Field Service Hours Offsets Trading

by Stephanus 2 Replies latest jw friends

  • Stephanus
    Stephanus

    Carbon offset trading is popular in this day and age.

    Less "atmospheric", and closer to home, many local communities use similar schemes to keep money from flowing out of the community by creating systems that allow locals to trade their services with each other either directly or indirectly. Kind of barter, but not exactly. "LETS" (Local Energy Trading Schemes) is one of the terms that describes these kinds of systems. "Ithaca Hours" is one of the largest and most well-known of these schemes. My BIL lives on a farm near a country town and participates in a LETS-type system - one time we went with him to pick up fifteen bails of hay he'd gotten in exchange for a massage (apart from running the farm, his other source of income is massaging people in town on a Sunday)

    My mind was wandering lazily today when it struck me that the Watchtower community is the perfect place for such a scheme to take place. Because apart from hard cold cash, the Watchtower's other currency is: TIME! Specifically, hours spent "in service". It's the perfect set-up for a LETS-type scheme: you have time rich people who clock up field service hours, and any excess over their minimum monthly requirements are "wasted", whereas others are time poor and earning a living. Since 10 hours is the monthly minimum for healthy adults in good standing, blocks of 10 hours could be the standard unit of trade. Someone who had a couple of these to spare at the end of the month could trade one for, say, a haircut from a brother who was a barber, and another to get their lawn mowed. The barber and the lawnmowerman could both claim 10 hours each on their monthly reports. All sorts of services would be available within the JW community: cleaning, window-washing, car-washing, repair work, ferrying people around and so on. A poor but time rich Dub could get a lot of stuff done for them without the need for money, while busy Dubs could hand in decent field service hours - a total Win-Win situation. And there's absolutely no dishonesty involved - no-one would report hours that hadn't been spent (by someone, at least) in field service! Suddenly more Dubs would be looking better on paper to the WBTS, and with some real incentives, those Dubs clocking up the hours in order to trade them would raise the average hours spent in Field Service.

    Of course, it probably wouldn't work. It'd take a bit of doing to set up, and would have to be kept secret from the Borg. The Borg would never sanction it because, even more than money, they love control, and such a scheme would be a way to dilute that control away from their central authoritarian structure, and into the hands of the local Dub communities. And we couldn't have that, now, people! Could we??

  • purplesofa
    purplesofa
    Because apart from hard cold cash, the Watchtower's other currency is: TIME! Specifically, hours spent "in service". It's the perfect set-up for a LETS-type scheme: you have time rich people who clock up field service hours, and any excess over their minimum monthly requirements are "wasted", whereas others are time poor and earning a living.

    I agree. Even among the JW's the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

    I posted this on another thread yesterday

    I really always disliked the different names for the number of hours one put in for service. So many that I saw pioneer had husbands that cared for them or parents.

    It completely discounts the person that is giving their all. And most that dont pioneer want to get the most out of their time and always seemed quite capable to me.

    I would hope to see them do away with labeling those that are out in FS. All time is important. Some

  • Stephanus
    Stephanus

    I really always disliked the different names for the number of hours one put in for service. So many that I saw pioneer had husbands that cared for them or parents.

    It completely discounts the person that is giving their all. And most that dont pioneer want to get the most out of their time and always seemed quite capable to me.

    You're right. Much has been written on these pages about how rich Dubs often get better treated within the Dub community. But as you've noticed, there are two types of rich Dubs - those rich in a material sense AND those who can spend a lot of time on "Kingdom matters". While hard, cold cash always speaks loudly in the congregations, spending time in field service is the other way to get ahead. And as you've noticed time is only valuable WHEN it's spent in field service, as far as the WBTS is concerned. Yet to R&F Dubs, their time is valuable, no matter how they spend it. A LETS style scheme would allow ordinary Dubs to trade their time spent other than in field service for field service hours. It'd be a small lifting of one of the burdens of Dubdom.

Share this

Google+
Pinterest
Reddit