THEREFORE ordinary resolutions will be created to approve each person above as a Worker Member.
If we overlooked your work in the past 2 years please reply and you can be added to the list.
If you are listed above and not interested in becoming a worker member, please reply. Regardless, even if you get approved at the AGM you are of course free to leave worker membership.
If approved, I suppose those of us who are also Music-Maker Members will have to declare which is our Primary Share Class and which is our Secondary Share Class?
Members may hold more than one class of share. In this case, a Member must choose one Primary Class. At each General Meeting, a Member shall have only one vote as a member of their Primary Class during all proposals requiring an Ordinary Resolution and Special Resolution.
All other classes in which the member holds shares will be their Secondary Class(es). Members may vote in Class Resolutions of all of their Secondary Classes and will participate in all applicable dividend distributions as a member of that class. The Board shall decide the administrative process by which a Member may choose and reassign their Primary Class in the Operating Manual. The Board may determine reasonable cooling-off periods during which a Member may not reassign their Primary Class.
Would worker members have to be voted in by ordinary resolution in the future? Or would the worker-member group be empowered induct ordinary members themselves?
Theyāve been rare. Less than 2/year. But with @psiās work on the Member Register, it may be easier going forward. And I expect that having worker members will make General Meetings easier to organize as well.
An alternative would be to change the Rulebook so that Worker Members could approve new worker members independently, rather than doing so via General Meeting. I think the advantages of this would outweigh the negatives.
In order to be effectively self-managing, Worker Members will already need to establish Worker Assemblies so that they have times to come together and make decisions. Granting the right to approve new Worker Members at such Assemblies makes sense to me.
Really the only concept I see behind doing this at General Meeting is that:
other member classes would have an opportunity to vett a prospective worker member and potentially veto them (by voting to raise the class resolution to a special resolution or poll [I think thatās how that works])
in theory, it could lower the administrative burden? caus there would be fewer meetings in total? maybe?
But that said, the Worker Members themselves would already be vetting the person. It seems pretty farfetched that there would ever be a prospective worker member who most worker members were supportive of, but who was so firmly opposed by either Listener Members or Music-Maker Members that either class tried to put a legislative block on approving them.
If weāve reached that point, there is probably some way bigger conflict going on which needs to be addressed. The veto would be mostly addressing a symptom (and creating a wound in the process). And if it really were a huge enough issue that Listener Members or Music-maker Members felt they needed to remove a Worker Member from the co-op, thereās already an established process for doing so.
Based on my experience, I believe that the more we support worker self-management, the more our capacity will grow, which will make things like organizing General Meetings easier and benefit the rest of the co-op significantly. So supporting the worker class to have empowered Worker Assemblies is essential. If we put up unnecessary bureaucratic blocks on workers self-organizing and getting done what they need to, my expectation is that this will indirectly hurt the other member classesā ability to participate in governance ā like how the administrative burden to setting up General Meetings has resulted in fewer opportunities for voting and engagement.
I think this should be one of the first tasks of the worker member group, if not the first. Having to wait for a general assembly will slow down membership growth, an āunnecessary bureaucratic blockā as you put it, when it should be growing organically.
Edit: Oops, I think I got it wrong. You got to change the rule book for the change to take effect and rule book changes have to be made by resolution, right? So Worker Members couldnāt just decide to do it, theyād have to go through another AGM to make it official.
The vetting process was that some folks chatted about it and made a resolution with an initial list, asking for others to speak up if they want to be added. If you want to suggest folks to be added to the list, go for it
@LLK Iām asking the questions to help clarify terms for causal readers.
Iām thinking about someone dropping in with no context.
āWeā does not mean āResonate Coopā or some formal collection of @workers (unless it does, in which case that would seem like useful information.)
ādoingā again suggests a formal process, āproposingā makes it clear (I think) that this is not a done deal but a proposed Resolution (in draft?) for consideration at the AGM in a couple of weeks.
Sorry if the tone seemed contentious. That was not my intention.
āAlternate processā was misleading. This is not a new process I or anyone else is proposing. According to the operating manual, this, or something very similar to it, is the defined process for how the worker class is launched if there are not already worker members. It is āalternateā in the sense that it not a normal situation to have no worker members.
In terms of āweā, Iāve removed the term and replaced it with āIā. Iām happy to take responsibility for raising the motion. The initial āweā was simply a drafting mistake, since a small group of folks worked on it.
When creating the list, folks were added who have been actively contributing work within the last few months. This wasnāt with an aim to exclude anyone, it was just a sensible initial list. Iāll stress again that the goal of posting this was to get an initial list up so that other people could speak up and get added if they want.
Iāve added everyone you suggested to the list. Thank you for your help.
To clarify, is it any three-month period where these 20 hours of work need to be done? And after qualifying, does a member have to do an additional 20 hours every 3 months? What is the minimum number of unpaid hours to remain a worker member?
Here is the description of what is required of worker members Worker Members
Iāll quote what I think are the relevant bits here.
The minimum qualifying contribution to become a Worker Member is:
[ā¦other tiers of qualificationā¦]
(iii) 20 hours of unpaid work as a volunteer/intern of Resonate over a three month period
[ā¦details about how to activate the membershipā¦]
A Worker Member must complete a qualifying contribution every two years to retain membership in this class.
[bold emphasis mine]
I guess it doesnāt specify when that 20 hours of 3 months of work has to happen to gain worker membership initially, but it does say that it elapses after 2 years if more work hasnāt been done to retain it. I guess this ties into the project of tracking work hours.
