The Systematic Starvation of Those Who Do Good
Late last year, New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli reported that nonprofits in New York employ nearly 1.3 million people, representing more than 18 percent of all private employment in the state. In New York City alone, human service organizations—those focused on the overall quality of life of local populations, and often addressing the most economically intractable and politically unappealing problems—employ more than 200,000 people. Yet despite the importance of these institutions to employees and the people they serve, many nonprofit workers do not earn a living wage.
Across the United States, nonprofits struggle to pay competitive wages, especially in the human services sector. New York nonprofits have the third-highest prevalence of low wages in the private sector, behind food service and retail. This is in spite of the fact that its human services workforce is highly skilled and highly educated—two-thirds of workers have some college education, and close to half hold bachelor’s degrees or higher. One factor in the widespread acceptance of these low wages may be that, across the state, 82 percent of these workers are women, and 50 percent are people of color. Both of these groups typically earn less than their counterparts who are white, male, or both. Both women and people of color also tend to come into our workforce with higher levels of student debt, making low pay all the more burdensome...