Hi all! This is a brilliant and much needed initiative - THANK YOU. I have many questions and challenges to share and discuss, so I thought I would try opening up a conversation
One challenge we came up against a lot was our collective and transparent processes (e.g. around budgeting or accountability) feeling distressing, particularly to our members who already feel monitored because State institutions force them to share loads of personal information (to get social security at the jobcentre, or asylum status through home office). People spoke about how exposing and shaming that can feel, and how they avoid anything that reminds them of it (even ‘benign’ things like accessing children’s centres).
For fair budgeting processes (like trying to implement a wage structure that reflects people’s needs) or accountability processes and good mutual support we need to understand each others contexts … but (and this is my question for the forum please ) how do we stop this feeling like another violation of people’s right to be private about their personal and financial situations?
Especially in groups (like ours) where members have very different economic and social circumstances. I think the risk of feeling exposed (again) is a serious source of anxiety for people and therefore a massive barrier for a lot of people to get involved with non-hierarchical groups using transparent, collective processes. Basically openness and transparency feels different for different people.
Sorry that was long! I am grateful for any thoughts/advice !
The only example I know of is policy I will add to the library in the next few weeks. It’s a needs-based pay policy with a base rate of pay and a series of potential uplifts in %s (e.g. dependents, city living, experience of marginalisation etc.).
The implementation of the policy is just employees self-reporting what their % salary increase should be. That doesn’t require any personal information to be shared directly (though how exposing it is depends on how identifiable the different % increase are, if they’re all different you can kind of reverse engineer and work out what someone is claiming, if they’re all fairly similar that’s less possible). This kind of approach does rely on a lot of trust within the group though.
I would be really interested to know if anyone knows of other examples…
The only example I know of is policy I will add to the library in the next few weeks. It’s a needs-based pay policy with a base rate of pay and a series of potential uplifts in %s (e.g. dependents, city living, experience of marginalisation etc.).
The implementation of the policy is just employees self-reporting what their % salary increase should be. That doesn’t require any personal information to be shared directly (though how exposing it is depends on how identifiable the different % increase are, if they’re all different you can kind of reverse engineer and work out what someone is claiming, if they’re all fairly similar that’s less possible). This kind of approach does rely on a lot of trust within the group though.
I would be really interested to know if anyone knows of other examples…
) how do we stop this feeling like another violation of people’s right to be private about their personal and financial situations?