I worked here for almost three years. To help keep this a bit organized I'll split it between office culture and work practices. Let’s start with culture.
PETA molds its culture around the notions that animal rights are non-negotiable and apolitical, and that you are either a 24/7 vegan or you are the enemy. Management pushed us to dedicate our personal time to animal rights without question. Polite refusals or having different priorities with our own personal time frequently led to talks with employees about not having the right attitude. PETA did not respect the need of its employees to have personal lives, even more so if those personal lives were not intimately intertwined with being vegan. Sick time and vacation needs were sometimes questioned sternly and then approved with the notion that this would come back to be used against us. Management’s rampant paranoia would lead them to keep employees who were abysmal workers and bullies, but also proud vegans. Women who were not bubbly vegan personalities were told that they had an attitude problem. Men who were not perpetually happy and vibrant did not get addressed in this manner. Not embracing every tenet of PETA’s belief system (I do mean every tenet) was viewed as being divisive rather than an opportunity to have a conversation. Employees who disagreed with certain decisions were ignored and pushed to quit without a hint of concern. All culture and ethics revolved around PETA founder Ingrid Newkirk’s current opinions and those could change without notice at the drop of a hat. Hypocrisies and double standards in PETA’s many stances would land confused employees in potential trouble unless they accepted all decrees without question (in particular PETA’s professing to be apolitical while decrying the NRA.) Morally repugnant and dehumanizing press statements were sent out into the world, putting employees in a position where we were expected to back them up without any preliminary discussions or notices. This is the behavior of a cult.
Work practices at PETA heavily revolved around wildly disorganized departments that frequently butt heads with each other. Despite a uniform goal of animal rights, managers told us about certain employees and indeed entire departments being problems. I was once asked by my department director if I was loyal to my department because I was addressing another department’s concerns. Management would routinely be dismissive and aggressive. Compensation and pay were subpar at best and downright laughable at worst. Asking for a time appropriate raise would define you as only caring about money and not animals. Employees who sacrificed their financial well-being for PETA were held up as examples for everyone else. Managers desperately tried to cover up astonishingly high turnover rates and sudden firings. Departments were given borderline impossible goals and then criticized if they could not make those goals or voiced concern.
The core problem of PETA is that upper management has an authoritarian relationship with its employees fueled by a fear of being left behind by mainstream culture. The age gap between management and most employees led to the awkwardness of being expected to fall in line with people in their 40s to 70s who acted like they had near infallible understandings of pop culture and how to work within it. If you want to work for animal rights, there are plenty of other healthy organizations to explore. PETA’s management are not just unskilled and clumsy; they are destructive and borderline malicious. This organization does not deserve your employment or support.
