Re: [autonomo.us] FSF is hiring: outreach and communication coordinator

[Charlie DeTar]

On 05/02/2013 11:13 AM, MJ Ray wrote:
> Danyl Strype <address@hidden>
>> How much autonomy would one really lose working for the FSF? I understand
>> what you're saying about trade unions' role in the state-corporate sytem,
>> and in theory I agree. I do take issue with the idea that working as a
>> contractor or a small company/ co-operative is inherently more autonomous
>> than being an employee. If you are contacting to the same corporation/ NGO,
>> I reckon you'd be better off as a unionized employee, with guaranteed
>> hours, sick days, holidays etc.
> Ultimately, I don't know - I've never worked for the FSF.
>
> I disagree about the "better off as a unionized employee" but I may be
> relying on rules local to England (IR56 and IR35), where there are
> necessary differences in how members of autonomous co-operatives and
> employees or contractors work.  Basically, hirers buy services from
> co-ops, not hours and people.  Of course, hirers need to factor in
> that they're effectively hiring something more resilient than an
> individual.
>

Interesting thread.  Two brief observations:

Re unions/cooperatives: Being union is not incompatible with being a
collective/cooperative businesses.  As an example, the small staff
collective that works at http://nasco.coop is a collective which is also
unionized.  The staff collective negotiates their contract with the
non-profit board of directors as a union, but organizes their work
internally as a democratic collective.  This type of arrangement could
potentially be very compatible with an org like FSF.

Re WebRTC: A super exciting thing I ran across recently: a RTC
audio/video plugin for etherpad: https://github.com/JohnMcLear/ep_rtc .
It's being developed by one of the main contributors to etherpad-lite,
and is installed on http://beta.etherpad.org. It's not very stable yet
(it does nominally work in recent Firefox and Chromium), but it
demonstrates the glorious future of video chat as a pluggable component
of any (potentially free) productivity suite, rather than a destination
monopoly service.

best,
Charlie