Hierarchy for hierarchy's sake
Leah Cowan
A defining feature of the UK charity sector is its ongoing dance with neoliberalism. The site for meaningful critique and action has shrunk as the sources of funding and political will for social change have dramatically reduced. This isn’t by any means a willful boogie, it is an incessant dance to the death.
We can start to understand this reality through a cursory potted history of Britain’s voluntary sector, which emerged over the past few centuries through a combination of social movements and philanthropy. In the 20th Century, however, the relationship between the state and charities evolved in a new direction. The government sought to regulate voluntary organisations, largely through the development of the Charity Commission, which in the present day obliges charities to uphold specific modes of governance, such as having a board of trustees and submitting annual reports to the commission detailing their charitable work.
In the 2010 election, the Conservative party ran with their flagship “Big Society” policy in tandem with wholesale public funding cuts; David Cameron expressed his desire for a "leaner, more efficient state" and encouraged charities and community groups to “step in” where the state was stepping out. The willful stripping back of the welfare state, and promotion of the idea that the tens of thousands of families pushed into poverty by austerity policies must pull themselves up by their bootstraps is the continuation of what cultural theorist Stuart Hall called “the long march of the Neoliberal Revolution”. Hall draws a connecting line between Thatcherism, through New Labour, to the 2010 Conservative-Lib Dem coalition, reminding us that these political approaches have all been characterised by protecting and prioritising profits over people.
This ideology is deeply oppressive. From the lives lost in the Grenfell Tower fire (caused by the use of cheap cladding to cut costs) to the devastation of the Windrush scandal (the systematic deportation of Caribbean elders in order to meet net migration targets), and survivors of domestic violence being left with nowhere to turn as funding for specialist refuges are cut to the bone, charities are leant on to sweep up the debris of state-sanctioned death and destruction. Charities perform this necessary work in order to improve people’s material conditions in the here and now. However, the obligation on UK voluntary sector organisations to be a sticking-plaster over the bullet-wound of a decade of austerity (and funding only being granted to organisations who don’t meaningfully challenge the status quo) means that the potency of longer-term pushback by those same organisations against harmful public policy becomes blunted through what writer Arundhati Roy calls the “NGO-isation of resistance”. In many charities, resistance is professionalised and shoe-horned into corporate structures in order to keep in favour with and secure funding from a government hell-bent on eroding the very same welfare safety nets that charities are struggling to stitch together.
In this context of emergency and urgency, charities increasingly adopt hierarchy for hierarchies sake, introducing layers of middle management as a buffer between junior/service-delivery staff working at the bottom, and bosses at the top making decisions about how the workplace functions most efficiently. Alongside systemic racism, transphobia, ableism, discrimination against sex workers and more, a lack of imagination by charity bosses to consider alternative ways of organising non-profit or social change work constitutes a tragic inability to apply an organisation’s ethics and political groundings to its own inner-workings. This also plays out as a low bar for worker’s rights in the sector: in comparison to the public or private sectors, employees in charities are more likely to be on part-time and temporary contracts, with wages well below the national average of £30,800 and yet only 15% belong to a trade union - a key mechanism for negotiating better pay, contracts and working conditions.
So where do we go from here? In Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, writer and activist Adrienne Maree Brown writes: “I believe that all organizing is science fiction - that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced”. The UK voluntary sector urgently needs to start modelling the future we long for - beginning with encouraging and supporting staff to unionise, in recognition that the power imbalance between workers and bosses is an obstacle to reducing the harms caused by successive governments, and building communities of care. Voluntary sector mission statements will only have a chance of coming to fruition if our belief that a different world is possible is rooted in building organisations that are part of the future we have not yet experienced. This requires naming hierarchy within our workplaces; enabling workers to organise collectively and pushing back against the creep of profit-guided agendas. Complicity with neoliberal governments will only continue to pull us far from the work we set out to do.
