Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Equitable Work Sharing

[Rob Sandelin (floriferous]

We use your pay or work method for commonhouse cleaning. It is, in my
opinion, not useful to think about equality in work time.  There are people
who really LIKE to garden, and will spend 8 even 10 hours on a weekend
mucking around in the garden. There are others who love to diddle around and
fix stuff and will do so far beyond the level of the disinterested. There
was a guy here who custom crafted a part to fix something, it took him
probably 25 hours to do this, whereas we could have bought the part for
about $50. But he LOVED making that thingy and it was a source of pride and
joy for him, even years later.  

 We don't track what people do other than commonhouse cleaning and if a task
that is important does not get done (which is rare) then we put the word out
via our email list and it seems to happen. We just had our fall work party
and every task on the list got done, and also a few others. I have no idea
who all showed up, I did some work that needed doing and worried not a whit
about who was NOT there.   We do pay an in-house bookkeeper as we found the
complexity and time involved to keep our financial records clean and clear
was more than a volunteer could reasonably accomplish. 

Does everything that could be done get done right away? I don't hold that
expectation so if it takes a year to fix the roof on the shed that got
crunched on the tree that's normal and fine by me. The folks that did the
work had a good time doing it, and THAT is much more important to me.

Some of us had an informal conversation about this over coffee the other day
and it was our analysis that over a yearly cycle people contributed all
kinds of things, each to their own kind, the work generally got done, and
everybody seems to be doing what they enjoy and do best, so its doesn't
really matter if its equitable as long as nobody is being a martyr and doing
more than they want to.  We seem not to have anybody like that, and if we
did somebody would probably tell them to relax, step aside and let somebody
else step up.

A problem we had once involved a couple of people who had grandiose notions
of how things were supposed to be, and since they were kind of workaholic,
overachiever types, they complained that the rest of us did not keep up with
their notions of what should be.  They soon got a new perspective, and got
over it, although one eventually moved away. 

As I always say, I'd rather be happy than equal and I generally never worry
about what other people don't do because I am too busy having fun. 

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood, Snohomish Co, WA
20 years old as of February