Membership, companies, and labor hour tracking

[orthecreedence]

A member is someone who works at a member company (worker co-op, uses Basis). This gives them entry into the system. However membership is sliding scale that depends on contribution, and contribution is defined as amount of labor hours.

Ideas/benefits:

• Define a systemic clamp (based on governance) on labor hours: the minimum required to be considered a member at all, and the maximum after which no further benefits are derived.
  • Would likely need to be some form of moving average
  • Would form the basis for setting an explicit and systemic "work week"
• More systemic voting rights for people who track more hours
  • Why should someone who works 3 hours a week have the same input into the system as someone who works 50 hours a week?
  • Would not apply to companies because they are free to manage their own voting rights as they see fit
• Sliding-scale use of shared property (housing, mop) based on hourly work
  • Effectively, determine the market rate (for non-membership) and determine the at-cost rate, and depending on membership ratio based on contribution, charge some amount of rent between market rate and at-cost.
  • Incentivizes full membership, and also derives network profit for those not contributing fully
• UBI pays out by hours worked.
  • As the sufficiency metric (Network self-sufficiency metric #122) increases, UBI (UBI #79) being paid hourly diminishes, and UBI starts being paid, well, universally.

Thoughts/rebuttals:

• What incentive is there for me to not just fill in 40 hours a week no matter what? With wages, it's because the cost needs to be paid by consumers, so I'm incentivized not to inflate my wages. With hours though, if tracking them gives me more systemic privs, what's to stop me from over-reporting?
  • What about some kind of per-company budgeting?
    • Nice idea, but not sure how this would do anything useful
  • Is there a social enforcement aspect here? Ie "you recorded 40 hours but you've only worked 10 hours, how dare you..."
• Hours might need to be clamped: ie, you're only a member if you work more than 8 hours a week, and after working 40 hours a week you get the max privileges. This incentivizes a minimum and maximum work week length to some extent.

[orthecreedence]

There really needs to be a systemic/economic incentive balance for tracking hours. It absolutely does make sense that we do this, because we cannot treat membership as binary, at least not in the beginning, but we need to make sure everyone doesn't just report their time as 40 hours each week. Paying people hourly is a good incentive to this end: you attach the hours worked to the cost of those hours. However, this doesn't work for salary or project-based payment. Needs more thought.

[orthecreedence]

Given the epiphany in raw material tagging (#17) it seems to me the answer is to have some credit cost per hour tracked. Only thing is, I think the cost might have to be a universal agreed-on amount. Otherwise, how does costing work? It could be decided by the company the work happens on, but then we'd have to track occupation-hour-cost instead of just occupation-hour (much huger collection, not doing it, nope). Or we could just move the costing of labor hours to various companies where the consumption takes place, but why wouldn't they just set it to zero? I think until we have some alternative-pricing framework (currently prices are incentivized to revolve around costs), it makes sense to have a fixed costs for labor hours across the board. 1 hour = 1₡. Deal with it.