Latest news with #MLMs
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The Little-Known Link Between Multilevel Marketing and Project 2025
It's a scenario that's all too common in Instagram DMs and on Facebook Messenger: An old acquaintance with whom you haven't spoken in years messages you out of the blue, usually with something like, 'Hey hun!' But this person's not trying to catch up — they're trying to sell you something. And that's all because of the multilevel marketing business they recently joined. When you think of multilevel marketing, you probably conjure up images of the past few decades: Mary Kay makeup, Pampered Chef cookware, or Tupperware parties in '50s and '60s living rooms. But in her new book, Little Bosses Everywhere, NY Magazine journalist Bridget Read explains that the origins of MLM actually go back almost as far as the founding of America — and that, rather than exemplifying the American individualistic spirit, these companies helped shape the national identity. We spoke to Read about what most people get wrong about multilevel marketing, the difference between MLMs and fraudulent schemes, and this industry's global influence — and its close ties to Project 2025. Bridget Read: I did a short article for New York Magazine about multi-level marketing companies during the pandemic, and it left me with more questions than answers. In describing how MLM works for an article-length piece, I had to skip over so many things that don't make sense about the business model. Ultimately, I realized that you need a whole book to tell the story of multilevel marketing, because it's a story as old as the American project itself. That's definitely the industry's definition, but what I learned in my research is that what you're actually getting paid for are the purchases of sellers under you. The Multilevel Marketing Company is only tracking how much my 'downline,' the group of people I've recruited to sell more products, is buying. In theory, that could be a mix of customers and participants. However, there is considerable evidence that suggests most people buying inside MLMs are themselves participants. MLMS treat those purchases as sales because, in theory, an MLMer can go out and resell the products. That's what they're supposed to be doing. But in reality, most of them have a ton of products lying around at home. The revenue comes from recruiting people, and what those recruits are buying. So there really aren't product sales happening in the way you think there are. Just think about how strange that is: The idea that anyone would buy these expensive products in this weird way from a friend, where they're sort of harassing you online? It doesn't make any sense as a business model. The products can be good, but where MLM falls into fraud and certain companies have been prosecuted as pyramid schemes is the concept of the business opportunity. That's the part that, over and over again, has been found to be often fraudulent, because the idea that it's relatively easy to make money is not true. [They sell the idea that] with this little investment, you can then build a team where you're making a living from doing that. When really, the people who continue to make a living from doing it, statistically and overwhelmingly, do it by recruiting new participants. There's a lot of really intense in-group association that makes people compare MLMs to cults. You're using your own kind of language, and they're plying you with positive attention, so you feel like you're part of a family. Also, many of these companies have a policy against what they call crosslining, which is that you're not supposed to talk to anybody who's at your level. And you're definitely not supposed to send negativity down to your downline. That creates this sort of Draconian environment, where nobody's complaining and nobody shares when they're losing money. That makes it really hard to dissent, to ask questions, and ultimately, to leave. When people do leave, then there's a lot of pressure [for those still inside] to cut those people out. Most people I've spoken to who leave MLMs are cut out of chats; their friends stop talking to them. You really do feel like you're being cut out of your family, so that also makes people really afraid to speak out. Women's positions are much more precarious in the labor market than men, and have been for a long time. During the '60s and '70s, many more women went to work, but statistically in the United States they went to work in the industries and areas where labor is much more fragile: retail, the service industry, clerk-type work, secretaries. These jobs are not very secure, wage-earning jobs. The people in them are often independent contractors, or they're making minimum wage. They don't get benefits, and they're much more subject to the vicissitudes of the market, layoffs, things like that. So that means more women are stuck at home; often, they're doing childcare, too. They are simply more vulnerable to the pitch that you can make a living from home, that it's flexible, and that you're not subject to clocking in somewhere every day, which often does conflict with childcare. MLM flourishes among all kinds of women. According to the FTC, there is such a thing as legitimate multi-level marketing, which stems from a decision made by the FTC in 1979, called the Amway Decision. Amway was, and still is, the world's largest MLM, and the most politically powerful and influential one. Betsy DeVos's father-in-law, Rich DeVos, is one of the founders of Amway, along with his partner, Jay Van Andel. Amway comes from the same line of old MLMs that created some of the companies in the seventies that were found to be pyramid schemes. When the FTC sued, Amway argued that there were rules in place that kept the company from being a pyramid scheme. They claimed [as a seller] you had to have a certain amount of customers, you had to have 70% of your products resold, or you wouldn't get any commissions. They also claimed that Amway bought back any products you weren't able to sell, and the FTC decided that they would accept those rules without any evidence — Amway didn't have to prove that its rules were enforced. They didn't have to prove how many of their recruits make a living from actually selling the products. The FTC accepted Amway's word that it regulated itself. Herbalife was another huge MLM that the FTC eventually sued. Though the company settled, the FTC found that the overwhelming majority of Herbalife participants did not make money, and many of them lost money. Herbalife was sued for $200 million and supposedly restructured their business. But again, there's really very little evidence that the enforcement has changed much, and so the idea of legitimate MLM is still a gray area — which is why the FTC website basically warns people not to participate in them, even though they're technically allowed. Part of what led to the Amway decision was that, by the time the judge was making his ruling, DeVos, Van Andel, and Amway were already incredibly powerful political entities. They are Calvinist Christians from Michigan; the Congressman from their district was Gerald Ford. By the time Ford was president, they were very close to him and were big donors. Then they backed Ronald Reagan, who obviously became president in 1980. During that time they were very influential, sending a lot of money to the Republican party and to think tanks like the Heritage Foundation. Since then, they've continued to be one of the largest dark-money donors in the Republican party — just like the Mercers and the Kochs. Betsy DeVos, even long before she was confirmed as education secretary, said in a speech in the '90s, 'My family is one of the largest donors to the Republican party, and now we're going to get something in return.' So, they've used their influence to help pass the policies that they want, which largely hew to an ultra-conservative free-enterprise philosophy. That includes making the government very small, deregulating all kinds of industries, increasing privatization, and lowering taxes. They contributed money to Elon Musk's PAC this election cycle, and what DOGE is doing really closely aligns with their vision of the government. They also donate a substantial amount to the Heritage Foundation, and Project 2025 aligns closely with their views. So what we're seeing happening in the Trump administration is a big part of the ideology that powered multilevel marketing. Yes. Barb Van Andel-Gaby, who is Jay Van Andel's daughter, is the chairman of the board of the Heritage Foundation, and when she inducted Kevin Roberts — who wrote the introduction to Project 2025 — she literally said, 'He is going to increase our influence on Capitol Hill.' Project 2025 includes exactly what Betsy DeVos said about the Education Department, which is that she wanted to eliminate it. It has a whole section on independent contractors, and MLM relies on as loose independent contractor laws as possible. They want to significantly limit the FTC's ability to regulate private companies and private enterprises, which would obviously greatly benefit MLMs. I hope everyone picks up this book, because so much of what has happened in our country in the last 40 to 50 years in terms of the widening inequality gap actually comes from the ideology that multilevel marketing has spread throughout the United States — and now the world, since the majority of MLM participants are actually overseas. That ideology is one of ruthless individual pursuit of wealth, and that instead of critiquing that inequality gap, [MLM philosophy says] we can all just keep going in our own little side hustles, and we all have the chance to be our own kind of Bezos one day. MLM conventions are extremely insular events. Typically, you have to be part of an organization to attend. I did not join Mary Kay, but I ended up going to the convention, and relying on the fact that I'm a white blonde woman who can blend in with the crowd. It was a really wild experience, but it also made me feel much more sympathetic and empathetic toward the women who do it. I was moved by a lot of the stories of redemption and success, even though many of them are probably not true — I've spoken to and seen a lot of evidence of women in Mary Kay and other MLMs who've been celebrated for their sales, but end up actually having simply spent a lot of money. One woman whom I spoke to at length about her journey in Mary Kay was championed as a saleswoman, but she was just spending and spending and spending. She ultimately spent more than $75,000 on Mary Kay products over a decade. The post The Little-Known Link Between Multilevel Marketing and Project 2025 appeared first on Katie Couric Media.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
An Awkward Truth About American Work
A few years ago, a cheeky meme made the rounds on the internet—a snappy rejoinder to a question about dream jobs: 'I do not dream of labor.' The witticism, sometimes misattributed to James Baldwin, began to spread a few months into the coronavirus pandemic, as the shock of mass layoffs started to give way to broader dissatisfaction with work. Before long, an untethering from office culture, combined with the security of a tight labor market, led many workers to quit their 9-to-5 jobs. Nobody, Kim Kardashian declared, wanted to work anymore—but that wasn't exactly true. More plausibly, the "Great Resignation" marked a shift—perhaps a permanent one—in when, where, and how people wanted to work. Moments of cultural change present openings for cons. Early in the pandemic, the number of multi-level-marketing schemes (or MLMs) exploded online. Such enterprises invite non-salaried workers to sell goods and then also earn commissions by recruiting more salespeople; the Federal Trade Commission has over the years outlined subtle legal differences between MLMs and pyramid schemes. As millions of Americans lost or quit jobs, MLM advocates on the internet made an enticing pitch: Work as we knew it wasn't cutting it anymore; other options were out there. Framing the chance to hawk leggings or makeup or 'mentorship' as an opportunity that could yield flexible income and a sense of community, they promised a kind of life that was too good to be true. A few years ago, the journalist Bridget Read started looking into the outfits behind such appeals. Initially, by her own account, Read couldn't really understand how MLMs worked. But some big questions stuck with her—among them, why exactly they were legal. She lays out what she's learned in her engaging new book, Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, which exposes some awkward truths about the nature of American work. Weaving in sympathetic portrayals of women who lost money and friends after working with MLM schemes, she recasts them as victims of a multigenerational swindle. [Read: LuLaRich reveals a hole in the American economy] MLM participants surely drive their friends and family crazy with their hard sells; they are also, in Read's telling, marks. She cites a 2011 analysis that found that 99 percent of participants in one MLM lost money, and she exhaustively catalogs the predations of the sector writ large. Read writes with scorn about the industry's early architects, who made outrageous health claims and touted their companies' 'profits pyramid,' and about right-wing opportunists who expanded MLMs' power and reach—especially the founders of Amway, a massive company with connections to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. But she never disparages her sources, whose stories of drained bank accounts and dashed dreams she portrays only with empathy. She threads the tale of a pseudonymous Mary Kay seller, a military veteran struggling to make ends meet, throughout the book. The woman loses more than $75,000. These vignettes keep the human toll of the schemes top of mind. Read's indictment of MLM outfits is predictable enough, but her research also reveals how much corporate America has in common with this shady economy, which has long been dismissed as a kooky sideshow. Corporations have borrowed from the methods of MLM companies—hiring large, contingent workforces; pushing employees to think like entrepreneurs; and lobbying hard for friendlier regulations. MLMs turn out to be more closely aligned with the center of corporate life (and political power) than many people might like to think. A key innovation of the industry was to rely on a fleet of temporary workers. During the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration was expanding the social safety net and implementing muscular work protections, an organization then called the National Association of Direct Selling Companies agitated for a carve-out that would designate salespeople as 'independent contractors' rather than employees. Historically, such contractors had occupied a tiny niche, but in a time of expanding regulation, classifying workers in this way became a handy loophole. This category later set the template for tech start-ups, including Uber and DoorDash, that challenged traditional full-time employers. As of July 2023, about 4 percent of the American workforce had temporary jobs as their main or only role, and an additional 7.4 percent of Americans were independent contractors, according to a survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That percentage may seem small, but it encompasses millions of workers and outnumbers many sectors of employment; other surveys find that tens of millions of Americans do such work for supplemental income too. As Read writes, 'The part-time, low-paid work that direct selling pioneered' now 'defines our current labor market rather than covers its gaps.' The low quality of many legitimate jobs has long provided cover for shadier schemes. Squint, and an MLM racket doesn't look all that different from the work of an influencer or telemarketer or door-to-door-salesman. If a major indictment of MLMs is that many of their contractors don't seem to actually sell much at all, well—the same could be said of many other jobs today. And the gig economy isn't walled off from the rest: Many Americans still have full-time, union-eligible jobs, but a lot of them dip into temporary or part-time work to make ends meet. The Mary Kay annual meeting features a special cheering moment for teachers who sell makeup on the side. [Read: When multilevel marketing met Gen Z] Many of the messages that MLMs adopt to reel in workers rely on a central contradiction, criticizing the corporate grind while extolling the free market. Amway recruiters, for one, have explicitly used anti-establishment language in their pitch: When you're working a 9-to-5, you are in the 'rut,' but when you break free and set your own hours, you are living 'the dream.' In fact, you are often forsaking security for precarity—or worse. As Read and others have written, the opportunity quickly becomes a disaster for all but a very lucky few. MLMs and their boosters deny that the companies are pyramid-shaped—Amway, according to one hagiographer, is shaped more like 'a flower.' But each, in Read's telling, also takes the form of a fun-house mirror. Throughout the history of MLMs, contractions and collapses in the broader economy have been good for them. Direct selling was hailed as 'counter-cyclical' and 'depression-proof' during the 1930s, Read notes. In the 1970s, widespread white-collar layoffs and looming stagflation presented another opening. 'In the direct selling business hard times are good times,' the founders of Amway wrote in a 1974 edition of their corporate magazine. In more recent decades, the sector's free-market ethos dovetailed with new cultural moods: MLMs both shaped and reinforced the values of the greed-is-good 1980s, as well as the self-help-obsessed aughts and the 'grindset' ethos that followed the 2008 recession. Seizing opportunities to grow businesses is, of course, what companies have always done. But this industry seized them to advance practices that flirted with, and sometimes qualified as, outright fraud. Read ably explains why these businesses have appealed to generations of underpaid and insecure American workers, and she argues that it's not greed or stupidity that drives people (especially women juggling family responsibilities) into the arms of the schemes but the decline of middle-class stability. MLM opportunities promise what American jobs used to: security, freedom, dignity. Those promises have consistently failed to materialize. But the fact that so many are desperate to get in on the schemes each year is not a credit to the broader job market. A person well served by the economy is unlikely to salivate at the prospect of making extra cash by pushing lipsticks on the side. Today, many workers at more conventional jobs face the havoc of just-in-time scheduling and inconsistent shifts; these employees seek out more flexible arrangements in spite of their downsides. In Read's telling, MLMs are a toxin masquerading as a cure. Among their many ruses is their insistence on a message of empowerment: that participants are 'bosses' or 'owners.' What makes this easier to pull off is the fact that MLM outfits don't have the kind of central, visible leader the public associates with many higher-profile schemes—no Sam Bankman-Fried or Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes. Read names the leaders who benefit, and in doing so, she delivers a damning portrait of those who take advantage—and she humanizes the people they rip off. Investigating an industry notorious for doublespeak and euphemism, she calls things what they are. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
21-05-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
The Shadowy Industry That Shaped American Work
A few years ago, a cheeky meme made the rounds on the internet—a snappy rejoinder to a question about dream jobs: 'I do not dream of labor.' The witticism, sometimes misattributed to James Baldwin, began to spread a few months into the coronavirus pandemic, as the shock of mass layoffs started to give way to broader dissatisfaction with work. Before long, an untethering from office culture, combined with the security of a tight labor market, led many workers to quit their 9-to-5 jobs. Nobody, Kim Kardashian declared, wanted to work anymore—but that wasn't exactly true. More plausibly, the "Great Resignation" marked a shift—perhaps a permanent one—in when, where, and how people wanted to work. Moments of cultural change present openings for cons. Early in the pandemic, the number of multi-level-marketing schemes (or MLMs) exploded online. Such enterprises invite non-salaried workers to sell goods and then also earn commissions by recruiting more salespeople; the Federal Trade Commission has over the years outlined subtle legal differences between MLMs and pyramid schemes. As millions of Americans lost or quit jobs, MLM advocates on the internet made an enticing pitch: Work as we knew it wasn't cutting it anymore; other options were out there. Framing the chance to hawk leggings or makeup or 'mentorship' as an opportunity that could yield flexible income and a sense of community, they promised a kind of life that was too good to be true. A few years ago, the journalist Bridget Read started looking into the outfits behind such appeals. Initially, by her own account, Read couldn't really understand how MLMs worked. But some big questions stuck with her—among them, why exactly they were legal. She lays out what she's learned in her engaging new book, Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America, which exposes some awkward truths about the nature of American work. Weaving in sympathetic portrayals of women who lost money and friends after working with MLM schemes, she recasts them as victims of a multigenerational swindle. MLM participants surely drive their friends and family crazy with their hard sells; they are also, in Read's telling, marks. She cites a 2011 analysis that found that 99 percent of participants in one MLM lost money, and she exhaustively catalogs the predations of the sector writ large. Read writes with scorn about the industry's early architects, who made outrageous health claims and touted their companies' 'profits pyramid,' and about right-wing opportunists who expanded MLMs' power and reach—especially the founders of Amway, a massive company with connections to Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump. But she never disparages her sources, whose stories of drained bank accounts and dashed dreams she portrays only with empathy. She threads the tale of a pseudonymous Mary Kay seller, a military veteran struggling to make ends meet, throughout the book. The woman loses more than $75,000. These vignettes keep the human toll of the schemes top of mind. Read's indictment of MLM outfits is predictable enough, but her research also reveals how much corporate America has in common with this shady economy, which has long been dismissed as a kooky sideshow. Corporations have borrowed from the methods of MLM companies—hiring large, contingent workforces; pushing employees to think like entrepreneurs; and lobbying hard for friendlier regulations. MLMs turn out to be more closely aligned with the center of corporate life (and political power) than many people might like to think. A key innovation of the industry was to rely on a fleet of temporary workers. During the Great Depression, when Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration was expanding the social safety net and implementing muscular work protections, an organization then called the National Association of Direct Selling Companies agitated for a carve-out that would designate salespeople as 'independent contractors' rather than employees. Historically, such contractors had occupied a tiny niche, but in a time of expanding regulation, classifying workers in this way became a handy loophole. This category later set the template for tech start-ups, including Uber and DoorDash, that challenged traditional full-time employers. As of July 2023, about 4 percent of the American workforce had temporary jobs as their main or only role, and an additional 7.4 percent of Americans were independent contractors, according to a survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That percentage may seem small, but it encompasses millions of workers and outnumbers many sectors of employment; other surveys find that tens of millions of Americans do such work for supplemental income too. As Read writes, 'The part-time, low-paid work that direct selling pioneered' now 'defines our current labor market rather than covers its gaps.' The low quality of many legitimate jobs has long provided cover for shadier schemes. Squint, and an MLM racket doesn't look all that different from the work of an influencer or telemarketer or door-to-door-salesman. If a major indictment of MLMs is that many of their contractors don't seem to actually sell much at all, well—the same could be said of many other jobs today. And the gig economy isn't walled off from the rest: Many Americans still have full-time, union-eligible jobs, but a lot of them dip into temporary or part-time work to make ends meet. The Mary Kay annual meeting features a special cheering moment for teachers who sell makeup on the side. Many of the messages that MLMs adopt to reel in workers rely on a central contradiction, criticizing the corporate grind while extolling the free market. Amway recruiters, for one, have explicitly used anti-establishment language in their pitch: When you're working a 9-to-5, you are in the 'rut,' but when you break free and set your own hours, you are living 'the dream.' In fact, you are often forsaking security for precarity—or worse. As Read and others have written, the opportunity quickly becomes a disaster for all but a very lucky few. MLMs and their boosters deny that the companies are pyramid-shaped—Amway, according to one hagiographer, is shaped more like 'a flower.' But each, in Read's telling, also takes the form of a fun-house mirror. Throughout the history of MLMs, contractions and collapses in the broader economy have been good for them. Direct selling was hailed as 'counter-cyclical' and 'depression-proof' during the 1930s, Read notes. In the 1970s, widespread white-collar layoffs and looming stagflation presented another opening. 'In the direct selling business hard times are good times,' the founders of Amway wrote in a 1974 edition of their corporate magazine. In more recent decades, the sector's free-market ethos dovetailed with new cultural moods: MLMs both shaped and reinforced the values of the greed-is-good 1980s, as well as the self-help-obsessed aughts and the 'grindset' ethos that followed the 2008 recession. Seizing opportunities to grow businesses is, of course, what companies have always done. But this industry seized them to advance practices that flirted with, and sometimes qualified as, outright fraud. Read ably explains why these businesses have appealed to generations of underpaid and insecure American workers, and she argues that it's not greed or stupidity that drives people (especially women juggling family responsibilities) into the arms of the schemes but the decline of middle-class stability. MLM opportunities promise what American jobs used to: security, freedom, dignity. Those promises have consistently failed to materialize. But the fact that so many are desperate to get in on the schemes each year is not a credit to the broader job market. A person well served by the economy is unlikely to salivate at the prospect of making extra cash by pushing lipsticks on the side. Today, many workers at more conventional jobs face the havoc of just-in-time scheduling and inconsistent shifts; these employees seek out more flexible arrangements in spite of their downsides. In Read's telling, MLMs are a toxin masquerading as a cure. Among their many ruses is their insistence on a message of empowerment: that participants are 'bosses' or 'owners.' What makes this easier to pull off is the fact that MLM outfits don't have the kind of central, visible leader the public associates with many higher-profile schemes—no Sam Bankman-Fried or Bernie Madoff or Elizabeth Holmes. Read names the leaders who benefit, and in doing so, she delivers a damning portrait of those who take advantage—and she humanizes the people they rip off. Investigating an industry notorious for doublespeak and euphemism, she calls things what they are.
The Hindu
09-05-2025
- General
- The Hindu
DEEP initiative shows spectacular result in Class 12 examinations in Nagapattinam district
Through coordinated efforts by the School Education Department and the district administration under the District Educational Excellence Programme (DEEP), Nagapattinam district has recorded a significant improvement in Class 12 public examination results, climbing from 37th to 11th place in the State rankings — out of 38 districts in Tamil Nadu. The district's overall pass percentage rose from 91.19 in 2023–24 (37th rank) to 96.03 in 2024–25 (11th rank), marking one of the most notable year-on-year improvements in recent years. The district was previously ranked 33rd in 2022–23 with a pass percentage of 90.68 and 28th in 2021–22 with 92.31. Chief Educational Officer M.K.C. Subhashini attributed the progress to a sustained and joint effort. 'Several government school teachers and headmasters dedicated themselves selflessly to support students, especially from marginalised backgrounds.' she said. A major component of the success was 'Project 100', a special initiative under DEEP, which identified 30 consistently low-performing schools over the past three years. In these schools, meetings were held with all stakeholders — including teachers, School Management Committees, panchayat presidents, and village administrative officers — to trace long absentees and give them focused attention. Unique approach While all districts in Tamil Nadu distributed minimum learning materials (MLMs), Nagapattinam adopted a more focused and differentiated strategy for extremely weak students. The district handpicked its best subject teachers to author custom MLM content, forming dedicated WhatsApp groups for all 13 subjects to coordinate efforts. What set Nagapattinam apart was its deliberate simplification of these materials —compressing them further than standard MLMs — to ease anxiety among struggling students. 'We observed that bulky revision notes created fear in weaker students. So we gave them extremely concise, focused notes and repeatedly tested them on just that. This reduced their stress and boosted confidence,' said a government school teacher. The MLM authors collaborated directly with school subject teachers through online meetings to refine content and address doubts. Repeated revision, doubt clearance, and subject-specific mentoring were prioritised for these learners, especially in the final weeks leading to the exam. From last year June onwards, government schools implemented daily 15–25 mark tests and monthly assessments to build writing practice and overcome exam fear. 'By the time students faced the final exam, they were confident and well-prepared,' she added.
