[CIMC-work] paid labor/IMC

[Mitchell Szczepanczyk]

I'm tending to agree.  IMC should be kept to its current status as a
volunteer project, and in a non-hierarchical fashion.

That's not to say that people shouldn't be compensated for their labor,
and fortunately there are a growing number of projects which offer cold
hard cash for people's hard work in a progressive orientation (e.g., ZNet,
The NewStandard, Free Speech Radio News).  If people are interested in
making money while doing world-changing work in progressive media, they
could hook up with one or more of these outfits.

It's just that I don't think IMC is meant for that mold. 

----------
_ Z  Mitchell Szczepanczyk
  /  http://home.uchicago.edu/~msszczep http://www.chicagomediaaction.org
     http://www.geocities.com/szczepanczyk http://chicago.indymedia.org

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 ChrisGeovanis at aol.com wrote:

> We should rally in on this discussion on global -- and from the position that 
> people are volunteers, and do not get paid for their labor for IMC. One thing 
> that really struck me about Chris Anderson's 'hypothetical' is the implicit 
> assumption that the collective would crash and burn if this 'volunteer' took a 
> paying gig rather than continued to volunteer for this collective. I'm all for 
> paying workers -- actually, I'm all for abolishing wage slavery altogether, 
> but in the interim I'll settle for living wages for the rest of us -- but the 
> metamessage in Anderson's pitch undercuts Indymedia's core foundations of 
> voluntary labor for a revolutionary project and in fact imposes a sort of heirarchy 
> of importance of particular people to a particular IMC project. I mean, if 
> this hypothetical IMC collective would collapse if this one volunteer took on a 
> full-time job, then that's not a very healthy collective, it's more like a 
> one-person project. 
> 
> We should, instead, be seeking to broaden the volunteer base and the skill 
> set of people connected with indymedia, so if somebody drops out to take a job, 
> gets hit by a truck, or gets collared by the feds, there are ten people who 
> can step in to fill her shoes.
> 
> That said, I'm not opposed to volunteers being compensated for expenses, but 
> even in this situation decisions must be made collectively and with a mind to 
> ensuring that it is the collective AND ITS LARGER CONSTITUENCY that benefits 
> from said reimbursement. So, for example, I would support compensating 
> individuals in an IMC video collective for expenses for tapes or burnable dvd disks; 
> naturally, the collective should have a discussion about how those dvds are 
> going to be distributed. But I would not support compensating an individual for 
> an upgrade to her computer unless that computer was going to be available to 
> collective members and their consituents. I would support subsidizing travel 
> expenses for one or more collective members to a particular action, if that 
> discussion had been held within the larger collective and the collective had 
> consensed on the subsidy -- AND the traveler was making a commitment to produce 
> something for the collective in terms of coverage or tactical assistance on the 
> ground.
> 
> See where I'm going here? People's thoughts?
>