Several hundred people are still waiting to get their pay for last-minute campaigning. Police were called to the Obama campaign office on North Meridian Street downtown to control the crowd.Police escorted Mr. Moulitsas from the building before he could do any damage.
The line was long and the crowd was angry at times.
“I want my money today! It’s my money. I want it right now!” yelled one former campaign worker...
UPDATE: Not Your Sweetie makes a damned good point: The screaming horde of unpaid workers...
...is interesting considering the boast of all volunteer GOTV
as in this money raising letter from the campaignFor the first time in recent history, the Democratic candidate for President is not using paid phonebanks to get out the vote in battleground states.Oops! maybe not.
6 comments:
Your check is in the mail, along with all Obama's other campaign promises.
Well, better they find out sooner than later that they've been pitched under the bus.
Heh, heh! Funny thing is - they were bragging they don't use paid phone banks. And paid in ...prepaid credit cards? Whatever happened to unmarked bills?
http://edgeoforever.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/i-want-my-money-now-obama-phone-bank-workers/
Now isn't that something? Obama's campaign, called Campaign for Change, was actually ads in the local paper in Reno for people to come to work for them. I think the pay was $10 an hour.
The Moulitsas line--classic!
Prepaid credit cards, oy. We know why, right? Hoping some people will lose/forget/not use up those cards, which equals so much extra $$$ to ObamaCorp.
The pay thing is REALLY, REALLY a BIG DEAL. Have some background in the film production industry, I am pretty certain they ran their campaign like a low budget movie.
The way that works is, you pay the head honcho, and they crew up with volunteers. Then the head honcho feeds the volunteers, and all is fine.
Now, factor in over 200 million dollars in undocumented funds, and you can see why their ground crew was so good.
Plus, there is the social interaction aspect as well, which just makes whatever money is involved go that much farther.
Meanwhile, John McCain ran an old school style of campaigning, one in which they actually document who pays them.
http://www.DailyPUMA.com
Much of the commentary on this thread makes little sense.
There is no showing in any of the articles linked here that the BHO campaign is going to stiff out any of these people. We don't even know that they were paid the wrong amounts as they claim.
Nor do I see where these people who did 'last minute' CAMPAIGNING or CANVASSING did it by phone. Canvassing usually involves walking a precinct in person. If they didn't work by phone, then the carping about the BHO campaign claim of not using paid phone banks is entirely unfounded. Paying walk around campaigners and canvassers is NOT a contradiction to a claim of having no paid phone bankers doing the phone work. Nor, really, is a 'last minute' (day or so before Election Day) resort to such paid telephoners, if they were that, much of a contradiction to the fact that the campaign didn't use them for many, many months, until they did so only at the very end of the process.
My company has 14 locations and a bit more than 100 employees, and we are dedicated to making sure our employees are paid what they are owed and in a timely manner. However, almost every pay period, there is some claim that the check is wrong (usually, the claim itself is wrong, but not always).
Now, these problems exist although we've made a heavy investment in things like finger-print sensor time clocks, using an outside payroll vendor, and also the fact that our STAFF is responsible to put in their hours and commissions. THEY STILL GET IT WRONG (and occasionally, so do we.) So what?
As for paying in pre-paid VISA cards, this is far more practical than trying to generate checks for everybody in their correct legal name. The shift was the same, the shift pay was the same, so everybody could be paid with the same denomination VISA pre-pay arrangement. Simple, and even elegant as a solution. When you are not going to have paid people over the threshhold that requires withholding, there is no need for checks (and even those raising these complaints seem to think paying them cash would be fine).
XIslander
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