wingologA mostly dorky weblog by Andy Wingo2016-03-24T21:49:19Ztekutihttps://wingolog.org/feed/atomAndy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/a simple (local) solution to the pay gaphttps://wingolog.org/2016/03/24/a-simple-local-solution-to-the-pay-gap2016-03-24T21:49:19Z2016-03-24T21:49:19Z

International Working Women's Day was earlier this month, a day that reminds the world how far it has yet to go to achieve just treatment of women in the workplace. Obviously there are many fronts on which to fight to dismantle patriarchy, and also cissexism, and also transphobia, and also racism, and sometimes it gets a bit overwhelming just to think of a world where people treat each other right.

Against this backdrop, it's surprising that some policies are rarely mentioned by people working on social change. This article is about one of them -- a simple local change that can eliminate the pay gap across all axes of unfair privilege.

Ready?

OK here it is: just pay everyone in a company the same hourly wage.

That's it!

on simple, on easy

But, you say, that's impossible!

Rich Hickey has this famous talk where he describes one thing as simple and the other as easy. In his narrative, simple is good but hard, and easy is bad but, you know, easy. I enjoy this talk because it's easy (hah!) to just call one thing simple and the other easy and it's codewords for good and bad, and you come across as having the facile prestidigitatory wisdom of a Malcolm Gladwell.

As far as simple, the substance of equal pay is as simple as it gets. And as far as practical implementation goes, it only needs buy-in from one person: your boss could do it tomorrow.

But, you say, a real business would never do this! This is getting closer to the real issues, but not there yet. There are plenty of instances of real businesses that do this. Incidentally, mine is one of them! I do not intend this to be an advertisement for my company, but I have to mention this early because society does its best to implant inside our brains the ideas that certain ideas are possible and certain others are not.

But, you say, this would be terrible for business! Here I think we are almost there. There's a question underneath, if we can manage to phrase it in a more scientific way -- I mean, the ideal sense in which science is a practice of humankind in which we use our limited powers to seek truth, with hypotheses but without prejudice. It might sound a bit pompous to invoke capital-S Science here, but I think few conversations of this kind try to honestly even consider existence proofs in the form of already-existing histories (like the company I work for), much less an unbiased study of the implications of modelling the future on those histories.

Let's assume that you and I want to work for justice, and in this more perfect world, men and women and nonbinary people will have equal pay for equal work, as will all people that lie on all axes of privilege that currently operate in society. If you are with me up to here: great. If not, we don't share a premise so it's not much use to go farther. You can probably skip to the next article in your reading list.

So, then, the questions: first of all, would a flat equal wage within a company actually help people in marginalized groups? What changes would happen to a company if it enacted a flat wage tomorrow? What are its limitations? How could this change come about?

would it help?

Let's take the most basic question first. How would this measure affect people in marginalized groups?

Let us assume that salaries are distributed inversely: the higher salaries are made by fewer people. A lower salary corresponds to more people. So firstly, we are in a situation where the median salary is less than the mean: that if we switched to pay everyone the mean, then most people would see an increase in their salary.

Assuming that marginalized people were evenly placed in a company, that would mean that most would benefit. But we know that is not the case: "marginalized" is the operative term. People are categorized at a lower point than their abilities; people's climb of the organizational hierarchy (and to higher salaries) is hindered by harassment, by undervalued diversity work, and by external structural factors, like institutionalized racism or the burden of having to go through a gender transition. So probably, even if a company touts equal pay within job classifications, the job classifications themselves unfairly put marginalized people lower than white dudes like me. So, proportionally marginalized people would benefit from an equal wage more than most.

Already this plan is looking pretty good: more money going to marginalized people is a necessary step to bootstrap a more just world.

All that said, many (but not most) people from marginalized groups will earn more than the mean. What for them? Some will decide that paying for a more just company as a whole is worth a salary reduction. (Incidentally, this applies to everyone: everyone has their price for justice. It might be 0.1%, it might be 5%, it might be 50%.)

Some, though, will decide it is not worth paying. They will go work elsewhere, probably for even more money (changing jobs being the best general way to advance your salary). I don't blame marginalized folks for getting all they can: more power to them.

From what I can tell, things are looking especially good for marginalized people under a local equal-wage initiative. Not perfect, not in all cases, but generally better.

won't someone think of the dudes

I don't believe in value as a zero-sum proposition: there are many ways in which a more fair world could be more productive, too. But in the short term, a balance sheet must balance. Salary increases in the bottom will come from salary decreases from the top, and the dudebro is top in tech.

We should first note that many and possibly most white men will see their wages increase under a flat-wage scheme, as most people earn below the mean.

Secondly, some men will be willing to pay for justice in the form of equal pay for equal work. An eloquent sales pitch as to what they are buying will help.

Some men would like to pay but have other obligations that a "mean" salary just can't even. Welp, there are lots of jobs out there. We'll give you a glowing recommendation :)

Finally there will be dudes that are fine with the pay gap. Maybe they have some sort of techno-libertarian justification? Oh well! They will find other jobs. As someone who cares about justice, you don't really want to work with these people anyway. Call it "bad culture fit", and treat it as a great policy to improve the composition of your organization.

an aside: what are we here for anyway?

A frequent objection to workplace change comes in the form of a pandering explanation of what companies are for, that corporations are legally obligated to always proceed along the the most profitable path.

I always find it extraordinarily ignorant to hear this parroted by people in tech: it's literally part of the CS canon to learn about the limitations of hill-climbing as an optimization strategy. But on the other hand, I do understand; the power of just-so neoliberal narrative is immense, filling your mind with pat explanations, cooling off your brain into a poorly annealed solid mass.

The funny thing about corporate determinism that it's not even true. Folks who say this have rarely run companies, otherwise they should know better. Loads of corporate decisions are made with a most tenuous link on profitability, and some that probably even go against the profit interest. It's always easy to go in a known-profitable direction, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to go, nor that all the profitable directions are known.

Sometimes this question is framed in the language of "what MyDesignCo really cares about is good design; we're worried about how this measure might affect our output". I respect this question more, because it's more materialist (you can actually answer the question!), but I disagree with the premise. I don't think any company really cares about the product in a significant way. Take the design company as an example. What do you want on your tombstone: "She made good advertisements"??? Don't get me wrong, I like my craft, and I enjoy practicing it with my colleagues. But if on my tombstone they wrote "He worked for justice", and also if there were a heaven, I would be p OK with that. What I'm saying is, you start a company, you have an initial idea, you pivot, whatever, it doesn't matter in the end. What matters is you relationship with life on the planet, and that is the criteria you should use to evaluate what you do.

Beyond all that -- it's amazing how much wrong you can wrap up in a snarky hacker news one-liner -- beyond all that, the concern begs the question by assuming that a flat-wage arrangement is less profitable. People will mention any down-side they can but never an up-side.

possible flat-wage up-sides from a corporate perspective

With that in mind, let's consider some ways that a flat wage can actually improve the commercial fate of a company.

A company with a flat wage already has a marketing point that they can use to attract people that care about this sort of thing. It can make your company stand out from the crowd and attract good people.

The people you attract will know you're doing the flat-wage thing, and so will be predisposed to want to work together. This can increase productivity. It also eliminates some material sources of conflict between different roles in an organization. You would still need "human resources" people but they would need to spend less time on mitigating the natural money-based conflicts that exist in other organizations.

Another positive side relates to the ability of the company to make collective sacrifices. For example a company that is going through harder times can collectively decide not to raise wages or even to lower them, rather than fire people. Obviously this outcome depends on the degree to which people feel responsible for the organization, which is incomplete without a feeling of collective self-management as in a cooperative, but even in a hierarchical organization these effects can be felt.

Incidentally a feeling of "investment" in the organization is another plus. When you work in a company in which compensation depends on random factors that you can't see, you always wonder if you're being cheated out of your true value. If everyone is being paid the same you know that everyone's interest in improving company revenue is aligned with their own salary interest -- you can't gain by screwing someone else over.

limitations of a flat wage at improving justice

All that said, paying all workers/partners/employees the same hourly wage is not a panacea for justice. It won't dismantle patriarchy overnight. It won't stop domestic violence, and it won't stop the cops from killing people of color. It won't stop microagressions or harassment in the workplace, and in some ways if there are feelings of resentment, it could even exacerbate them. It won't arrest attrition of marginalized people from the tech industry, and it won't fix hiring. Enacting the policy in a company won't fix the industry as a whole, even if all companies enacted it, as you would still have different wages at different companies. It won't fix the situation outside of the tech industry; a particularly egregious example being that in almost all places, cleaning staff are hired via subcontracts and not as employees. And finally, it won't resolve class conflict at work: the owner still owns. There are still pressures on the owner to keep the whole balance sheet secret, even if the human resources side of things is transparent.

All that said, these are mainly ways in which an equal wage policy is incomplete. A step in the right direction, on a justice level, but incomplete. In practice though the objections you get will be less related to justice and more commercial in nature. Let's take a look at some of them.

commercial challenges to a flat wage

Having everyone paid the same makes it extraordinarily difficult to hire people that are used to being paid on commission, like sales people. Sales people drive Rolexes and wear Mercedes. It is very, very tough to hire good sales people on salary. At my work we have had some limited success hiring, and some success growing technical folks into sales roles, but this compensation package will hinder your efforts to build and/or keep your sales team.

On the other hand, having the same compensation between sales and engineering does eliminate some of the usual sales-vs-product conflicts of interest.

Another point it that if you institute a flat-wage policy, you will expect to lose some fraction of your highly-skilled workers, as many of these are more highly paid. There are again some mitigations but it's still a reality. Perhaps more perniciously, you will have greater difficulties hiring senior people: you literally can't get into a bidding war with a competitor over a potential hire.

On the flip side, a flat salary can make it difficult to hire more junior positions. There are many theories here but I think that a company is healthy when it has a mix of experiences, that senior folks and junior folks bring different things to the table. But if your flat wage is higher than the standard junior wage, then your potential junior hires are now competing against more senior people -- internally it will be hard to keep a balance between different experiences.

Indeed junior workers that you already have are now competing at their wage level with potential hires that might be more qualified in some way. An unscrupulous management could fire those junior staff members and replace them with more senior candidates. An equal wage policy does not solve internal class conflicts; you need to have equal ownership and some form of workplace democracy for that.

You could sort people into pay grades, but in many ways this would formalize injustice. Marginalized people are by definition not equally distributed across pay grades.

Having a flat wage also removes a standard form of motivation, that your wage is always rising as you get older. It could be that after 5 years in a job, maybe your wages went up because the company's revenues went up, but they're still the same as a new hire's -- how do you feel about that? It's a tough question. I think an ever-rising wage has a lot of negative aspects, including decreasing the employability of older workers, but it's deeply rooted in tech culture at least.

Another point is motivation of people within the same cadre. Some people are motivated by bonuses, by performing relatively well compared to their peers. This wouldn't be an option in an organization with a purely flat wage. Does it matter? I do not know.

work with me tho

As the prophet Pratchett said, "against one perfect moment, the centuries beat in vain". There are some definite advantages to a flat wage within a company: it's concrete, it can be immediately enacted, it solves some immediate problems in a local way. Its commercial impact is unclear, but the force of narrative can bowl over many concerns in that department: what's important is to do the right thing. Everybody knows that!

As far as implementation, I see three-and-a-half ways this could happen in a company.

The first is that equal pay could be a founding principle of the company. This was mostly the case in the company I work for (and operate, and co-own equally with the other 40 or so partners). I wasn't a founder of the company, and the precise set of principles and policies has changed over the 15 years of the company's life, but it's more obvious for this arrangement to continue from a beginning than to change from the normal pay situation.

The second is, the change could come from the top down. Some CEOs get random brain waves and this happens. In this case, the change is super-easy to make: you proclaim the thing and it's done. As a person who has had to deal with cash-flow and payroll and balance sheets, I can tell you that this considerably simplifies HR from a management perspective.

The third is via collective action. This only works if workers are able to organize and can be convinced to be interested in justice in this specific way. In some companies, a worker's body might simply be able to negotiate this with management -- e.g., we try it out for 6 months and see. In most others you'd probably need to unionize and strike.

Finally, if this practice were more wider-spread in a sector, it could be that it just becomes "best practice" in some way -- that company management could be shamed into doing it, or it could just be the way things are done.

fin

Many of these points are probably best enacted in the context of a worker-owned cooperative, where you can do away with the worker-owner conflict at the same time. But still, they are worth thinking of in a broader context, and worth evaluating in the degree to which they work for (or against) justice in the workplace. But enough blathering from me today :) Happy hacking!

Andy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/time for moneyhttps://wingolog.org/2013/06/25/time-for-money2013-06-25T08:19:02Z2013-06-25T08:19:02Z

Good morning!

This is the third in my series of articles on working for/in/on/at a worker's cooperative. The previous one is here; eventually I will update the first to link to them all.

a message of pottage

Today's article is about compensation! You know, pay, salary, that kind of thing. This is such a strange topic that perhaps you will permit me to wax philosophical for a moment.

Most of us in our salaried lives are accustomed to see the checks coming in, as if it were the natural, normal relationship between human beings: organizations depositing money in people's bank accounts at regular intervals.

However, salary is an epiphenomenon. At the most basic level a business has to get sales and deals coming in, and this is a much more chunky endeavor: a big contract here for 8 people for 6 months, a two-week engagement for one person there, and so on. Whereas we can try to convince ourselves of the reality of "payroll" as a kind of constant flow of expenses, income is more often dealt with particle-by-particle, not as a fluid.

Salary, then, is a kind of damping function between the uncertainties of income and most people's desire for regularity and certainty. It also serves as a way for an owner to hide income from workers. The point of employment is for a business to pay someone to provide value, and that the value be greater than the pay; if most workers realize this, they will (and should!) negotiate up or change jobs.

So the question to ask in a worker-owned, self-managed cooperative is, "should we even have salaries?" If workers are responsible for securing income, and ultimately receive all of the income (minus fixed expenses), could it be that creating the illusion of certainty and predictability via salaries might actually be bad for the business? It could be that salary as a flow abstraction over chunky income would isolate a worker from the needs of the business.

We don't talk about these things much, because we're used to the current situation, which I'll explain below. But I wanted to bring up this point because salary like other aspects of the business isn't really decided a priori; it's all up for collective agreement. Granted, it is hard to get people interested in a topic on which they have already had long arguments, even if that was before you joined the group; perhaps rightfully so. But it is all open.

equity

The theory in Igalia is that we pay everyone the same. Everyone should be working with approximately the same effort, and everyone should be working on something that is valuable to the business (whether in the short-, medium-, or long-term), and so everyone should share in the income to an equal extent.

The reality, as always, is a bit more complicated.

I live in the Geneva area: actually in France, but 10 minutes' walk to the Swiss border. I moved here for my partner, who came here for professional reasons, and though I was very uncomfortable in the beginning, it is growing on me. One of the good things about living here is that I'll never be shocked by any price anywhere ever again. Things are expensive here. Anyone who moves here from elsewhere learns a bit of economy, but that only goes so far; the simple fact is that for a similar quality of life, you pay much more in Geneva than you do in Barcelona.

Finding an equitable solution to this problem is an ongoing topic, though we think we have something workable currently. The basic idea is start from a per-location "base salary", and all aim for a common "target salary".

A base salary corresponds to the amount that a person in (say) San Francisco needs to live, below which they would probably have to find another job. The current way to calculate that is partly a function of rent prices, and partly uses some cost-of-living indexes from numbeo.com. We all agree on the target salary as a number that we'd all be happy with, that could let someone live well anywhere.

Depending on how our income is going, we pay someone their base salary plus a fraction of the difference between the global target and their specific base salary. That fraction (the "bonus percentage") is the same for all workers. In that way, in times of plenty we're all getting the same good amount, corresponding to our equal value to the company, and in times of tight cashflow we all have what we need.

As I mentioned in my last article, Spanish workers are salaried, whereas folks in other places are freelance. Freelancers get an additional 30% or so in their income, corresponding to the amount that Igalia pays in social security and other tax for its Spanish employees.

Amusingly, we can't actually codify the base-and-target regime into the legal salary structure for Spanish workers. In Spain the various industrial sectors have collective bargaining between workers and employers to set minimums on the standard contracts, and the base salary for the IT sector is above a Spanish base salary as currently calculated. So although the usual total salary for a Spanish worker is much higher than the negotiated minimums, we can't actually formulate the contracts in that way. As I understand it, this is an example of the kind of restrictions imposed by being a legal corporation rather than a legal cooperative. The funny thing is that Igalia is not a legal cooperative precisely to allow its workers to live anywhere in the world -- a cooperative has to be 85% owned by its employees -- but naturally Spanish employment law doesn't do anything to help foreign contractors, and being a corporation is inconvenient for an organization that is practically a cooperative.

effort and value

Oddly enough, I don't remember anyone ever saying why it is that we pay everyone the same. "Paying everyone the same" is a strategy, not a principle, and as you see it's not even the strategy that we have, given the cost-of-living adjustments described above.

However, if I have to back-justify a principle -- and I do think it is necessary -- I think it is that we pay according to effort, assuming the work is valuable.

Effort is measured in hours, as recorded in a time tracker. Although the time tracker is useful for "management" if that word can be used in a non-pejorative sense -- "is this person able to spend enough time on commercially useful things, or are other things taking up their time?" -- the primary use of the time tracker is to document the time that someone spends at work, so they can get paid for it, and so that we know that everyone is showing similar effort.

It can happen that a person works too much, and in that case we sum up hours at the end of a year and either arrange for that person to have some paid time off, or pay them an extra month or two. This is a very tricky thing, because 40 hours a week is already quite a lot -- many of us would like to reduce this -- and you don't want someone burning out due to overwork, or spending their time on unproductive things. At the same time, it does happen that people do overtime, so we have to deal with it.

The caveat that "assuming the work is valuable" is important, and it touches on the topic of value. It is the collective responsibility of the business to ensure that people are working on valuable things. There are many kinds of value, and not all of them are measured in euros. For instance, working on and around Free Software is one of our values. Doing technically interesting work is also a value, one that compensates us not only as craftspeople but also as a business, through good marketing.

However, not all technically interesting, Free Software projects are equally valuable to the business. Some have customers that pay more than others, and it's the responsibility of the assembly to ensure that people are generally working on things that make economic sense. That doesn't mean there must be a short-term return; for instance, I've heard of a number of different people working on really advanced projects whose budget came out of the marketing department. Nonetheless, in the end, we have to get people to work on technology that sells.

We don't talk very much about it, but not everyone produces the same value to Igalia, even exhibiting the same effort in valuable work areas, and factoring in the intangible value of some projects. I think the current perspective is that this is a problem that we address through training. This has worked out well in the past, for example building out a formidable WebKit team out of people that were specialized in other technological areas. It is an ongoing experiment, though.

Some people suggest that differing compensations are important in a cooperative as a feedback mechanism and to ensure that the worker is actually producing surplus value for the company. For example, Valve's new employee survival guide describes their strategy:

Unlike peer reviews, which generate information for each individual, stack ranking is done in order to gain insight into who’s providing the most value at the company and to thereby adjust each person’s compensation to be commensurate with his or her actual value.

Valve does not win if you’re paid less than the value you create. And people who work here ultimately don’t win if they get paid more than the value they create. So Valve’s goal is to get your compensation to be “correct.”

While I can appreciate this on a business level, when viewed as a social experiment in post-revolutionary life, this is somewhat unsatisfying. Sure, some kind of signalling around effort is useful to have; for me, all socially valuable effort that my colleagues do is acceptable, from 10h/week to 50h/week, though my personal target is in between. Peer review can be an effective input to an assessment of effort and thus compensation. But I am uncomfortable correlating compensation with value, especially market value. I have more sympathy with the "democratic planning" side of things rather than "market socialism"; see this article by Robin Hahnel for some more cogent thoughts in this regard.

bottom line

It's easy to forget when in the thicket of debates over how best to pay people what a pleasure it is to be able to discuss these things without class antagonisms -- without trying to take advantage of management, because we are the management, or exploit the workers, because they are we too. Good riddance to that taboo about not discussing salaries among co-workers. I don't believe that a perfect compensation plan exists, but I am very happy with our ability to argue about it at any time, without fear of reprisals.

I have a couple more topics to write about in the next post or two, but if there is anything you want me to cover, let me know in the comments. Cheers.

Andy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/but that would be anarchy!https://wingolog.org/2013/06/13/but-that-would-be-anarchy2013-06-13T07:55:24Z2013-06-13T07:55:24Z

Good morning, internets!

This is the second of a series of articles on what it's like to work for/in/with a cooperative; the first one is here. Eventually I'll update the first one to link to the whole series, whereever it goes.

I work for a worker's cooperative, Igalia. This article series is about moving beyond theory to practice: to report on our experience with collective self-determination, for the curious and for the interested. It's a kind of exercise in marketing the revolution :) I hope I can be free from accusations of commercial interest, however; for better or for worse, our customers couldn't care less how we are organized internally.

the ties that bind

The essence of a worker's cooperative is to enable people to make decisions about their work to the degree to which they are affected by those decisions. For decisions affecting the whole group, you need collective deliberation. You could think of it as workplace democracy, if you understand democracy to go beyond simple voting and referenda.

Collective decision-making works, but you need some preconditions -- see for example conditions for consensus, from this excellent article on consensus. More so than any other enterprise, a cooperative needs to have a set of goals or principles that binds all of its members together. In Igalia, we have a rather wordy document internally, but it's basically a commitment to finding a way to let hackers work on interesting things, centered around free software, in a self-organized way. Everything else is just strategy.

structure

There are two more-or-less parallel structures in Igalia: one for decision-making and one for work. There is also a legal structure that is largely vestigial; more on that at the end.

The most important structure in Igalia is the "assembly". It's composed of all workers that have been in Igalia for a certain amount of time (currently 1 year, though there are discussions to shorten that period).

The assembly is the ultimate decision-making body, with power over all things: bank accounts, salary levels, budgets, strategies, team assignments, etc. All company information is open to all assembly members, which currently comprises all of the people in Igalia.

The assembly meets in person every two months at the head office in A Coruña, with the option for people to dial in. Since many of us work in remote locations and just communicate over mail and jabber, it's good to see people in person to renew the kind of personal connections that help make agreement easier. Incidentally, this requirement for group face-to-face meetings influenced the architecture of our head office; there is a dividable room there that can be expanded into a kind of "round table" with microphones at all the posts. You can see a picture of it on the about page.

The in-person assemblies are usually a bit abstracted over day-to-day operations and focus more on proposals that people have brought up or on strategy. Sometimes they are easy and quick and sometimes they go late into the night. The ones associated with longer-term planning like the yearly budgeting assemblies are the longest.

How well does this work, you ask? I would summarize by saying that it works OK. There are so many advantages to collective decision-making that I now take for granted that it is difficult to imagine other ways. However, making decisions is hard on a personal level: it's a challenge to hold all of the ideas in your head at one time, and to feel the right level of responsibility for the success of the business. I'll write another article on this point, I think, because it is also part of the cooperative working experience.

"The assembly" is both the bimonthly meeting and also the body of people. We're all on a mailing list and a jabber channel, which is where a lot of the other day-to-day business decisions get made, like "do we accept this contract", "should we hire people soon", "should we hire X person in particular", etc. However with some 40 people it's tricky to establish an active consensus on a mailing list, so it's usually the people that lead with proposals and actively round up people to help them implement that get things done.

work groups

So that's the power structure in Igalia. However on a day-to-day level, unless a thread is really active on the assembly mailing list, folks just do their jobs. Sounds silly but it has to happen. We're organized into teams, like in a normal company, but without managers -- we also do consensus on a smaller, more informal level within the teams.

Since we're a consulting shop, most people write code all day, but there are also people that primarily focus on other things: sales, team coordination (who's available for what work when?), administrative work, finance and cash-flow monitoring, etc. This broader team allocation is also a result of consensus. (You can see the theme here.) Ideally we rotate around the "coordinator"-type jobs so everyone stays fresh, hacking-wise, and we don't entrench these informal power structures. We've done some of that but could do more.

I've heard people say that "if you don't have a boss, the customer is your boss", but that's simply not true for us in any of the ways that matter. Our working conditions, pay, holidays, hours -- all of this is up to us. Yes, we have to do good work, but that's already an expectation we have of ourselves as hackers. It's a much healthier perspective to consider your customer to be your partner: both providing value for the other. If this isn't the case, we should find other partners, and happily in our particular industry this is a possibility. (More on cooperatives, capitalism, and crisis in a future post.)

legalities

As I said in the beginning, the important thing is that a group share principles, and agree periodically on the strategy to implement them. In that light, the particular legal structure of Igalia is an afterthought, though an important one.

Although Spanish law explicitly provides for cooperatives as a kind of legal entity, Igalia is organized as a limited-liability corporation. The reasons are not entirely clear to me, and periodically come up for debate. One of the issues, though, is that in a cooperative, 85% of your partners have to be Spanish residents, and we did not want that restriction.

Spanish workers are employees of Igalia, and folks outside of Spain are freelancers. However once you've been in the assembly for an amount of time, currently 2 years (way too long IMO), you have the option to become a legal partner in the business, purchasing an equal share of the business at a fixed price. I say "option" but it's also an expectation; the idea is that being a partner is a logical and natural outcome of working at/with/on/in Igalia. We have partners in a number of countries now.

You see my confusion with prepositions, and it's because you have to fit all of these ideas in your head at the same time: working for Igalia as an employee, on it as a project, with it as a partner, at it as a social experiment, etc.

Partners are the legal owners of Igalia, and there are about 30 of them now. They meet every few months, mostly to assess the progression of "prepartners" (those in the assembly but not yet partners, like myself). Ideally they don't discuss other things, and I think that works out in practice. There is a small power differential there between the partners and the assembly. However all the really important things get done in the assembly.

Finally, since Igalia is an S.L. (like an LLC), there is a legal administrator as well -- someone who's theoretically responsible for the whole thing and has to sign certain legal papers. In fact we have three of them, and the positions rotate around every three years. If we were a legal cooperative we could remove this need, which would be convenient. But that's how it is right now.

domination

I want a society without hierarchical power: no state, no military, no boss. But that would be anarchy, right? Well yes, of course that's what it would be! "Anarchy" doesn't equate to a lack of structure, though. It's true that Igalia is embedded in capitalism, but I think it and other cooperatives are a kind of practical anarchy, or at least a step along the path.

I'll close this epistle with a quote, in Chomsky's halting but endearing style. The whole interview is well worth a read.

Anarchism is quite different from that. It calls for an elimination to tyranny, all kinds of tyranny. Including the kind of tyranny that's internal to private power concentrations. So why should we prefer it? Well I think because freedom is better than subordination. It's better to be free than to be a slave. Its' better to be able to make your own decisions than to have someone else make decisions and force you to observe them. I mean, I don't think you really need an argument for that. It seems like ... transparent.

The thing you need an argument for, and should give an argument for, is, How can we best proceed in that direction? And there are lots of ways within the current society. One way, incidentally, is through use of the state, to the extent that it is democratically controlled. I mean in the long run, anarchists would like to see the state eliminated. But it exists, alongside of private power, and the state is, at least to a certain extent, under public influence and control -- could be much more so. And it provides devices to constrain the much more dangerous forces of private power. Rules for safety and health in the workplace for example. Or insuring that people have decent health care, let's say. Many other things like that. They're not going to come about through private power. Quite the contrary. But they can come about through the use of the state system under limited democratic control ... to carry forward reformist measures. I think those are fine things to do. they should be looking forward to something much more, much beyond, -- namely actual, much larger-scale democratization. And that's possible to not only think about, but to work on. So one of the leading anarchist thinkers, Bakunin in the 19th cent, pointed out that it's quite possible to build the institutions of a future society within the present one. And he was thinking about far more autocratic societies than ours. And that's being done. So for example, worker- and community- controlled enterprises are germs of a future society within the present one. And those not only can be developed, but are being developed.

The Kind of Anarchism I Believe In, Noam Chomsky, 28 May 2013

Andy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/no masterhttps://wingolog.org/2013/06/05/no-master2013-06-05T13:35:31Z2013-06-05T13:35:31Z

It's difficult for anyone with an open heart and a fresh mind to look at the world without shuddering at its injustices: police brutality, obscene gaps between rich and poor, war and bombs and land mines, people without houses and houses without people. So much wrong! It is right and natural not only to feel revulsion, but to revolt as well. Fight the man! Down with the state! No god, no master!

So to those working against foreclosures and evictions of families in your neighborhoods, more power to you. Fight the good fight.

However, revolt is unfortunately not sufficient. We must also think beyond the now and imagine a better world: life after the revolution.

I'm sure I've lost some of you now, and that's OK. We are all at different points of political consciousness, and you can't speak to all at the same time. Some of the words like "revolution" probably bother some people. It sounds strident, right? But if you agree (and perhaps you do not) that there are fundamental problems with the way the world works, and that symptoms like banks kicking families out of houses using riot police are ultimately caused by those problems, then any real change must also be fundamental: at the foundation, where the roots are. Radical problems need radical solutions. Revolution is no more (and no less!) than a radically different world.

For me, one of these roots to dig up is hierarchy. I take as a principle that people should have power over and responsibility for decisions to the extent that they are affected, and hierarchy is all about some people having more power than others. Even if you do away with capitalism, as in the early Soviet Union, if you don't directly address the issue of hierarchy, classes will emerge again. A world in which some people are coordinators and other people are workers will result in a coordinator class that gradually accretes more and more power. Hierarchy is in essence tyrannical, though any specific instance may be more or less so.

On the other side of things, hierarchy deadens those at the bottom: the listless students, the mechanical workers, the passive and cynical voters. The revolution has to come about in a way that leaves people more alive and curious and energetic, and that seems to correspond not only with greater freedom but also with personal responsibility. I think that a world without hierarchy would be a world whose people would be more self-actualized and self-aware, as they would have more responsibility over the situations that affect their lives and those around them.

Well. I don't want to wax too theoretical here, in what I meant to be an introduction. I've been having these thoughts for a while and finally a couple years ago I decided to join in a collective experiment: to practice my chosen craft of computer programming within a cooperative context. I haven't had a boss since then, and I haven't been the boss of anyone. I'm not even my own boss. There are no masters!

I've gotten so used to this way of working that sometimes I forget how unusual it is to work in a cooperative. Also, we're usually too busy hacking to write about it ;) So in the next few articles I'll take a look at the internal structure of our company, Igalia, and try to give some insight into what it's like working in a cooperative.