely,

Philip Shropshire
http://www.threeriversonline.com

PS: I'm also curious about the other year round canvass as well: The Clean Water Action Project.

mirroruniverse.blogspot.com/2008/04/questions-about-working-america-at-indy.html

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I Worked at WA
by Anonymous Tuesday, Apr. 29, 2008 at 12:06 PM

I started working there in Summer 2006.

I thought that Working America, like most anything else, had both positive and negative aspects. What was positive was that they were establishing badly-needed community connections for the labor movement. The pay was good and the work was interesting. I made many friends through the
experience.

But I also think there were big problems with the way Working America operated. At best, some of the things
that were done made little sense in either business or
political terms; at worst, rights of both the
canvassed and the canvassers were seriously violated.

The most obvious problem is that rules were arbitrarily applied. We were supposed to keep things "positive and progressive"; but Jannon would swear in front of large crowds, sexual harassment was alleged against one of the Field Managers, and anti-gay slurs were used around me (by an FM who thought I would be "cool" with it).

This arbitrariness was particularly troubling when it came to things like, say, checking up on addresses of
members. Jannon would claim that there were "red flags" concerning the veracity of some canvassers' information based merely on whether or not she liked them. This is evidenced by the fact that the very canvassers who *really did* blatantly make shit up somehow managed to never raise any suspicions.

You are expected to lie to people. We were instructed to tell them that it was "just for verification purposes", which is not even remotely true. This is just one example of FMs violating rules and encouraging others to do the same; this also extended to, say, do-not-knocks, which would consistently be ignored.

We had a union, OPEIU Local 2; but it functioned more or less as a company union. We would complain about things mentioned above to our union rep, as well as things like not taking adequate precautions for the weather or having lunch breaks cut short. He would repeatedly say he'd do
something about it, then not get back to us. We considered affiliating instead with another union, but nothing ever came of it.

Interesting story that may or may not be true, though:

Very few people who were at Working America at the
same time I was are there now. *Supposedly*, there's
a concerted effort not to re-hire them, precisely
because we were going to affiliate with another union.

Note also that while Working America is a union shop, Clean
Water Action is not. But both are projects of Grassroots
Campaigns, Inc., making this setup what in labor law
is called a "double-breasted" operation, and probably
illegal.

It was rumored that Jenn Jannon had a reputation as a
slave driver with other managers, leading them to
nickname her "Hitler". She hurled such abuse at the
previous office manager (the one before Erin -- can't
remember her name) that she would get physically ill
from stress, and eventually quit.

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