Staff Categories

In general staff means anyone who is paid by Free Geek to work at Free Geek. (Note: often when people use the term "staff" they use it as shorthand for "staff collective".)

Workers that get paid through outside agencies (i.e. paid job training programs) and volunteers (even volunteer interns and core volunteers) are not considered staff.

Collective positions

This is the group of people who are hired on a long term basis to oversee all the day to day work at Free Geek. While each member has areas of specific responsibility, each member also takes responsibility on some level for the whole thing. That is, while other staff members can say "not my department -- go bug someone else", collective members have to at least know where to direct issues, and ultimately deal with them if needed. Collective positions are salaried and come with benefits (health care, paid holidays, vacation/sick days, and 401(b).)

Probationary collective members vs. full collective members

Collective members have a six month probationary period, after which they are full collective members. During the probationary period the individual and the collective need to decide if the person is a good match for the position and the collective. When figuring out how long someone has been in the collective we go by the date they were hired into the collective (not the date they gained full status).

There are some concrete duties that all collective members share:

• a collective member must serve on at least one of the Standing Staff Committees. (A full time member serves on two of these committees.)
• a collective member attends and participates in staff meetings, including rotating through the facilitator and scribe roles.
• a collective member takes responsibility for overarching management of organization.
• a collective member has to deal with volunteer complaints and discipline problems as they arise, rather than pass them off to someone else.
• a collective member participates in peer reviews of other staff and collective members.
• a collective member coordinates volunteers as an expected part of their job.

Paid internships

Interns are staff members that work for a limited amount of time in a targeted area. These positions are aimed at people needing job skills, for example young people right out of high school or college. Interns are usually part time workers, and they usually work for about six months. Interns are paid an hourly wage. Being an intern at Free Geek does not lead to a position in the staff collective.

Exploratory positions

Exploratory positions are paid positions that are set up so we can try out a new program and see if it merits a new collective position, an internship, or something else. Workers in these positions are paid an hourly wage.

Substitutes

Substitutes are people that fill in when the schedule has gaps in it due to staff members leaving, getting sick, or taking vacation or leave. There is no guarantee of work continuing or regular work. Substitutes are paid an hourly wage.

Committed non-collective positions

Committed non-collective staff members are paid to work at least 24 hours per week and have negotiated a commitment to work at Free Geek for at least one year with the staff collective. These positions are paid an hourly wage. They receive a week's paid time off (for vacation and sick days) per year, and receive Free Geek subsidized health care benefits.

Nothers

There have been other staff positions than those listed above. For example we have had "contract workers" cover many of the duties of build coordinator, tech support coordinator, and printer coordinator in the past. These people are paid an hourly wage.

Proposed area for policy: There has been some talk about classifying any substitute who works more than a certain amount of hours in a specified amount of time as being automatically classified as a "non-collective" worker. One thought is that when a substitute is added to the regular schedule rather than being used only on an on call basis this would trigger their classification as an "other non-collective" staff member.

Issues, solutions, and ideas

Ideally, a worker collective is an egalitarian group of people where everyone has equal access to decision making. There are limits to how pure we can be with this ethic, however. For instance, we need substitute coverage that is by nature very part time and sporadic, and it's impractical to bring all substitutes, however temporary their status, into the collective.

Another issue arises when someone who contributes well to Free Geek but does not want to take on the added responsibilities that go with being in the collective. Too many people like that fosters a situation where the collective shrinks in size to the point where it's a small group of managers compared to a larger pool of workers, even though no one in the collective wanted that to happen!

We can impose limits that force us to keep things relatively non-hierarchical, however. One idea is to impose ratios.

Ratios

How many collective members vs. interns vs. others do we hire?

Proposed area for policy: There has been some talk of describing allowable ranges of percentages for each type of position.

There are several options for addressing these issues. This is to contain the tendency to develop a hierarchy where a small staff collective (with a lot of power) is running a much larger pool of workers.

Maximum hours paid to substitutes rule

We could impose a maximum of 10% of all hours paid could go to paying substitutes. If we find ourselves going above that percentage, we would need to address the issue by converting a substitute into an "other paid worker" and giving them the regular hours needed. (10% is an arbitrary figure. We should look at current rates, and determine what is practical. People's Coop uses the 10% rule and for the last few months realize they've gone over, maybe to 12% or 13%.

In January and February of 2007, Free Geek's paid hours ratios looked like this:

77.9% Collective Members

0.6% Exploratory Position

9.6% Interns

6.0% Other Regular Workers

5.8% Substitutes)

Minimum percentage of workforce is in the collective

We could impose a minimum of 60% of the workforce (excluding substitutes) in the collective. This would mean that a maximum of 40% of the workers could be interns, exploratory position workers, or other regular workers. If these percentages were violated, then we would need to address the issue by hiring an additional collective member or eliminating a non-collective position (or both). (60% is an arbitrary figure. Currently Free Geek has 13 collective members out or a total 18 non-substitute staff, for 72,2% in the collective. However with one collective member leaving and an intern being hired, the rate drops to 66.7%. If we hire several extra interns without hiring additional collective members the rate would drop even more.)

Taken together these two policies would encourage us to pay attention to the makeup of the staff as Free Geek grows.

Minimum hours floor

Another area that some worker collectives develop policy around is how many hours a collective member must work in order to remain in the collective. For instance, anyone working less than twenty hours per week might be dropped from the collective, as remaining in the collective requires a certain amount of commitment in terms of hours. (20 hours is an arbitrary figure. People's Coop uses the 28 hours and is currently making exceptions for two people.)

Policy Proposal

The staff collective has approved the Staff Ratios proposal.