There is a danger of conflating worker with employee. Work is a verb. Employee is a status. I’ve worked with a fair few co-ops who value labour as more than a monetary exchange/existence of “employment” and invite in volunteer workers (subject to minimum threshold). Member benefit can sometimes be something other than a wage. The inputs to workers.coop of the people who do the work (the “doing” that i would argue makes them workers) are just as valuable if they donate the time individually as if their worker co-op pays them.
We may also have people who are paid to deliver work for workers.coop outside of an employment relationship as contractors.
If we are going to tie down the term “worker” to employees could we call them “employee member”?
I think we do need to differentiate between “Individuals who give their labour to the federation (part of working group)” and Individuals that aren’t part of a working group but do help out, engage in a more informal way (what Doug referred to above as “Supporters”)
For me the four obvious categories are:
Member Coops
Members (People who are members of Member Coops)
Working Group Members (people who are in a working group but not a Member [though they could choose to be a Working Group Member but then - possibly - lose their Member status])
Supporters - people who pay some form of sub but who aren’t in a Working Group and who have no voting rights.
Specific concerns about people voting twice etc can be ironed out quite easily I think.
I don’t have an issue with thie idea of non-paid peolpe being ‘workers’ - we have ‘working’ groups, after all.
Sean what do you think should be the ‘quid pro quo’ for a supporter, if they have a voting right? Or are you thinking they have information and participation rights, but non voting?
The draft membership policy would give voting rights to anyone who is a named member of a working group, who applies for membership, on whatever basis they are consistently contributing their work. But as yet we have no clear category for registered supporters.