Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: hiring labor

[Elizabeth Stevenson (tamgoddess]

Sounds to me like a good old-fashioned case of middle class white guilt.
Nothing to be ashamed of, but it can get in the way of getting things done.
I have lived in cohousing for ten years, and I can tell you without a doubt
that there will be times you need to hire someone to do manual labor.(Did
you mean unskilled labor? There is a difference that may be important to
him. After all, you can mow the lawn yourself, but plumbing requires skills
that most people don't have.)

All of you will have the utmost respect and admiration for someone who can
come in and fix something in an hour that would have taken you hours or days
to fix. And you won't have the luxury of discussing and consensing on fixing
a major water leak before it needs immediate attention. I think you will
need to get more specific with him about exactly what types of things he
feels should be done by the group, and what can be farmed out.

I don't mean to be condescending in this. We have spent much time discussing
these issues as well, and many of us feel that we need to continue to do as
much of the work as we can do ourselves, for other reasons, including
keeping the amount of work that everyone has to do fair, and unaffected by
income.

It may be that he is really opposed to hiring out *unskilled* labor, and
that may be the sticking point. That if it's something you could do
yourselves, it's classist to hire it out. I can see his point. But it can be
a fine and/or arbitrary line what is skilled and unskilled, and talking
about exactly what he means and hammering out where exactly to draw the line
would seem to be the next step.

You will need to do this in any event, whether he has objections or not.
Every group has to decide how much to hire out. Whether or not to hire
anything out is moot. It will have to be done. Unless your man can fix HVAC,
do plumbing, electrical, and anything else that needs to be done, and he has
unlimited time in which to do these tasks.

We do all the unskilled labor here, unless it's a big, one-time job we don't
have time to do. We hire most everything else out. Almost everything falls
into these categories. A few things, like caulking the outside of homes,
people have a choice of whether to do it themselves or hire it out.

I hope these ideas are helpful. It seems to me that you don't have very far
to go to agree on this, you just need to get specific and clear about what
the issue is.


-- 
Liz Stevenson
Southside Park Cohousing
Sacramento, California
tamgoddess [at] attbi.com
> From: Casey Morrigan <cjmorr [at] pacbell.net>
> Reply-To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
> Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2002 18:01:29 -0700
> To: cohousing-l [at] cohousing.org
> Subject: [C-L]_hiring labor
> 
> Anyone have any ideas about this new thread that is probably old?
> 
> We are trying to make up our community minds about budgeting for hired
> labor.  We have one community member that is uncomfortable with hiring
> people to do manual labor on site (landscaping, cleaning, digging). So
> uncomfortable that he's not sure he can live with it in the budget.
> 
> How have others addressed this and resolved it?  I am not a neutral party in
> the discussion.  I cannot figure out how to get the work done, because we
> have lived here three years and neglected lots of stuff and over-relied and
> burnt out a coupla resident people who overdid this work. So I am stuck
> regarding a solution.
> 
> Casey Morrigan
> Two Acre Wood
> Sebastopol, California
> 
> 
> 
> 
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