Scientology officials
Staff hierarchy, practices, personnel of Scientology network From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Staff hierarchy, practices, personnel of Scientology network From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Church of Scientology network operates as a multinational conglomerate of companies with personnel, executives, organizational charts, chains of command, policies and orders.[1][2][3]: 88, 131 [a]
Religious Technology Center is the most powerful executive organization within the Scientology empire, and its current chairman, David Miscavige, is widely recognized as the effective head of the church.
Church of Scientology personnel are bound by policy as written by L. Ron Hubbard and by orders from any senior. Each staff member is junior to those above them on the organizational chart (called an "org board"[4]: 369 ) and is senior to those under them.
Scientology members (also called "public"[b]) are those individuals who are not on staff, who pay the organization for training or auditing services, and who live and work separately from the Church of Scientology.[5]: 70 Members defer to all staff personnel, who are seen as their seniors. All members and staff defer to Sea Org staff. Even though at-large members are not part of the organization proper, they are ranked within the entire chain of command and are frequently pressed into service for clerical or promotional tasks or recruiting new members.[2]: 180 Members who recruit people for Scientology services are called "field staff members" (FSM) and are paid a commission of 10%–15% of the amount the new person pays.[6][7][2]: 181
The recruit is transformed from a client to a follower and from a follower to a deployable agent.
Staff sign employment contracts, though in recent years these contracts label them as volunteers or "religious workers" to circumvent labor laws because staff are almost universally paid less than locally mandated minimum wage. However, all organizational policies written by L. Ron Hubbard refer to such workers as "staff".[8]
These contracts have lengthy durations. At a Class V organization, a contract may be as short as 2.5 years; extending to 5 years or more if they are sent to Flag Service Org for extensive training. Sea Org members sign billion-year contracts; effectively a perpetual contract with no expiration date. Sea Org personnel live in communal housing; Class V staff make their own living arrangements and sometimes even have second jobs.[2]: 182
Staff hold posts where they are either given a small fixed allowance (Sea Org)[9] or are paid based on a share-percentage of the organization's weekly gross receipts.[8][2]: 135–136 [10]: 71 Occasionally, those who work in sales or fundraising posts may have a chance for bonuses. Sea Org members who work for one of the for-profit corporations in the network are paid a minimum wage, reduced by deductions for housing and other expenses, bringing their pay back in line with other Sea Org allowances.
The employees of Hubbard's Org are not merely officials, but also disciples. Hence commitment of staff to the Org is secured by ideological means, replacing the need for the attractions of tenure, secure salary and orderly promotion through a work hierarchy.
Staff are required to keep "stats" (short for "statistics")—a count of their production. They perform weekly evaluations of their own stats and are required to chart the stats on a graph, declare their "ethics condition" for last week's production, and write up their "ethics formula", laying out their plans for the next week. Personnel whose production stats were lower than the prior week, or whose graph shows a general downtrending pattern, are dealt with by the "ethics officer", often with harsh penalties.[5] For example, certain conditions below "Normal" may preclude getting paid at all.[2]: 183
Staff may be punished, though usually for lack of production or insubordination; not usually for basic behavioral matters. In the Sea Org, staff are routinely removed from post and reassigned to the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), a forced labor and re-indoctrination program.[1][9] Removing a staff members completely from the organization is called "offloading".
Sea Org members are heavily discouraged from engaging in any family activities such as the raising of children, and are expected to spend their entire waking hours in service to the Church of Scientology.[1][9]
Further paralleling the institutional order of developed societies, ... Hubbard has strategically used that authority to establish Scientology upon the legal-rational basis of an almost ideal-typical bureaucracy. This social world is run along formal lines defined by "Policy"—the stream of bulletins and material written or authorized by Hubbard, periodically compiled into thick volumes and treated for all intents and purposes as law. Policy specifies every aspect of organizational life.
— Roger Straus in Scientology "Ethics": Deviance, Identity and Social Control in a Cult-Like Social World [5]: 70
Though formal training courses are available for all posts, staff members are expected to be proficient at all times, whether trained or not. All posts have a "hat writeup" ("hat" for short) which consists of Hubbard writings pertaining to that post and other writeups written by those who held the post before.[4]: 244–245
Staff are recruited with promises that they are expected to train or be audited for 2.5 hours per day worked (called "enhancement"),[2]: 182 but in reality enhancement time is usually bumped for the latest emergency—called a "flap" [11]: 284 [4]: 131 —or expected to be performed outside of their normal work hours.
Staff receive Scientology training, and occasionally auditing, on a deferred basis. Invoices are written up for services taken, but no payment is expected while the staff member continues to work for the organization. If they complete their contract, they are pressured to re-commit for another contract term,[12] but if they leave having fulfilled their contract term their deferred invoices are forgiven or waived. While seeming to be free services, if a staff member is offloaded (fired) or breaks their contract by leaving before its term completion, they are immediately invoiced for all services rendered during their employment.[2]: 182 Since Sea Org members sign perpetual contracts, their invoice—called a "freeloader bill"—can be quite high; no waivers or reductions being given for years of service rendered.[9][13]
If a person leaves before their contract termination date without performing specific steps for leaving (called "routing out"[12]), they are considered "blown" and such individuals will often be declared suppressive.
This section contains a select list of some of the current and former officials of Scientology organizations.
This section contains a select list of former officials of a part of Church of Scientology who are known to have left the organization.
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