[sudo-discuss] Cleaning

[Sonja Trauss]

I'm generally with romy - if you have more money than man-hours, you should
use the money to pay people to do things you need done. You do the things
you're good at, pay ppl to do the things you're relatively not good at.
HOWEVER I think sudo room has more man hours than time.

The next step is to make a list of tasks you think should be done during
clean up, and then decide how frequently/ when those things should occur.
Then I'll sign up for maybe two sessions a month. I would 1000% rather pay
dues in labor than in cash.

Part of what you get out of hiring someone is knowing the task will be done
at a certain time. We can get that without hiring though.

The downside of this plan is that there will be uncomfortable times when
individual sudoers will find themselves in the position of being enforcers.
There will be times when you will notice that a person didn't show up for
their shift, or did, but did a bad job. Then you'll have to decide which of
the following two actions you find less distasteful: calling/ emailing the
person to say, 'hey, what gives' or say nothing and do the cleaning
yourself. To me though, this is part of the point of a club like this. If
you don't have dedicated enforcers (cops) then the task of enforcement
falls a little bit on everyone. People hate doing it, that's why we have
dedicated enforcers in so many of our organizations, but here we're trying
to be self governing. Right?

On Thursday, May 16, 2013, Marina Kukso wrote:

> hi romy,
>
> i really appreciate your continuing the discussion on the topic of keeping
> our common area clean, but i was quite offended by you saying "Could we pay
> for a small family owned immigrant cleaning business." i'm really not sure
> why you suggested that it could specifically be an immigrant business...
> it's hard for me to see a reason for you suggesting this that doesn't
> involve stereotypes about who does what kind of labor in our society. if
> i've completely misunderstood or if you'd like more details about my
> perspective, let's talk offthread.
>
> i think that this speaks to my larger discomfort with suggestions about
> paying people to clean our space. part of what we are doing at sudo room is
> learning how to cooperatively manage a resource - something that many of us
> (myself included) have had limited experience doing. from my perspective,
> part of this learning process is learning how to keep things clean so that
> we can all use them and enjoy the space and not alienate our landlord. i
> think there's a tendency in our society to start paying other people to do
> "unpleasant" or "crappy" necessary work when we have the financial means to
> do so and this is all based on ideas about what's "crappy" work and how
> much people should be paid to do this crappy work (the answer is usually
> cheaply...as if it's not worth a lot to clean, take care of children,
> prepare food, and do other things that our society has considered "crappy"
> at different times in history). but we can choose to reorient our
> conception of cleaning from "crappy work that no one wants to do" to "we
> are learning how to work together to manage a resource that is for all of
> our benefit." with that perspective, keeping the space clean becomes less
> of a problem to solve and more of an interesting question - how do we take
> a bunch of people with different ideas about "clean" and different feelings
> about their responsibility to the space and create the conditions that help
> everyone feel ownership of the space to the point where it becomes apparent
> that maintaining it is a key part of keeping it usable? and what kinds of
> mechanisms can we use to help people participate in maintenance of the
> space?
>
> not everybody is interested in that kind of challenge, but if we hope to
> have longevity in our community, it seems like it's something that we have
> to address... plus we don't have any extra money for cleaning services
> right now :P
>
> at this point we can have a long discussion about paying people, labor,
> etc., and i would be happy to discuss this with people offthread, but i
> think that if we hope to continue the discussion onthread, we should be
> addressing 1) advantages and disadvantages of paying someone vs creating
> community solutions for keeping the space clean and 2) ideas for mechanisms
> (such as sunday night clean) that would help people easily plug in to
> keeping the space clean.
>
> - marina
>
>
> On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 7:17 AM, Romy Ilano <romy at snowyla.com> wrote:
>
>> If we pay people for beer, if we buy burritos then why is it wrong to pay
>> someone to clean?
>>
>> Could we pay for a small family owned immigrant cleaning business to
>> clean the common room and the space ?
>>
>> I do not see sudo room getting into a cleaning skill set in the near
>> future and  that is ok
>>
>> ---
>>
>> Romy Ilano
>> Founder of Snowyla
>> http://www.snowyla.com
>> romy at snowyla.com
>> _______________________________________________
>> sudo-discuss mailing list
>> sudo-discuss at lists.sudoroom.org
>> http://lists.sudoroom.org/listinfo/sudo-discuss
>>
>
>
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