Agreements and Policies #3

by Raven

3: Work and Labor

Every community requires work.  Most communities try to divide the work up equally or compensate those who do more work.

Here’s where there is a big difference between the communes (income-sharing communities) and the rest of the communities.  Within an income sharing community, money is irrelevant (although it certainly matters when the commune is dealing with the outside world).  In an income-sharing community, work is the currency.   This plays out in how labor and work function within these communities.

In non-income-sharing communities(co-op houses and cohousing for example), there is still a need to get work done.  I haven’t lived in cohousing but my understanding is that a lot of this gets done through committees.  In co-op houses, work becomes chores.  Since most folks work outside of the house for pay and use that to pay the bills, chores are necessary to get the work that the co-op needs done.  Cooking is a chore, shopping is a chore, and cleaning is a chore.

Chore wheel examples

How these chores get done in a fair way varies from co-op to co-op.  Some use the infamous chore wheel (above)–one week you need to clean a certain area, the next week it’s your turn to shop, etc.  Since cooking is needed several to seven nights a week, usually everyone has a different night to cook.  Many co-ops these days use fixed chores.  One person takes care of the trash and recycling, while another is responsible for cleaning the yard, for example.  The advantage of fixed chores is that you get to focus on an area (perhaps one that you are good at and/or enjoy) and if something isn’t being done, it’s obvious who is responsible.

I often say that chores don’t exist in a commune. Since no one works for themselves, it’s all community work.  Work that earns money benefits the commune.  Cooking, cleaning, etc, benefit the commune.  Generally all work is equally valued and often you get to choose what you want to do and when you want to do it.

In the bigger communes (the Kat Kinkade communes so to speak, Twin Oaks, East Wind, and Acorn) they track labor hours.  At Twin Oaks they use labor sheets and keep careful track.  Acorn was more loose about it although I know that they were recently (at least a couple of years ago) experimenting with labor sheets and more careful tracking of hours.  Last I checked, Twin Oaks and Acorn required 42 hours of work a week and East Wind required 35.  However this work could be anything the community needed: work that brought in money, cooking, cleaning, building, laundry, road and path maintenance, fixing things, etc.  (Although I think that East Wind has a requirement that a certain amount of the work be done in a money making area.)  All work is equivalent–an hour of work is an hour of work no matter what the work is.  

Filling out a Twin Oaks labor sheet

Twin Oaks justifies its 42 hour requirement by pointing out that if you are in the mainstream and work 40 hours at a job, you still need to cook and clean (and often fix things or pay for it) for yourself and that is quite a few more hours.  At Twin Oaks, you don’t need to cook unless that’s what you want to do for your hours, and you don’t even need to do laundry if you participate in their communal clothes system.

The smaller communes do things a bit differently.  My understanding is that Sandhill didn’t track hours and they certainly don’t at Glomus Commune and we aren’t doing it in the little community that I am now part of.  Of course, we want to be fair but there are other ways of making sure that work is at least somewhat equitably distributed.

When I was at Glomus we used three different ways of paying attention to the distribution of labor.  The first (and generally what we do here) was in a small commune, it’s not hard to know what everyone is doing.  Secondly, there was a section of the weekly meeting where folks reported what they had been up to.  And third, and I think key, we had a yearly ‘Roles and Goals’ report where people talked about what they saw as the work they were doing and what they hoped to achieve over the next year.  (We recently looked at all our different roles here and it was very helpful to see what each person was doing.)  

Something that I also noticed at Glomus and is true here as well is that you don’t need to worry about people doing the work if people are doing stuff they really want to do.  The farmers worked long hours because that’s what the farm required and they were dependent on each other–and they all really wanted to farm.  I’ve noticed it here as well.  Each of us is doing the work we are committed to, because we are committed to it, not because we have some predetermined set of hours.

Glomus farmers at work

I am going to recommend this for anyone trying to start an income-sharing community.  Tracking is necessary in a larger community but no community starts off large.   If you are starting as a small community, trust and paying attention to each other is what’s important in a labor system.  Talk about what each person wants to do and see if that makes sense.  Look at the gaps–what things still need to get done.  Who will do them?  How do you make sure that it’s all fair, that no one is overworking and that no one is really slacking off?  As I said, it’s hard to really slack off in a small community without other folks noticing.  And if someone really doesn’t want to work, they probably don’t belong in the community.

Unfortunately, community building and community maintenance is work, sometimes hard work–but I think that it’s also satisfying work.  If you are starting a community, talk about your labor system.  Figure out a way to get everything the community needs done (including bringing in enough money to survive) and figure out who is going to do what.  Write it down.  This is the beginning of your labor policies.

I will look more at money and how communities deal with it in my next post on Agreements and Policies.