- by paxus
In March of last year, Twin Oaks had a catastrophic fire which destroyed one of our largest businesses and over a million dollars worth of inventory and equipment. Adversity was a teacher, but much of what we learned was surprising. What we did not learn was about the utility of outsiders commenting on our decision-making process on social media. We already knew that was going to be wildly off, from years of experience and this belief was again robustly confirmed after the fire.
When Hawina and i came to Twin Oaks in 1997, the quota was 42 hours per week. Six hours of work everyday of the week. It had been that way for quite some time. Most people when they hear this compare this to their own work week, which is often around 40 hours a week. What most don’t realize is these numbers are not based on the same assumptions. I get labor credits for all manner of things most workers get nothing for – commuting, child care, voting, talking with students about communities, going to the doctor or dentist, political actions, working in the garden, doing dishes, teaching home school and on and on. And i can switch jobs on short notice. Comparing an Oaker’s work week to a mainstream person is an apples to wombats kind of thing.
But one of the things we learned from the fire was that even with all these non-classical work options, 42 hours was too much for many members, especially folks who had not been here very long. We learned this because immediately after the fire the planners decided to drop quota to zero hours a week for about a week and a half and then reduce quota to 35 hours a week for some months as we re-oriented and started to clean up.
While the instant “vacation” was nice, it was the on-going reduced quota that really shook us up and made us rethink our labor situation. A few months into this period of reduced quota we had a community meeting to discuss how we were going to move forward. We did a go-round of the perhaps 40 members attending and what we discovered was there were basically two types of people in the community. Most of the older members present said that the level of quota did not influence their work decisions that much and they did their jobs and the jobs dictated how much they needed to work and this was often over quota. Almost all the older members had significant vacation balances (over 500 hours) which they get from working over quota in a week and which they can use whenever they like to take time off.
The newer members, almost to a person, said that the post fire quota of 35, instead of 42 hours, was a huge relief. That they were able to do more personal stuff, did not have to scramble at the end of the labor week to finish their quota and generally speaking commune life was much more sustainable for them. There was a call to permanently reduce quota.
From an internal accounting perspective, reducing quota is a nightmare. We have a large complex budgeting system which is designed around a 42 hour week, we have hundreds of jobs to fill to keep the place running and we have carefully balanced all these budgets around our population working on average 42 hours a week, cut that by 1/6th and the math collapses.
But the reduction of quota was a double windfall for pensioners. Twin Oaks calculates pension in an unusual way. When you reach age 50 you get one hour of pension, which is reduced from your quota. At 51 you get two hours and so on every year. This elegant system was designed before anyone in the community had reached this age and has been the source of many discussions about its fairness. What the reduction of quota did was basically give a huge benefit to pensioners, because quota was being calculated from the new reduced quota. For example, i was 66 when the fire hit, my quota was 42 – 17 (for my years over 50) which was 25 hours a week. When our quota dropped by 7 hours, my work obligation dropped to 18 hours a week after taking out my pension.
This reduction started a heated discussion about reforming pension as well, which was generally seen as too generous (elegant is not the same as fair). Combined with the fact that it was overwhelmingly older members who had large vacation balances, there was political traction to reduce pension. In the end, the planners dropped the quota to 38.5 hours per week and reduced pension slightly, which was a reasonable compromise. Had we not had the fire, i am sure quota would still be 42 hours a week. The fire helped us become a bit fairer and a bit easier on new members.
Some years back, we cancelled our insurance on our inventory at the warehouse. We had been self insured for years. Putting money instead into the “Fire and Aging Fund” was designed to take on large expenses, especially those related to fires and the medical costs of aging members. We agonized over the decision to drop insurance, but the annual rates had become too high. So we stopped paying it and increased the amount we put into our self-insurance fund. When the fire hit, everyone on reddit, facebook and other social media said we were foolish for not having insurance. They were wrong.
They apparently had not noticed that generally speaking, insurance is a scam. Every insurance company has to price insurance so they make money. Every insurance company is re-insured in case they make a mistake and get a claim they can not cover. And the existing insurance companies get to decide if any type of new insurance is something they want to offer, before anyone else can offer it. Or as the insurance executive who was sitting next to me on a flight once said to me “It is like organized crime, only better because it is legal”.
The trick with self insurance is you need to get through the first few years without an incident, so you can build your own pool to draw from. The communes figured this out decades ago. We have our own funds to cover catastrophic health costs, and with crazy low monthly per member premiums we have been self insuring very successfully for decades. Saving ourselves literally millions of conventional insurance.
Reading through the comments on social media when people find out we were not insured they simply stopped their critical thinking and bought into idea that this nearly criminal solution is the only one available. We made the right choice to stop paying insurance companies. Everyone who has any capacity to self insure should figure out how to establish this.
Naomi Klein wrote The Shock Doctrine about how predatory capitalism uses catastrophes to displace local disadvantaged people to benefit the rich. What are fire proved is that the opposite situation can also arise. Where a catastrophe focuses attention, forces self reflection and permits a group to rebuild better than before. We are certainly not happy to have had the fire, but i am very glad what we learned from it and how we both dropped quota and made pension slightly fairer.
commune life 