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Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't have any more information. BRC has only agreed to disclose the pay for Jennifer Raiser because according to non-profit rules they had to disclose pay of at least one main person. She is treasurer making $111K. Not bad for a employee organizing once a year single week event, especially when the organizers asks everyone else to be volunteer. I've been part of several non-profits where treasurers were volunteers and got paid exactly $0 for year around activities.

Despite of constant asks over the years, BRC has not agreed to breakdown their "payroll" category of expenses which is left to imagination for what goes to temporary staff vs BRC people. These secrets I would least expect from great non-profits let alone from Burning Man founders.

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Maybe the burning man people are overpayed, but being the treasurer of an organization that, as you say, deals with 35 million dollars every year sounds like a full time all year round position to me, regardless of when or how the money is made.

The work load here isn’t proportional to revenue, it’s proportional to services provided by the organizers - which is extraordinarily minimum. The revenue simply drops in via website that is active only few days a year. I absolutely disagree that any person involved for Burning Man should be full time employee of any kind. I would also not expect any sort of “executives” let alone paid folks for Burning Man when the entire premise of event rests on volunteering. Do you think no one with great qualifications in the world is willing to be volunteer to make a website for Burning Man or be a treasurer for the event?

> Do you think no one with great qualifications in the world is willing to be volunteer to make a website for Burning Man or be a treasurer for the event?

I honestly don't know. What I do know is that if I was in charge of selecting a treasurer to manage $35M I would definitely prefer it to be a paid position, especially if the money all comes in and goes out in a short timespan. I might trust volunteers with trash pickup, but this is 35 million bucks.

If I go to burning man with 70000 other people then $1.59 of my ticket price is going to pay this lady, that's less than a single cup of dusty coffee or a bag of ice! I'm okay with that. Handling 35 million dollars in a year sounds like a daunting task, doing it in a week sounds downright insane, I don't think it's unreasonable to pay someone a living wage to do this job. I also hope the people driving around sucking shit out of the porta potties are getting paid and I would not like to see that be a volunteer position.

Like I said, I have no idea if the other administrators of burning man are overpayed, but I do suspect running an event of this scale is much closer to a year-round job than you surmise, and in the real world being "radically self reliant" usually means maintaining an actual paying job somewhere.

> but being the treasurer of an organization

That's immaterial to the discussion. The point is that management rakes in the lion's share of a $35M revenue made largely at the expense of people paying well over $1k to attend an event which is sold as non-profit, non-capitalist and volunteer-only. Naturally, people need to get paid for the job they do, and organizer's do have the right and even obligation to profit from their initiatives, but questions do pop out regarding the ethical implications of doing so under what appear to be false pretenses.

Great point sir. I am interested in being a full time treasurer as well, will you give me $35mm/year? I will devote my full time to managing it

Don't be ridiculous, the treasurer doesn't make $35mm/year.

Not with that attitude

If you pay peanuts on average you get monkeys. Competent non-profit management people are not exactly the same as competent for profit management but there’s substantial overlap on the skills involved. All of the highly paid people doing Burning Man could get better paid jobs tomorrow.

If you want to do something like Burning Man yourself but with lower paid permanent staff no one is going to stop you. Have fun.

This is untrue from my experience of interacting and be part of several non-profits. Most of these non-profits have actual executives from well known companies in similar positions contributing their time to be unpaid volunteer. Great non-profits I know have largely unpaid executive staff. When I see non-profits with significantly paid executive staff, my heart sinks and I would rather stay away from them. More often than not these are pseudo non-profits exploiting holes in the tax laws and essentially getting tax free revenues to pay themselves.

Fun fact: several racial supremists, left as well as right extremists personalities don’t actually have full time jobs. They are typically head of some “non-profit” created specifically for them where rich people can donate money and they get this money as salary to “run” the non-profit.

Are these great non-profits that you are familiar with large organisations? I’ve known people whose uncompensated non-profit work supported an e tire school though the other ten or so people involved did about half of the work. That kind of organisation does not scale. You can’t run a summer camp without some full time people, never mind a a soup kitchen, homeless shelter or university.

The number of people who are capable of running an organisation of size X who don’t need to be compensated for doing so is way lower than those capable of running an organisation of size X. Being on the board of a prestigious organisation is a great way to network, gain exposure and help the organisation but if no one’s getting paid it’s an upper middle class or higher monopoly. That’s fine if we’re talking about an arts organisation, like the NY Philharmonic or MOMA, where the primary qualification to be on the board is the ability to write a very large cheque but if there’s a more concrete goal it would be better to pay more to get the people who can do it well and do it full time.

On the fun fact, single issue organisations political organisations are as legitimate a non-profit as Democratic Party think tanks like Brookings or Niskanen or Libertarian ones like Cato. The ACLU, NRA and NAACP all started off as small non-profits one time. I hope the left and right’s respective racists don’t grow any more organisation but they have no less a right to the tax status than Soros’ or Koch’s pet organisations.

I see 26 individuals listed with salaries totaling $2,392,870. 9 board members are unpaid.

The highest paid employee not designated as "key" made $141,290.

I've been part of several non-profits where treasurers were volunteers and got paid exactly $0 for year around activities.

Were they responsible for (your numbers) $60MM/yr?

Not bad for a employee organizing once a year single week event

This is flatly, obviously, knowably wrong. Burning Man organizes dozens of events all around the world year-round.

No it doesn't. The Burning Man Project has virtually nothing to do with the regional burns around the world, which is a sore point for a lot of regional organizers. They ask that the regionals follow their rules, then provide virtually no support for them, while simultaneously bragging about how they've spread the culture worldwide.

Regionals are run by organizations that are completely separate from the Burning Man Org.

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