Public Interest Research Group

Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) are U.S. and Canadian non-profit organizations that employ grassroots organizing and direct advocacy on issues such as consumer protection, public health and transportation. Many of the PIRGs are closely affiliated with the Fund for the Public Interest, which conducts fundraising and canvassing on their behalf.

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 (OSPIRG) and Massachusetts (MASSPIRG). 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:

PIRGs on college campuses have historically been funded through the use of automatic billing with a portion of student activity fees in the form of a labor checkoff or in the form of automatically enrolled dues to the association. Students may elect at some institutions to have the fees refunded to them or opt-out, although many students are unaware that this is the case. At some institutions, opting out of the fee only lasts one academic term, requiring students who do not wish to be members and pay dues to have to opt-out. In 1982, the PIRGs established the Fund for the Public Interest (commonly referred to as "the Fund") as its fundraising and canvassing arm.

The student fee 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 Minnesota Public Interest Research Group (MPIRG) automatically receiving a cut of student activity fees.

The Fund For the Public Interest has been subject to lawsuits and accusations of unfair and exploitative labor practices, and it has resisted unionization efforts by its canvassers.

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.