Working Together:
Oakers reflect on our labor system
Labor. If there's one thing that ties Oakers together, its the work that we do to contribute to the continuation and upkeep of our community. This includes everything that we deem "labor creditable:" cooking, cleaning, group child care, tofu production, hammock production, gardening, dairy work, and the hundreds of other jobs that we do are valued equally. Moving to Twin Oaks, we each commit to working 44 hours/week (this number fluctuates).
We each have a great deal of autonomy over constructing a labor scene that fits our individual needs and desires.
It's a trust-based system: we track how much of which kinds of work we've done each week. Hours done over or under quota get added to, or deducted from a running vacation balance. Our labor system is a central to the community's functioning, and lately it has been discussed in the community. What follows is a small slice of the wider, ongoing community discussion: six communards give their personal take on our labor system. Share and Enjoy!
Pele- Our labor system is a mix of positive and negative, like virtually everything. I genuinely appreciate our system's dependency upon honesty, cooperation, and equality. One hour of work is worth one labor credit regardless of the type of job.
These same qualities can hurt our labor system, when communards behave disrespectfully and irresponsibly.
This is disheartening to me. I live here for the trust based way that we share our work in order to share the benefits. The labor system's effect on the community is also both positive and negative. We tend to be very work-focused, which can interfere with cultural pursuits.
However, we are highly productive. Our tofu business and garden are the first two examples that come to mind of hard work paying off. Even as a work-focused community, our system offers much more flexibility than the "outside". Each of us is an owner of several businesses, not an employee.
This gives each of us more power and autonomy over our jobs than someone with a boss. Personally, I greatly enjoy the freedom that our system offers. It provides me with the opportunity to hike in the woods for long periods of time. Although getting out of the labor hole (labor debt to the community -ed.) is challenging for me due to my physically demanding work scene, I still wouldn't change our labor system. I live with the consequences of my choices.
Gordon- During my first visit to Twin Oaks, in 1974, there was a well- attended hammock shop meeting on what to do about a member who was 200 hours in the labor hole. As I recall, the member was contrite, yet a slight bit defiant. He wanted to do better, but he didn't think The System was really fair. He could imagine working harder in the abstract, but he clearly had trouble staying motivated in the face of endless hammocks and other day-in, day-out jobs. Some people made supportive suggestions, others felt ripped off and helpless. Some people felt frustrated that the community couldn't prevent this problem from happening again and again.
Twin Oaks has made progress since then. The Labor Hole Policy is pretty good at catching people early who are falling behind. However, the tension continues between our trust-based labor system, built on members picking their own work and pace, versus the tendency of many people to slack off. We very seldom get to the point where we need a public meeting about an individual's work performance; unmotivated people often move themselves on before it gets too bad. So we don't have much practice with confrontational enforcement. Old policies are dragged out. Managers try to remember the way it happened last time. It is slow, and awkward, and the tensions keep building.
But it is important that we do ultimately confront members who are not doing their share. It is just too easy for people to lose energy, lose focus, maybe get depressed, and fall behind. Also, Twin Oaks' fairly open acceptance policy means some new members don't yet have much self-motivation. Usually when people fall behind, the small things (3x5s from the Labor Hole Mother, friends' support, gossip) get us back on track.
If those don't work, the community must face the unpleasantness of O&I papers, feedback meetings, and so on. Otherwise everyone's confidence in the community's institutions and culture is threatened.
Pam- I consider myself as (among other things), a pragmatic socialist. Our labor system offers a simple way of getting necessary tasks done without a lot of daily negotiation - that appeals to my pragmatism. I also appreciate that our system values all kinds of work equally, and shows this by 'paying the same rate' of one labor credit per hour.
I despise the huge range of pay scales in the corporate world. Here we run worker-owned and worker-controlled businesses. How wonderful! No need to compromise our egalitarian values to earn a living. We put domestic, agricultural and organizational work on the same level as money-earning.
Because of sharing income and expenses, we are able to reduce our cost of living to a low level while experiencing a comfortable lifestyle. It frees us from the need to each focus on earning money for 40 hours a week. It enables us to focus on the things we, as a group, have decided are important to us.
And yet sometimes we grumble....
What is there to dislike about such a fair and pleasant way of living? When we forget that we are the engineers of our systems and the participants in our decision-making, and instead cultivate resentments and cynicism about our community, we are choosing to live less fully than we can. Cynicism is a warped choice that allows a person to go along with something they can profess to disagree with strongly, and not do anything to change what they say they don't like. It allows the person to reap all the benefits without making the effort to work for continuous improvement. The price, of course, is a curdled soul - unhappiness that is blamed on what other people do, although it is caused by the mismatch between our ideals and what we ourselves are prepared to actually do.
Some of the foundations of happiness, as I see it, include having a set of ethics you really believe in and live by, and also a plan for your time that is realistic. Our labor system can fit such an approach. It doesn't have to be perfect.
Paxus- PSCs (personal service credits) are our own internal labor currency. If I have a vacation balance from working over quota on average, I can offer some credits to another member of the community in exchange for them doing some work for me. If my friend is good with tools, I can offer them PSCs to build me a piece of furniture. The long standing policy is that PSCs, like the rest of our labor, are granted on a one PSC for one hour of work basis.
However, like many things at Twin Oaks, there has been "norm drift." Can I give you 3 PSCs for a picture it took you an hour to draw, because you had to practice drawing other pictures to get this fast? Can we have auctions where PSCs are used as the currency, completely distinct from the time it actually took to create the object being bid on? Should PSCs be de-linked from the one-to-one policy, since the underlying work to the community has already been done?
Just as a member can choose to spend vacation anyway they want, perhaps they should be permitted to spend PSCs at what ever rate they would like. The debate rages on....
With the loss of Pier 1, our largest hammocks customer, the community has sought to increase other income areas to compensate. One of the fastest growing work areas in the community is Outside Work (OW). OW is labor that members do for someone other than one of our cottage industries. The wages go to Twin Oaks, and the member receives labor credits. The majority of Outside Work's growth has come from more members working off the farm in construction, agriculture, house cleaning and landscaping.
Despite the benefits, there is some internal controversy over OW. It puts a strain on our vehicle fleet, and it often takes people off the farm, degrading the quality of our collective life.
Despite the drawbacks, I still think that OW will continue to be an important part of our collective income.
Shal- A labor credit is earned per hour of work, no matter how much or little is accomplished in that hour. On the positive side, it is a very important part of an egalitarian system to recognize that some people are able to work faster than others, and slower people should not be punished for what they cannot help. This is especially important to me since I am a slow person, and love that I am not punished for that here. It is one of several major reasons why I live here. However, although a faster person's range is different than a slower person's, both have the ability to work quicker or slower. The upper part of that range requires pushing ourselves hard, and most of us would not want to be required to do that since we want to enjoy our work, and we own the place. But much of the range can be done without undo hardship, at least in repetitive jobs (like most of our work), by looking for ways to work more efficiently.
As I see it, it is a major weakness that our system has no built-in incentives for working more efficiently. I think this has the effect of making our community significantly more inefficient than it could be, thus costing us as a community quite a bit of time. I think we could chip away at this problem in a couple of ways. On a formal level, for our repetitive jobs we could teach efficient methods to new members, and hopefully even retrain established members in more efficient methods. And on a more informal level, we could try to create more of a culture of trying to work efficiently for the good of the community, while still working at a humanely comfortable pace. This would serve the community better in that we would get more done per hour. Then we could do more and/or work less.
Apple- Sometimes I hate our labor system. Sometimes I notice that I am comprehending life only through labor credits, deciding what to do with my time based NOT on what I would enjoy doing, or what I think NEEDS doing, but on what I could do that I could write on my labor sheet. Sometimes I find myself looking at what OTHER people are doing for labor credits, and judging myself against them. At times like these, I start to think that the labor system is a gigantic and ugly institution that's slowly crushing me into the ground.
And sometimes I LOVE our labor system. I see freedom within it to chose work that feels good to me, and that differs everyday. I see it as a representation of all the members deciding what is important to us, and agreeing to work on it together, equally, fairly. I see it as the basis of our egalitarian system. I see it as agreements that we individuals have made with each other, out of respect and shared interest.
I struggle with trying to uphold this second view of the system. I want to feel positive about it, and about us. What's important to me is that we get the work done, and we regard each other with respect. I don't think there is any SYSTEM that can make both of these things happen. It is the choices of individuals that make our society work. And on a good day, I DO think our society "works."