Public Interest Research Groups are a federation of U.S. and Canadian non-profit organizations that employ grassroots organizing and direct advocacy with the goal of addressing political change. The PIRGs are closely affiliated with the Fund for the Public Interest, which conducts fundraising and canvassing on their behalf.
History
The PIRGs emerged in the early 1970s on U.S. college campuses. The PIRG model was proposed in the book Action for a Change by Ralph Nader and Donald Ross, in which they encourage students on campuses across a state to pool their resources to hire full-time professional lobbyists and researchers to lobby for the passage of legislation which addresses social topics of interest to students. Ross helped students across the country set up the first PIRG chapters, then became the director of the New York Public Interest Research Group in 1973. The Minnesota Public Interest Research Group, founded in 1971, was the first state PIRG to incorporate. It was followed by Oregon and Massachusetts. By the late 1990s, there were PIRGs in 22 states with chapters on more than 100 college campuses. U.S. PIRG reported 1 million members by 2000. The state PIRGs created U.S. PIRG in 1984 to have a national lobbying presence in Washington, D.C. In their first two decades, PIRGs worked on a variety of issues:
Toy safety: U.S. PIRG has released toy safety reports every year since 1986, which has led to recalls of more than 35 toys.
Lemon law: ConnPIRG and CALPIRG were involved in passing the first new-car lemon laws in 1982 that require manufacturers to repair or repurchase severely defective relatively new vehicles.
PIRGs on college campuses have historically been funded with a portion of student activity fees in the form of a labor checkoff. Students may elect to have the fees refunded to them, although many students are unaware that this is the case. This system of PIRG funding has been met with controversy and with a number of legal challenges. In 2014, students at Macalester College in Minnesota voted to end their relationship with MPIRG due to the group's revenue structure, which relied on MPIRG automatically receiving a cut of student activity fees. In 1982, the PIRGs established the Fund for the Public Interest as its fundraising and canvassing arm. The Fund has been subject to lawsuits and accusations of unfair and exploitative labor practices, and it has resisted unionization efforts by its canvassers to unionize. In 2016, U.S. PIRG joined conservative groups in opposing the Obama Administration's rules that expanded worker overtime pay, which resulted in criticism against the organization in the popular press.
Transparency
rated the U.S. PIRG two out of four stars for accountability and transparency, and three out of four stars for financials.
Some PIRGs are members of a larger network of non-profit organizations called the Public Interest Network. In the past, they have also helped to launch a number of other independent public interest non-profits, including:
Twenty-five U.S. states have a statewide PIRG that is directly affiliated with the Public Interest Network/US PIRG. Other state PIRGs that are not part of the network include the New York, Vermont, and Minnesota PIRGs. The state PIRGs are:
