Staff Memories

[Stat]

I will share some of my experience in an attempt to answer you question/s, Student of Trinity.

I believe, most of the regular Orgs (vs. poster or Advanced Orgs) have anywhere between 25 and 50 staff members (sometimes much less, sometimes a little more).

Per my observations, there are normally only 3 to 5 people in an Org who work directly on advertisements, but they work long, hard hours for sure. It's being done in a direct coordination with an Org top Execs and in case of a major event/evolution - all the way to top management (through telexes, emails and otherwise).

Then, there is Public Division. Those folks normally work their asses off really hard to get new people in through book sales, testing, films, surveys, what have you. Also, keeping the current people on their courses/Book One auditing, making sure they resign to major services (Bridge auditing/training) and trying to recover "blown" ones. That's a front line and can be a real bitch, even though sometimes rewarding (when people get benefits/real wins).

Now, the auditing part. Most of the regular Orgs probably have anywhere between 4 and 10 reliable, classed Auditors who constantly deliver the bridge actions (which is the main source of the income, despite of the LRH's HCO PL "Booming Orgs Through Training". Most of them are really cool, motivated and well-intentioned people, per my experience. They believe in tech and they really want and try to help another (when they are not in cramming or ethics.)

There also Registrars (Income people). Two categories I know of. The best ones I know were the worst people I ever met. I am not sure if they are even human, capable of love or simply affinity. Second ones (juniors of the first ones), were very conflicted, mostly good people.

And then there are the rest of good folks, like Treasury guys (least bothered), Course Supervisors (it's always their fault, if things go wrong), Qual (see Course Supervisors above), HCO (just lame), etc.

Basically, it's a bunch of people with good intentions, who most likely were misleaded, to begin with, trying to make things go right.

Not sure if I answer the percentage question, but I hope it gives you some idea.

Wish you well.

[Student of Trinity]

Huh — that's very informative. Thanks a lot!

So it sounds as though there are in the ballpark of 20% of staff who are auditing folks, and only around 10% doing pure advertising. But then the Public division people seem to also be doing marketing, and so in a sense are the Reges. Are there a lot of Public division and Reges around in an org? From the way you write about their job, I get the impression that Public Division is rather big, and that marketing activities of one kind or another could be consuming around 50% or even more of an org staff's collective time.

I guess course supervisors and qual people could also be counted as directly providing Scientology services, if they are training people — is that what they do? Are there a lot of these folks, or only a few?

It sounds as though pure administration is a rather small group, if we count treasurers and HCO and whomever is in charge. Maybe 10% again?

Maybe a related question: roughly how many public would a small org actually serve regularly? A typical mid-sized urban Christian church generally has somewhere between 100 and 200 regular attenders, and probably only supports one full-time minister, with part-time secretary and organist. I think synagogues are roughly comparable (if you swap cantor for organist). Is the Church of Scientology an unusually staff-heavy religious denomination, or does an org with 50 full-time staff serve thousands of parishioners?

[Enthetan]

after getting out, and reading and hearing about the horrible conditions and treatment SO members endured, i understand her resentment. i think perhaps they look at the staff with the same resentment that the staff look at the SO members.

And let's not forget how much the SO despises the public. Back when I was in Flag, we had utter contempt for the public, who had to be treated with such surface ARC, and who actually got to sleep, eat well, and have fun while we had none of that.

It was, all of it, very deliberate.

If staff were not miserable and hating public, then we might have backoff on screwing public, doing crush regging, taking all their retirement money and all their children's college funds. Public were to be viewed as resources to be squeezed, not as human beings, and resenting them was a tool that made it easier to look at them that way.

If staff were actually making even minimum wage, there would be a tendency to look at public as CUSTOMERS, who had to be treated with respect. And public would be more likely to behave like customers. "I paid for my session, I want my session NOW, and damn it I want FRIES and a COKE with that too!"

Its the bad treatment at the top that acts as a justifier to treat juniors badly. "Shit rolls down hill" and all that.

[Enthetan]

Huh — that's very informative. Thanks a lot!

So it sounds as though there are in the ballpark of 20% of staff who are auditing folks, and only around 10% doing pure advertising. But then the Public division people seem to also be doing marketing, and so in a sense are the Reges. Are there a lot of Public division and Reges around in an org? From the way you write about their job, I get the impression that Public Division is rather big, and that marketing activities of one kind or another could be consuming around 50% or even more of an org staff's collective time.

I guess course supervisors and qual people could also be counted as directly providing Scientology services, if they are training people — is that what they do? Are there a lot of these folks, or only a few?

It sounds as though pure administration is a rather small group, if we count treasurers and HCO and whomever is in charge. Maybe 10% again?

Maybe a related question: roughly how many public would a small org actually serve regularly? A typical mid-sized urban Christian church generally has somewhere between 100 and 200 regular attenders, and probably only supports one full-time minister, with part-time secretary and organist. I think synagogues are roughly comparable (if you swap cantor for organist). Is the Church of Scientology an unusually staff-heavy religious denomination, or does an org with 50 full-time staff serve thousands of parishioners?

In the orgs I've been in, if the number of public in the org getting services at any particular moment is double the number of staff, then you're doing well.

This is one reason why staff pay is so low. If orgs were required to pay staff what a staff member would earn in a comparable non-Scientology job, there is no Class V org that would stay open a week. The AOs and Flag might survive for a while, but they are dependent upon orgs sending them public, so they might last maybe a month before folding.

[Dulloldfart]

Maybe a related question: roughly how many public would a small org actually serve regularly? A typical mid-sized urban Christian church generally has somewhere between 100 and 200 regular attenders, and probably only supports one full-time minister, with part-time secretary and organist. I think synagogues are roughly comparable (if you swap cantor for organist). Is the Church of Scientology an unusually staff-heavy religious denomination, or does an org with 50 full-time staff serve thousands of parishioners?

Anon Sparrow recently (month ago?) did a count in one of his videos. From (my) memory he counted 55 full-time staff and 12 public in the org that day receiving auditing or training. From the other videos of his that I have seen, those numbers don't seem unusual for that org (FCDC in Washington).

This is clearly hugely unviable, and only works to some extent because the staff get paid peanuts and not even minimum wage. I doubt if they even cover their basics (rent, utilities, phones, postage) on a regular basis, especially as orgs are under huge pressure to send out vast quantities of paper mailings, as anyone unfortunate enough to be on any CofS mailing list well knows.

Paul

[Enthetan]

especially as orgs are under huge pressure to send out vast quantities of paper mailings, as anyone unfortunate enough to be on any CofS mailing list well knows.

Paul

Years ago, the addresso guy(person in charge of mailing addresses) in an org I was in kept wanting to do "address correction" mailings, where the post office would return bulk mail sent to bad addresses, with any address forwarding info. This cost extra money, so he had to get financial planning approval. This was routinely denied. Meanwhile, more and more of the orgs mailing address info was going bad as people moved, and address forwarding info was only kept by the post office for a limited time.

It finally flapped. Who did they blame? The addresso guy, of course. The Comm Ev proclaimed that he should have "made it go right" by paying the cost for address correction mailings out of his own pocket.

Why so many mailings to bad addresses? Fixing addresses would have shrank the size of the mailing list and made the "bulk mail out" stat go down.

[Student of Trinity]

For comparison to mainstream religious groups, I guess it's only fair to mention that a typical church's full congregation normally only meets once per week, and only for two or three hours at most. There will be numerous other smaller meetings throughout the week, but the total number of parishioner-hours of received service per week is probably only a few hundred. If an org like DC takes a dozen people a day, for an hour or two of auditing each, that's maybe comparable delivery of service-time.

But the total number of hours worked per week, by the few staff of a mainstream church combined, is probably 100 max, maybe as low as 50. If CofS staffers are all working 50 hour weeks, then an org with 20 to 50 staff seems to be putting in 10 to 50 times as many staff hours per parishioner hour as a mainstream church. This is a pretty dramatic difference, dramatic enough that I think it is pretty sure to remain a dramatic difference even if my estimates are off by quite a bit.

A big part of the reason is surely that auditing is inherently very staff-intensive. One pastor can preach for an hour to several hundred people, but one auditor can only handle one PC at a time. But on the other hand, mainstream church members do participate in a lot of smaller group activities as well as full community meetings. As a rule these are run by lay volunteers, rather than paid staff, though the staff may spend some time organizing these programs.

It does still seem notable that Scientology seems to have a lot of very poorly paid and slightly trained staff, whereas mainstream religions have a few decently paid and highly trained professional staff, plus a moderate to large number of volunteers who work only a few hours per week for the church, for no pay at all.

What fraction of people who are seriously involved in the CofS are staff (or Sea Org), as opposed to public?

[Dulloldfart]

A big part of the reason is surely that auditing is inherently very staff-intensive. One pastor can preach for an hour to several hundred people, but one auditor can only handle one PC at a time.

No. The main reason is that Scn org staff spend an unGodly () number of hours doing things that normal churches — or any halfway-sane organization — wouldn't. Like writing hundreds (or literally thousands) of letters a week to everyone in central files, even if they haven't written back for ten years and then the last letter was "Take me off your mailing list! I'm not interested!" At my orgs typical general staff letter quotas were 25-50 a week each. That's in addition to their regular duties.

There are dozens of "Programs" that seniors are hassled by management people outside the org to be worked on. Each of these dozens of programs contains dozens of "targets." A "target" in Scn parlance is not a quota; it is a step on a program that needs to get done. Example of a target: "Get every staff member checked out on the policy letter "Senior Policy'." Another example: "Get the student progress board in the Academy up to date." The first one involves a staff member running around the org with a list of all the staff, hassling them, getting them checked out on the policy letter. Most won't have any trouble and it's just five minutes of distraction from everything else they have to do. But some staff will be bogged on study or sick or something, so what might seem like a small target becomes hell on wheels because it says "Get EVERY staff member checked out..." and one staff member is home on pregnancy leave and another one is horribly bogged on study and needs an auditing action but is OT VII and has out-int and no-one can audit her, and besides. . . .

Multiply this by dozens and dozens of equally futile time-wasting exercises and you have a typical org where everyone is frantically busy and getting screamed at by frustrated seniors (superiors) with very little useful production actually getting done.

Paul

[Zinjifar]

But, the 'useless' things are the 'stat' and, with management by stat, you can't afford to stop useless.

Zinj

[Stat]

No. The main reason is that Scn org staff spend an unGodly () number of hours doing things that normal churches — or any halfway-sane organization — wouldn't. Like writing hundreds (or literally thousands) of letters a week to everyone in central files, even if they haven't written back for ten years and then the last letter was "Take me off your mailing list! I'm not interested!" At my orgs typical general staff letter quotas were 25-50 a week each. That's in addition to their regular duties.

There are dozens of "Programs" that seniors are hassled by management people outside the org to be worked on. Each of these dozens of programs contains dozens of "targets." A "target" in Scn parlance is not a quota; it is a step on a program that needs to get done. Example of a target: "Get every staff member checked out on the policy letter "Senior Policy'." Another example: "Get the student progress board in the Academy up to date." The first one involves a staff member running around the org with a list of all the staff, hassling them, getting them checked out on the policy letter. Most won't have any trouble and it's just five minutes of distraction from everything else they have to do. But some staff will be bogged on study or sick or something, so what might seem like a small target becomes hell on wheels because it says "Get EVERY staff member checked out..." and one staff member is home on pregnancy leave and another one is horribly bogged on study and needs an auditing action but is OT VII and has out-int and no-one can audit her, and besides. . . .

Multiply this by dozens and dozens of equally futile time-wasting exercises and you have a typical org where everyone is frantically busy and getting screamed at by frustrated seniors (superiors) with very little useful production actually getting done.

Paul

So fucking true.