BUT IT’S ONLY $4 A MONTH, FOR THE LOVE OF CHEESE! YOU CHEAP BASTARD! JUST GIVE IT!!!
I KNOW! THAT’S WHY I’M SO TORN! CAN’T YOU JUST GIVE THE UW A PASS AND WRITE A $48 CHECK ONCE A YEAR TO THE ORGANIZATION OF YOUR CHOICE?!?!?!? HELL, MAKE IT $50!!! FOR THAT MATTER, MAKE IT $60 - FIVE BUCKS A MONTH TO 12 GROUPS. YOUR MONEY WOULD BE BETTER SPENT!
But, no, it’s better for community organizations to deal with the evil that is the UW and settle for the $36 they get after expenses from those money launderers rather than the $60 they could get.
I was on the fence about this one, but now I’m sold. 
For the love of cheese?
Are you from Wisconsin?
His location is “1313 Mockingbird Lane”… the address of TV’s Munsters… Mu(e)nster is a cheese… I think you’re onto something!
Wrong.
Absolutely wrong.
First, what the hell gives him the right to “challenge” people who he is in a position of authority over about anything not directly related to their professional conduct or work?
Second, let’s take at face value your statement that your husband would in no way base performance evaluations on their conforming to your personal idea of charity and appropriate giving ("…but it’s only four dollars a month."*). The fact is, the impression that employees get when they’re publicly brow-beaten (“challenged”) by people in authority is that there is a connection. If your husband, espeically if he was in a position of authority over me, pulled his “look me in the eye and convince me that you really are giving as much as I think is appropriate” routine, he would be in HR facing a “hostile work environment” charge so fast his head would spin and if HR didn’t address it (and I’ll give you 50:1 odds that any decent HR deparment would), the courts certainly would. “Your honor, I was just trying to do my job, but my supervisor kept pressuring me to pay him. He said that there wasn’t any connection between my evaluation and my giving, but he kept pestering me and refused to let me alone to do my job. I told him I wasn’t interested in discussing it, and he kept harassing me.” Hell, the HR department where I would would at the very least, suspend me if I pulled that crap on one of my employees.
How is blurring the lines between personal conduct and work-related conduct any different here than in the sort of thing that usually leads to sex-harrassment lawsuits (other than a huge difference of degree)? My finances have…or, I suppose, after reading about the kind of harrassment your husband inflicts on his employees…should have as little to do with my workplace environment as my sex-life. (Now I have the mental picture of your husband going around to employees saying “Hey, you don’t have enough sex at home, so I’m gonna put you down for giving me a blow-job. What? You don’t want to? Can you look me in the eye and to evaluate their life in comparison to a less sexy person? Hell, lemme put you down for a hand-job. It’s the very least you can do.” 
)
Why in the world would I chose to give money at work unless I thought I’d benefit from it (or be punished for lack of it). The idea of giving money at work is alien and ugly to me and the idea of discussing my personal life at work. My reason for being at work is to work. And anyway, discussing my charitable giving other than in the vaguest of terms (“Such-and-such is a really good organization.”) is loathesome. One does not brag about one’s charity and charitible giving. **
Fenris
*What if they’re already taking that $4.00/month and combining it with another $46.00 and giving $50.00/month to the charity of their choice. (I can tell you that my pet charity is one that is never listed in these huge unbrella lists of charities.) . What if they’re giving $100.00/month? $300/month? Surely you’ll concede that at some point you can’t say “Well, another four dollars won’t make or break you.”. And, I assume, that you agree that they have no obligation to discuss any of this with you/your husband.
**Hell, I can’t wait for him to shake down a really devout Christian (cf Matthew Matthew 6:3-4 ) who are forbidden to give publically, and gets slapped with religious discrimination, religious harassment and hostile workplace charges.
NONE OF THAT MATTERS- I know you, chique, and I KNOW for a fact where all of your money goes. Why, you’re so cheap that you take money OUT of the bell ringers kettle! Since I’m privy to all of your financial information and know for a fact that you do NOT contribute to any charity whatsoever in any way, I’m going to continue to browbeat you until you give in.
How 'bout now? Now? Now? Now? Now? Now? Now? It’s just $4. It’s just $4. It’s just $4. everyone else is doing it. Look at all I do, you lazy bint. GIVE GIVE GIVE to my charity of choice!!!
(Is it working yet? I really want to color in the next part of my thermometer and brag to my boss how much I got out of you)
Plus, no one has also mentioned the number of shakedowns that occur on a daily basis in most workplaces. Parents who bring in crap that their kids are selling. The arm twisting to bring in a dish for the pot luck. Tossing in a few dollars for pizza so the dept. can “bond” at lunch. Flowers for the secretary that sits on her ass creating web pages about her cats and making personal phone calls. The fucking Secret Santa. Money that goes into sports pools.
All of these optional mandatory items cost money. Corporate arm twisting for charity is just another one of those things that piss people off at work. Of course, opting out means you’re not a “team player.”
Lissa: please respond to this part, rather than continuing to quote, “6,000 OTHER charities to which you can donate,” which is, I believe, what was addressed with this sentence.
I give at work because it is convenient. I work for IBM and they have a very sophisticated charity campaign. It is confidential, so your boss doesn’t know if you gave or not. It is automatic, through a payroll deduction, if you choose. You have a wide variety of charities, thousands across the country.
All they ask is that you “respond” by logging in to the system. You don’t have to give, there’s a prominent button on the webpage for no donation, and it’s confidential. I think that is a very fair request on their part. I’ve never felt pressured to do anything but log in, and my time at IBM is the only time in my life I’ve actually given to charity in any significant amount, so it worked.
Unfortunately, smaller companies can’t devote the resources IBM can to organizing a campaign like this, so you wind up with employees being pressured by organizers and feeling threatened because the giving (or not) is recorded for their manager to see.
Or how about this from the article Fenris linked:
The article goes on to discuss how each charity they serve is allocated a certain amount of money from the United Way, and only if their “donor choice” donations go above the budgeted money do they actually get any increase in money - and that’s only happened with one charity in that state in the last 4 years.
So “donor’s choice” means nothing. Nada. Not only do contributors end up paying for the United Way’s expenses with about 20% of their contribution, but their specific donations mean practically nothing - unless a miracle occurs, their money just goes into a big pile with all the rest, and no extra cash goes towards the favored charities. The charities get what United Way determines they’re going to, and those who donate (willingly or because they feel like their job might be affected if they don’t cave in to a superior’s questioning about how good their life is compared to others) are lied to about it.
Well, the fact that this has been his assignment every year for the past five years and no one has yet to make up such a bullshit charge on him should say something. My husband’s integrity in the workplace has never been challenged in that fashion.
HOW MANY GODDAM TIMES TO I HAVE TO SAY THIS: THEY DID NOT HAVE TO GIVE THROUGH THE FUCKING UNITED WAY!
bumping this for answer.
If I worked for your husband and I told him that I already donate to a cause would he lay off? For example, I donate to a Boston Terrier rescue group, a group that I can pretty much assure you isn’t one of the 6,000. Is this ‘good enough’ for you or am I supposed to pick a group specifically endorsed by you?
Just because nobody hasn’t complained doesn’t mean anything.
A lot of people may feel that complaining will black ball them.
What your husband does is plain wrong, IMO. Charity should not be forced, EVER.
See, this is what confuses me. If it’s not through the UW, then where is this list of 6,000 originating from?
I’m not going to re-hash my past criticisms and flames of the UW, since the Search engine will find them. Suffice to say I think that any quasi-forced charity which can informally and unofficially result in poor work performance reviews or even termination as a result of executives trying to win kickbacks or even “bragging rights” is a situation which should prompt passing a law to throw both the culprits AND the organizers in jail - or at least allow for serious civil penalties. Don’t think it will happen anytime soon.
At least at my company the UW work is assigned (yes, you don’t have a choice, actually) to people who would normally be heading out the door before long due to lack of work. So it gives them something to do whilst waiting for some real work to open up, which hopefully helps them out by keeping their job. So UW rallying is like a form of corporate welfare in a way…subsidized by my Projects. Wow, I get doubly screwed.
She mentioned that there were other umbrella organizations as well as individual charities to choose from. My company’s campaign works this way too, we have many individual charities as well as United Way based choices.
But what if they don’t want to give at all?
Lissa, I think the point is not that they have options other than the UW. It’s that they are being pressured at work to part with their hard-earned money for something other than what they choose to do. You could have any number of charities that I would be interested in donating too. The minute anyone tells me I must donate, well, then, mysteriously my pocketbook locks down.
You like to donate to charity. Others don’t. Yes, it may only be $4 a month and they can well afford it. But it’s their money. And no one likes to be coerced. There’s a reason people hate high-pressure salespeople.
I don’t know. Do you at least realize that most if not all of us would feel the exact same way whether it was the UW or not? I don’t care if the donations were to my own personal beer fund, workplace coersion to donate is immoral no matter how worthy the cause.
Haj
I think I am confused because I am not familiar with what an umbrella organization is or how charities as such work. Do all umbrella charities take a chunk of the procedes? How are the individual charities added in?
Thanks for educating me!
Umbrella fundraising organizing organizations like the United Way provide several really useful functions to large institutions that want to be perceived as “good corporate citizins”.
- They can help HR and finance departments put processes in place to make the collections virtually labor-free through payroll deductions.
- They relieve companies of the burden of deciding what charities are worth supporting. In a sense it’s a form of money laundering. They can throw their money into a pool for pre-approved “good” organzations, with a big enough list that most people can find something on it worth giving to.
- They are a cheap source of marketing gold for all the “citizenship” strategies. The top donor companies make it onto the papers or TV, the funded programs do special events where they publicly thank their donors. It’s the old “We give back to the community” scheme, and it’s a particularly good deal because they squeeze the money out of their employees.