From Aspiring Worker-Member to Worker-Member

01Defining “Worker-Member”

While Worker-Members participate in democratic decision-making and share labor with Creative-Members inside of the production spheres they are active in, Worker-Members are responsible for the labor and final decisions made outside of these spheres, including, but not limited to:

All Worker-Members do the labor of Creative-Members in production, but Creative-Members do not do all of the labor of Worker-Members.

All of this said, becoming a Worker-Member does not allow anyone to make decisions over Creative-Members in production decisions, or to become the manager/boss of a production team.

While there are certain alignments that are important for all who join 400M Productions, there will be varying degrees of interest, ability, and bandwidth for the responsibilities people want to take on. For example, some may be interested in creative work related to productions under the broader 400M umbrella, but prefer not to pursue taking on the commitments and responsibilities required of Worker-Members.

While we strongly encourage everyone to share in the broader responsibilities of the Worker-Member Circle (for the sake of a stronger and more direct democracy), we prefer that people are, first and foremost, honest and accepting with others and themselves around both their limits and desires. Whatever the case, there is a place and/or path for everyone involved with 400M Productions (in some way, shape, or form).

We stress the importance of the Worker-Member Circle because it, as a domain, represents commitment to full worker control of 400M Productions as an institution, and this, in turn, impacts power dynamics within the co-op as a whole, as those with more responsibility and decision-making power will ultimately have more influence/sway within the co-op — in the spirit of direct democracy, we encourage all members to pursue involvement with the Worker-Member Circle, with the hopes that we may all share in the full rotation of responsibilities necessary to keep our shared organization moving forward.

The more who share in this rotation, the lighter the load becomes for each individual Worker-Member.

02Becoming a Worker-Member

Workers in the Creative-Member Circle who wish to become Worker-Members (and subsequently join the Worker-Member Circle) can go through a 3-month trial period as an Aspiring Worker-Member.

With the added responsibilities and decision-making powers assigned to Worker-Members, this trial period — which is open to all who have been Creative-Members for at least 3 months and are interested — aims to ensure that there is trust developed in new members based upon not only their communications, but their actions (and consistency in actions) as well.

To be more specific, the purpose of this trial period is to:

Baseline, Aspiring Worker-Member, and Worker-Member requirements are as follows:

03What We Hope for with Aspiring Worker-Members

For Aspiring Worker-Members looking to become Worker-Members, their three-month trial period will involve taking on more of the work and responsibilities that Worker-Members share, having regular meetings to give report-backs, and asking questions wherever necessary. When the trial period is complete, all Worker-Members will eventually conduct a formal meeting to share a final vote on whether or not Aspiring Worker-Members will be permitted to join the Worker-Member Circle.

This trial period is set up so that those wanting to become Worker-Members within 400M Productions can learn new skills, participate in new forms of labor with the help of other members, and engage with the cooperative in a deeper way. This trial also allows everyone to see that those wishing to become Worker-Members are serious about their commitments. The length of the trial is necessary in order to see that potential Worker-Members are able to have consistent engagement and communication without constant reminders or assistance from others. That said, perfection is not expected during this period, or in any other place within 400M.

Not having the ability to show these commitments (in the assessments of Worker-Members) does not necessarily mean a member cannot be a part of 400M Productions as a whole, but instead suggests that one should perhaps be a part of a different circle of labor that is better suited to their current situation or abilities, even if it is just for a temporary window of time.

Because Worker-Members participate in the broader decision-making of the cooperative along with everyone else, the process of the Aspiring Worker-Member trial period is a way to ensure that all new Worker-Members have shown consistent initiative towards the additional work being done, are aligned with the broader aims and goals of the organization, and are able to be honest and communicative with others.

Honesty and communication are essential for becoming a Worker-Member. Productive labor on its own is not enough. A new member can work countless hours on different projects long term, but if they are not able to communicate from a place of honesty about their availability, skills, personal needs, etc., they will end up creating issues for others and themselves.

In order for us to effectively build spaces where we can work together, take care of ourselves, and take care of each other, it is critical that we cultivate trust, both in ourselves and each other.

04Strengthening Connections

During the Aspiring Worker-Member Trial Period, Aspiring Worker-Members will have weekly or biweekly check-ins with Worker-Members to discuss the work they are doing, ask for help in areas they have issues, receive guidance on areas that might help them, and participate in exercises to develop new skills. These meetings allow Aspiring Worker-Members to better connect with Worker-Members outside of the specific dimensions of labor, and to better understand each other as people.

Some key questions explored in this process:

In many of these meetings, we will be working on strengthening member connections with soft skills (behaviors and ways of being/relating) and hard skills (practical abilities and knowledge) that are introduced in our general onboarding process. Since being a Worker-Member involves labor that might be new to members of other circles, it is important to help build and strengthen some of these new hard and soft skills together, so that Aspiring Worker-Members understand how to do work that they may not have participated in before, and can actively share in the distribution of power amongst all stewards of the organization.

Below are brief overviews of just some tendencies and skills that are central in the Aspiring Worker-Member trial period (this list is not definitive and will change along with us):

Where this Aspiring Worker-Member Trial Period differs from the New Member Trial Period is that it is fluidly structured by the Aspiring Worker-Members actively going through the trial themselves.

The New Member Trial Period focuses on onboarding an individual into the group as a Creative-Member, discussing issues and unhealthy behaviors we have historically struggled with, how to avoid these issues, and walking through how we can democratically cooperate with one another in shared space. Worker-Members will set up the meetings, check in, and provide guidance in any way they see necessary to best help new members. The experience is meant to serve as a way for Worker-Members to guide new members into 400M spaces, and work with them in any areas of difficulty. When new members start as part of the Creative-Member Circle, we expect there to be room for growth in certain areas, and will be working right alongside them to provide a helping hand in that process.

The Aspiring Worker-Member Trial Period, in comparison, aims to see if the skills and behaviors we try to promote in onboarding for new members (Creative-Members) have been internalized, and are actively being worked on. With many of these skills focusing on initiative, communication, and coordination, we aim to defer new responsibilities to Aspiring Worker-Members by having them facilitate meetings, build a curriculum for skills they would like to improve, set up check-ins with Worker-Members, and more.

If the onboarding process and New Member Trial Period were driving lessons, then the Aspiring Worker-Member Trial Period would be Worker-Members handing Aspiring Worker-Members the keys to a car and saying, “Drive.”

Handing someone the keys is not the same as teaching them to drive.

We will be learning by practice.

This does not mean that Worker-Members won’t be doing work to help in this process — we will be sitting right next to Aspiring Worker-Members in case they start “driving off of the road” — but it does mean that the work all Worker-Members do to help should ideally be initiated by the Aspiring Worker-Members themselves. (This also implies Aspiring Worker-Members having the self-acceptance and humility to accept constructive critique and even course correction in the “driving.”)

Practically speaking, all of this means Aspiring Worker-Members reaching out for help and getting comfortable acknowledging the areas that come easy to them, in addition to the areas that they feel need improvement, all without judgment on core personhood.

While this might seem simple, we (as Worker-Members) have found that this is one of the main factors that hold people back from taking the initiative needed to be a Worker-Member.

Understanding leads to participation.

When we do not understand something, participation can seem overwhelming if not outright impossible. This is why it’s so important to try, even when we are uncertain about what to do (or to reach out on our own initiative to gain the understanding we need).

Many people feel a sense of fear when it comes to doing new things and taking on new responsibilities. We believe it’s important to face these fears and discomforts in the interest of growth and a fuller participation in the collective spaces we inhabit together.

Through the process and practice of facing our fears, we cultivate deeper understandings, gain new skills and insights, and can connect more effectively as community.

We believe we must be willing to cultivate a deeper understanding of our own fears and actually face them in order to better understand the spaces around us, and more fully participate in them.

05The Four Stages of Competence

The “four stages of competence” learning model can be traced back to a 1960 textbook entitled Management of Training Programs by professors Frank A. DePhillips, William M. Berliner, and James J. Cribbin at New York University. This model breaks down the psychological states encompassed in the progression from “incompetence” to “competence” in any given skill.

Humans can often have multiple sets of skills, each at different stages of competence at a given time (we could perhaps imagine these stages as representing different levels of “skill points”). These skills are not always related to each other.

This model is a helpful framework for understanding the multitude of (multilayered) barriers that stand in the way of many growing and developing in service to themselves and others within the context of democratic and cooperative social organization.

1. Unconscious Incompetence (Weak Intuition)

Not knowing what we do not know

2. Conscious Incompetence (Weak Analysis)

Knowing what we do not know

3. Conscious Competence (Strong Analysis)

Learned and intentional effort

4. Unconscious Competence (Strong Intuition)

Second-nature effort

If your self-valuation is dependent upon seeing yourself as “the smartest person in the room” or “the expert,” or you harshly judge your total self for being “bad” at something, you are going to have a difficult time trying to cooperate and learn with others. In contrast, if you are not practicing such self-valuation (self-esteem), and instead practice something along the lines of unconditional self-acceptance, refuse comparison, etc., cooperative labor can be a beautiful and rewarding process of growth (in both character and skills).

In light of this, as we learn and move through The Four Stages of Competence, it is important to take up the following practices:

Learn more about Unconditional Self Acceptance here.

The practice of maintaining a “beginner’s mind” as we learn new skills, face frustrations, communicate, engage with and encounter difference, and build community, aids us in maintaining humility, openness, and creativity as we grow together. As such, it is important to cultivate as we face challenges, expand our understanding, and develop new competencies.

Learn more about Shoshin here.

06Co-constructing Knowledge

Integral to Worker-Membership is a willingness to grow and learn new skills, address struggles in different parts of your life, and a proactive awareness toward ways of being and relating that we are conditioned to otherwise ignore in our current society.

Most of the educational spaces we have experienced in our lives have been steeped in a top-down logic based upon paternalism or outright domination of the student by the teacher. This has sustained hierarchies, with the “teachers” elevated as infallible figures who “know all,” and the “students” lowered to passive recipients of information who know “little to nothing.”

Even in truly democratic spaces — as we have seen in the past with individuals who may have had more knowledge than others in certain subjects — differences between individuals in terms of knowledge, skills, and perception can lead to the formation of informal social hierarchies. These hierarchies can be formed when others perceived to know less choose to sit back in silence and wait for the more “knowledgeable” individuals to speak first, even perpetually deferring to individuals on responsibilities that are either assumed or unknown, therefore giving these people more power (whether they actually want it or not). How these differences are related to determines whether unhelpful social hierarchies arise from these differences, or whether these differences become opportunities for growth, sharing, learning, complementarity, and mutuality.

Our ability to participate in a truly democratic space is only as strong as our willingness to speak from our own experiences and knowledge in open dialogue with others. To counteract the formation of informal social hierarchies around knowledge, we must not only share knowledge, but we must also accept and be willing to explore the things that we do not know or understand. In pursuing this through 400M Productions, we would like to work off of a system of knowledge-sharing that differs from the status-quo approaches to education that define our authoritarian society — one that accepts ours differences, and creates a more democratic space for learning.

Where Creative-Members and Aspiring Worker-Members feel they have difficulties in abilities or skills related to stewarding the co-op, current Worker-Members will aid processes of growth by helping them to find exercises, readings, and workshops that can be explored collectively by all members. This allows all members to pose a potential problem they as individuals or as a group are struggling with, and to work alongside others in finding potential solutions.

Here are some example questions that could be used to guide this process:

The “problem-posing” approach in knowledge-sharing allows Aspiring Worker-Members to gain new skills in certain areas they feel they have weaknesses in, build comfort in finding areas where they can grow with others, and build a community of knowledge that is co-created with others through open dialogue.

Worker-Members within 400M Productions aim to subvert the teacher-student hierarchy and build a horizontal relationship where everyone is both a student and a teacher with something to learn and something to share. This approach highlights the importance of openness, honesty, and communication for all members, and works to ensure that they can get the help that they need from others in the cooperative (as everyone grows together).

We end with a quote from the educator and philosopher Paulo Freire: