work at Twin Oaks
[I’ve been on the mailing list of the Federation of Egalitarian
Communities for years, starting back in the paper and ink era. I
admire these people for what they’re trying to do, though I could
never live that way myself. Here’s a contribution from the venerable
Twin Oaks on their labor system from the latest FEC newsletter. More:
http://thefec.org/.]
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 (3×5s 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.”