Canvassing in San Francisco: A Test of Democratic Accountability
Third in the series, “Stealing and Hoarding Power from the Most Vulnerable: Authoritarian Practices in U.S. Workplace & Business Cultures”
“This is a job, not a democracy.” ~Operations Manager for the canvassing arm of Daniel Lurie’s San Francisco mayoral campaign (see Note 1)
In January 2017, I wrote an urgent Instagram post from my research site in deep red, rural Southern Oregon. I posted directly after listening to the dystopian inaugural speech by the 45th POTUS. There were no images in the post, just words. In the rush of language, I warned my followers back home in the San Francisco Bay area that the “good guys” better have guns because the people who lived around me had them, and they were now empowered to use them to “own the libs,” fight a race war, and install a dictator.
Most of us can see now what I (and others) recognized in 2017: authoritarianism — and its inherent violence — is alive and well in the U.S. Stunningly, however, some Americans are still skeptical, believing the talk about authoritarianism is heated hyperbole:
“Stories about terror, violence, and oppression are compelling, and our [US] history books are understandably filled with such tales. But an unintended side-effect is that we imagine those horrors to characterize everyday life under those [authoritarian] systems. From this misunderstanding, we then conclude that whenever such terror is absent, we can rest easy, confident that whatever problems we face are of a totally different nature.” ~ Dr. Brian Porter-Szűcs
The common misunderstanding that authoritarianism is limited to regime-level spectacles of physical violence, terror, and mass oppression functions to distract us from the very real everyday relational expressions of authoritarianism that make up many U.S. workplace, family, academic, and community cultures.
Since the world shifted on its axis after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I have documented the bottom of the hierarchy in a variety of U.S. workplace cultures that function as authoritarian. (See Note 2) By this, I mean that the human relational practices that make up the culture — the everyday communicative interactions that form the social basis of workplaces — function as authoritarian, making the workplace culture also authoritarian.
I found — given that we spend on average 81,396 hours of our lives in the workplace — that democratic workplace cultures are an integral part of the social enabling conditions that support broader democratic norms, processes, and systems. In sharp contrast, authoritarian workplace cultures undermine democratic norms, processes, and systems by creating social conditions that grow humans well-suited to support authoritarian leaders and fit into authoritarian regimes.
The findings also show that these cultural conditions do not grow on their own: the humans at the top of the hierarchy are directly responsible for, and accountable to, the humans at the bottom of the hierarchy. Workers at the bottom in non-democratic workplace cultures are buried in authoritarian relational practices that are embodied, emboldened, and modeled from the top.
What follows are descriptions of the authoritarian San Francisco workplace culture I experienced and documented, from my perspective as a canvasser. Publicly describing my experience of this workplace culture is not intended to be a political exposé or a hit piece on a candidate, however.
Instead, what I offer in this article is a test of democratic accountability. It doesn’t matter whether you’re running to be San Francisco’s next mayor, or you’re the Founder/CEO of a billion dollar tech start-up, or you’re the head of a wealthy family whose commodity is human blood. In this democracy, you are as accountable to those at the bottom of your business or workplace hierarchy as you are to your C-Suite, stockholders, other investors, and political supporters.
How Mr. Lurie and his team respond will reveal how deep a commitment to accountability they maintain in actuality.
In what follows, I offer a brief note on terms, then descriptions of several exemplars from the SF workplace culture I experienced. Although I documented hundreds of relational practices that function as authoritarian, sharing all of them goes beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I offer an exemplar in each section, and each is divided into one of the four authoritarian relational practices (ARP) categories: inaccurate information, closed communication, violence, and non-transparency.
A Note on Terms
Authoritarianism, as political science scholar Marlies Glasius points out, is not just a regime-level phenomenon. Instead, both authoritarianism and democracy are expressed in a multitude of modes, from structural expressions like elections and governments to relational expressions embodied in individual communicative practices. (For a list of some relational practices that function as authoritarian, see Note 3.)
Power is the ability to generate and maintain our forward momentum. All beings on the planet are born with power: we own our given power. Money, status, bandwidth, and other resources function to fuel power, but they are not power per se.
Relational practices are communicative interactions between humans. Relational practices that block our forward momentum functionally steal our power. Stealing (and sometimes hoarding) power in relational practices functions as authoritarian. Just like regime-level authoritarian practices steal rights and resources from The People — functionally slowing, staggering, or stopping dead their forward momentum — so, too, do authoritarian relational practices between humans that constitute workplace cultures.
Cultures, at bottom, are constituted by practices. Patterns of practices that dominate in workplace, family, academic, and community cultures are norms.
Exemplars
I accept the offer to canvass as a W2 employee for Daniel Lurie’s San Francisco mayoral campaign in July 2024. I am ecstatic. This is much more than just a part-time job for me. I get to work for a man who founded a major poverty alleviation organization and who seemingly shares his inherited wealth for everyone’s benefit. I assume this man is a fundamentally democratic (with a little ‘d’) human: I assume his communication is open, he is transparent as needed, he offers only accurate information, and his practices are nonviolent.
I breathe a sigh of relief at the first canvassing meeting: after all the authoritarian cultures I’ve experienced and endured since 2016, the words of the Operations Manager assure me that I’m finally home in a fundamentally democratic (with a little ‘d’) San Francisco workplace culture. I can’t stop nodding my head as the manager speaks.
My hopes are shattered by the end of the first week. Even though the first meeting with the Operations Manager — and the Co-Field Organizers — included all the right democratic words (open communication, transparency, accurate information), the words are not reflected in their practices going forward.
Rather, a series of disturbing, decidedly non-democratic events transpire that prompt my documentation. The contrast is stark between the democratic relational practices embodied in the first meeting of canvassers and the authoritarian practices that constitute the last meeting I attend on September 7th. Both meetings are facilitated by the Operations Manager, who directly reports to the two Senior Account Executives in charge of the DL campaign, who in turn report to Daniel Lurie, his campaign manager, and the Managing Partners of the “Canvassing Organization.”
Inaccurate Information Offered Intentionally
Democratic relational conditions require accurate information so that everyone can make sound decisions, can trust the workplace information, and can stand on solid informational ground when making judgments. In contrast, authoritarian relational conditions rely on the spread of inaccurate information to confuse, to undermine trust, and to create the conditions under which gaslighting can be successful.
I canvassed the first 4 or 5 times with a partner who happened to be tall, female, and Black. She commuted from the East Bay like I did, and we hit it off right away. Our first neighborhoods were on steep hills with hundreds of stairs, and we worked hard making sure we talked to as many voters as we could. Even with a physical condition that justifiably required an accommodation, my partner powered through professionally without asking for assistance for her condition. (She was afraid of discrimination.)
As was the norm in this culture, my former partner just disappeared one day. After not seeing her once or twice, I asked two fellow canvassers on our way to turf if they knew what happened to her. They related to me that she had been fired. I was stunned. I asked if they knew why, and they both said at the same time, “She cheated.”
I asked if whoever claimed that she cheated showed proof, and the two canvassers recalled that the Field Organizer announced to all the canvassers during a meeting that my former partner had claimed on the app she knocked on 200 doors. That information was offered by the Field Organizer to the group as the reason she was fired. I replied that I’d never seen her do — or talk about — anything close to cheating when we were canvassing. I told the two canvassers that I had a hard time believing what everyone had been told. They disagreed with me.
I was equally concerned that a manager had used my former partner’s name to make the claim publicly to other canvassers. I related my concern to the other canvassers and in-person to the Operations Manager. The manager claimed to know nothing about what happened to my former partner or why she was “let go.”
I reached out to my former partner to find out from her what had happened. Her story was quite different from those offered by the Operations Manager or the other canvassers. She recounted that she had been enthusiastically invited personally into the office to work on a day she wasn’t scheduled. The Operations Manager communicated this to her, she said, and when she arrived, the manager brought her back to an office, closed the door, laid her off, and gave her the final check he’d arranged in advance.
My former partner further explained that she and another partner had worked the 200 doors and that the voter responses to her as a tall Black woman knocking on doors in Pacific Heights was much different than responses the petite white woman — who was her partner — received. (When she was canvassing with me in another wealthy SF neighborhood, several police cars slowed and looked as they drove by us. My partner noticed them first. I walked up to one of the police cars and started giving my DL pitch to the officer driving to shake them off so we could work in peace.)
My trust in management evaporated after this incident.
For my former partner, the impacts were also serious. Paraphrasing her words: “I feel like I was never heard because there is no feedback channel for canvassers to share their experiences. I feel like canvasser voices don’t matter to the campaign except for the data we collect and the anecdotes collected by the Field Organizer during debriefs. It is obvious in how they interact with us that there is little respect for canvassers. Many canvassers didn’t feel comfortable speaking up and kept problems to themselves to fester. I didn’t feel safe to share my experiences; I felt judged. I was never offered the opportunity to defend myself, there was no investigation related to my performance, and no manager ever canvassed with me like they did with others. I felt that hard work was not acknowledged, especially burned out bodies. Nothing about the advocacy felt authentic; it felt forced and rehearsed with no real energy or purpose.”
The inaccurate information offered intentionally by management served to stop dead my former partner’s forward momentum. She was forced to process what happened to her, reorient toward new employment, and find the power to keep moving in a different direction. More than this, the negative inaccurate information about her that was shared by management with other canvassers continues to cause her psychological and physical harm.
Closed Communication
Democratic relational conditions require open communication along with accessible, functional, and responsive channels of communicative interaction and feedback. In contrast, authoritarian relational conditions require closed communication, with channels that are inaccessible, nonfunctional, and non-responsive, providing little or no feedback from workers to management.
Like about a third of the canvassers, I was hired for the Lurie campaign even though I don’t currently live in San Francisco. Our group of non-SFers live in the East Bay and must commute into the SF office, out to the Richmond district. It didn’t matter to me that it took a bus, BART, and the N train to get me there, though. The 3-hour round trip and $23 a day to commute to San Francisco — home for me — was not going to act as a barrier to doing what I thought of as deeply democratic work. (I also needed the part-time income, like most of us.)
We all asked, during that first week, if there was any reimbursement for using public transportation, whether commuting into the city or while getting to our turf to canvass once there. Initially, we were told that the Co-Field Organizers would ask the Operations Manager. When I followed up during the Q&A session of the weekend phone-bank training, my question was shut down with a hard verbally slammed door. Every canvasser on that call felt the hard “NO” directed at me and intended for those of us using public transportation. We talked about negative effect afterward, how we felt marginalized and disrespected.
There was no discussion, there existed no policy, and no public transportation accommodations were offered, even for getting to our turf during working hours. The “NO” was unyielding — and without recourse — so we paid out of our own pockets to get to work and, for the first few weeks, to make it to our canvassing turf.
During the following month, I consistently got feedback from other canvassers about the working conditions: exclusion, surveillance, and what felt like discrimination were the top complaints. Like every other authoritarian workplace culture I’ve documented, I attempted to communicate with management about what I was experiencing, the toxic conditions shared with me by other canvassers, and the negative impact it was having, not just on us, but on the campaign. (Voters remember stressed canvassers who show up at their doors. Also, the consistent turnover — of both canvassers and field organizers — negatively impacted those of us who were left, especially in a communication vacuum created by management.)
I tried scheduling appointments, I sent emails, I sent texts, and I asked for conversations in person. The Operations Manager avoided my meetings, ignored my emails, disregarded my texts, and shut down my in-person requests. I was constantly forced to follow up to initiate communication, and I was consistently overlooked and dismissed. The few times I tried to have a conversation in a hallway or outside an office, the Operations Manager just stared at me, offering no response except to tell me my questions would be answered in the meeting with everyone else. Those questions never got answered, after two months of asking.
To survive closed communication conditions that leave them feeling marginalized and invisible, some canvassers withdrew. Some stopped asking questions and censored themselves from requesting anything. Most went along, never dissenting — always agreeing to get out the door and to work. Some disconnected from the rest of us, not sharing their experience with others and isolating themselves.
My response — along with sharing some of the impacts listed above — was to keep asking. As a result of my pursuit of open communication, the Operations Manager’s relational practices with me began to feel retaliatory and made me extremely uncomfortable.
Violence (Psychological, Discursive, & Economic)
Democratic relational conditions require psychological, discursive, economic, and/or physical nonviolence to create a workplace culture that is safe, nurtures trust, and creates a sense of well-being for everyone. In contrast, authoritarian relational conditions require psychological, discursive, economic, and/or physical violence to act as intimidation, threat, and warning against unwanted questions, requests for transparency and openness, inquiries about recourse, and dissent.
Marginalization, surveillance, and job loss threats became the norm for some canvassers in the workplace culture I experienced. Practices like this — directed at BIPOC employees — functions as discrimination and inflicts a host of well-documented harms on victims, from stress related illnesses, to mental health issues like anxiety and depression, to physical ailments like hypertension, cardiac disease, and chronic illness. Each relational practice — each act of exclusion, each act of surveillance, each act based on race, each act of intimidation, each act of disinformation — inflicts violence on employees subject to those practices. That violence can slow, stagger, or stop dead their forward momentum.
With a pay raise, we were all threatened with tests on the campaign’s messaging material if we wanted to keep our jobs. During debrief meetings conducted by the Operations Manager, I was consistently excluded, even with a hand up. The manager refused to make eye contact with me during the meetings. Other canvassers reported back to me that they felt excluded from or cut off short during debrief sessions, leaving them feeling marginalized. The Operations Manager was quite paranoid about a “mole” in our midst, and ended one meeting with the sincere and aggressive wish that “a huge ugly hairy mole grows on the ass of anyone here who’s spying.” This was a double-down on the aggression and threats he offered some canvassers.
Two separate canvassers reported to me that they were surveilled while canvassing, as other canvassers were “shadowed.” The difference between the two is relational: shadowing means the Field Organizer is walking with you, observing, and offering constructive feedback for improvement. Surveilling, on the other hand, involves covert or intentionally overt watching from a distance, generally because a canvasser is suspect. Both canvassers correctly identified the manager’s vehicle used to surveil them. Both canvassers were non-white and were just trying to do their jobs. Surveillance does significant damage to humans, especially those already marginalized.
The final disturbing incident involved the Operations Manager’s unwarranted surveillance of me, during what I decided was my last day with the campaign. After returning from the second highly successful 4-hour shift on Saturday, I sat in a seat for the debrief session. The Operations Manager’s “assistant” sat directly behind and above me on a table, looking right down at the back of my head. I turned, laughed, and said he felt a little too close. He said nothing and the meeting was about to start. I stood up, moved my things, and found another seat on the other side of the room. The “assistant” got up, followed me and sat right behind me again. I joked, telling him I felt a little surveilled. It was surreal. He didn’t respond to me or move. Then the meeting started.
At the end of the meeting, I got up (having forgotten the “assistant”) and put my literature and bag away on the big table in front of the doors before heading to catch my train. The “assistant” followed me to the table and stood directly across from me, staring with a small smile. I smiled back and said his surveillance was sloppy and obvious. And very weird. He said nothing. I walked out the door. I arranged for my final check to be direct deposited and did not return to the DL office.
Non-Transparency/Opaqueness
Democratic relational conditions require transparency in processes and systems so that everyone can see in front of them to best co-navigate the cultural conditions. In contrast, authoritarian relational conditions require opaqueness in processes and systems so that only those at the top have access to how processes and systems function and so they are best positioned to see in front of them while constituting and navigate the culture.
At the end of my first month, I requested — from a Field Organizer — access to my performance data. The team had already lost two Field Organizers — the first disappeared with no explanation after a month and the second lasted three days after replacing the first, who either abruptly quit or was abruptly fired. No information was shared with any of the canvassers about what happened. The Field Organizer said he couldn’t share the numbers with me.
Subsequently, the Operations Manager took control from the lone remaining Field Organizer, so I followed up with this manager about access to my data. Except for compliments in debrief meetings, I had no performance data to stand on after a month of work. I had no quantitative way to know where to focus to improve, if necessary. There was no common “objective” standard on which I could stand equally with management with evidence in hand. Only management had access to data that could help facilitate my forward momentum.
I was told that access to my performance data also entailed access to voter information. That didn’t make sense to me, so I asked in a different way: Was it possible to run a report with my ID (my email address used to login into the system) that just showed my numbers? NO. I asked if it was possible for me to access data about how many doors I’d attempted, how many voters I’d contacted, and how many were committed to voting for DL. “NO.” I told them I’d never had a role where I couldn’t see my own performance metrics. I suggested that if they had data on my former partner’s performance, they ought to be able to access mine, as well. The Operations Manager just kept saying “NO,” leaving me no choice but to give up.
Additionally, the hiring process for advancement — primarily for leads — was opaque and secretive. Some canvassers were offered the roles without applying, while others who applied were ignored. Some canvassers were approached to apply, while others knew about the open roles only when the new lead was announced to the group. Even though I was not personally interested in working with management beyond my role as a canvasser, the opacity and secrecy of the advancement process further eroded trust and left many of us wondering what kind of conversations were being had by management about each of us, without our knowing or being present to advocate on our own behalf.
Conclusion
My findings show that authoritarian relational cultures — whose norms function to steal power — are growing all over the U.S. The social soil in these cultures — our relational practices with each other in the aggregate — is often poisonous. These cultural conditions are orienting humans to also embody the authoritarian practices in the culture just to navigate, while also bringing those practices home and beyond.
In a struggling democracy, those at the top in U.S. business and other organizations have a democratic obligation to create workplace cultures that support democratic norms, processes, and systems. When workplace cultures function as authoritarian because relational practices of management steal power from workers at the bottom of the hierarchy, it is up to those at the top to address those conditions.
How Mr. Lurie — and his campaign team — respond to this test of democratic accountability will reveal Mr. Lurie’s own potential depth of accountability to all San Franciscans, if elected. If candidates are not accountable to those at the bottom of their team, then they are only accountable to themselves and others with them at the top. That authoritarian orientation — with its embodied practices — is lethal for a global, democratic city like San Francisco.
A whole new group of canvassers — some women, many non-white — was just laid out over the remaining original group, of which I was a part. If the experience gained by the founding group of canvassers is simply paved over with new people — without addressing the non-democratic workplace conditions — the authoritarian relational practices will persist in the Daniel Lurie canvassing team and continue undermining broader democratic norms, processes, and systems.
My hope is that this article will not only elicit democratic accountability, but will also act to protect the canvassers still with the campaign so they might enjoy more democratic relational conditions than exist currently.
Note 1: Regarding compliance with “Employment Agreement” Confidentiality & Conflict of Interest statement:
“Canvassing Company Employment Agreement,” dated Friday July 12, 2024 (Addendum to DL canvassing offer letter)
Section 5: CONFIDENTIALITY & CONFLICT OF INTEREST
Para 1: “At all times, both during the term of this Agreement and after its termination, Employee shall hold all information obtained in connection with this employment, including but not limited to information not generally known or available to the public and information provided to Employee by the Candidate or by Committee’s consultants or vendors, in strict confidence, and shall ensure that any person granted access to such information holds it in strict confidence. Employee understands and acknowledges that disclosure of such information would irreparably damage Candidate and Committee.”
Para 5: “Employee shall not take any of the following actions during the term of this Agreement without the prior approval of the Committee: distribute any media or campaign advertising; make any representation to any person regarding Committee’s or Candidate’s views or opinions regarding any public policy matter; commit Committee or Candidate to a public position; or spend any sum or incur any obligation on behalf of Committee (other than approved expenses).”
“Information obtained” (from paragraph 1) refers to data and/or materials that the Committee or Candidate own and hold in confidence, like upcoming policy positions or campaign strategies (as indicated in paragraph 5). This restriction on my speech as an employee with Daniel Lurie’s campaign was honored while canvassing, after leaving the canvassing team, and during the writing of this article.
My experience, observations, and documentation of the workplace culture constitute the data for this article. No Committee or Candidate information was used as data or for analysis. All my shared experience includes relations with “Canvassing Company” management and fellow canvassers, who remain anonymous. As the owner, sharing my experience, observations, and documentation publicly honors the restrictions in the “Canvasser Company’s” Employment Agreement.
My experience, observations, and documentation are also framed by previous publications and original research in similarly non-democratic workplace, family, academic, and community cultures. See Analytic Frames (The Human Relational Basis of Democracy, white paper) and Methods (The Human Relational Basis of Democracy, white paper). For a fuller representation of supporting work, see both my ResearchGate profile and my LinkedIn profile.
Note 2: Documented workplace cultural sites included in the 7-year study and other projects: Sprouts Farmer’s Market, The Home Depot, Safeway, a COVID testing site, an Amazon DSP, academia (several sites), Uber and Lyft, hospitality (several sites), and Scale-AI’s Outlier.
Note 3: Listed below are just some of the relational practices that steal (and sometimes hoard) power, as documented in authoritarian cultures. Each practice can slow, stagger, or stop dead forward momentum:
- Microaggressions: Everyday, subtle (intentional or unintentional) interactions or behaviors that communicate a bias toward historically marginalized groups.
- Passive aggression: Intentionally offering inaccurately positive relational information to hide negative actions or intentions.
- Bullying: Repetitive aggression in the form of personal attacks and exclusion.
- Mobbing: A group intentionally ganging up on a bullying victim to inflict group bullying.
- Name-Calling: Intentional or mindless use of language to reject, condemn, and demean.
- Weaponized Fear: Telling unfounded or exaggerated stories of danger meant to scare newcomers, outsiders, or the marginalized into compliance.
- Willful ignorance: Intentional exclusion of commonly accepted or new information to stop communication.
- Surveillance: Outright watching in public spaces and/or around home based on fictional criminal suspicions.
- Calling the cops without justification: Personal appropriation of state authority.
- Asking to speak with the manager without justification: Personal appropriation of professional authority.
- Marginalization: Interactions intended to push a victim to the sidelines.
- Invisibility: Interactions intended to render a victim unseen and unnoticeable by the rest of the group.
- Gatekeeping: Blocking access to community resources or communication channels.
- Exclusion: Intentional lack of eye contact, acknowledgement, and/or response.
- Cynicism: Intentional disparagement of enthusiasm, optimism, hope, and altruism.
- Lack of Transparency: Intentional vagueness and/or informality to hide information and discourage informed responses.
- Unfounded doubt: Intentionally ignoring or disparaging commonly accepted credentials and qualifications.
- Stoicism: Intentional withholding of compassion, emotion, imagination, and creativity to discourage connection.
- Gaslighting: Interactions intended to force victims to question their own judgement, reasoning, and/or sanity.
- Offering Inaccurate Information Intentionally: Lying, selective truth-telling, selective truth-remembering, pretending not to understand, and faking faulty memory.
- Trivialization: Downplaying feelings and/or vulnerability as being too sensitive or significant events as being unimportant.
- Gossip: Casual and/or unconstrained conversations, reports, and/or accusations about other people who are not present.
- Mis-Information: Casual and/or unconstrained conversations, reports, and/or accusations involving details that are not confirmed as being accurate.
- Dis-Information: Casual and/or unconstrained conversations, reports, and/or accusations involving details that are intentionally inaccurate.
