Name: Good work
ISBN: 9780349131337

What Hacker News says

pdfernhoutJan 2020

Some ideas I've collected on making better organizations: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...

You may also find some jobs posted at Idealist of interest (although many may have their own issues as the non-profit world can have its own dysfunctions): https://www.idealist.org/

You might like some things written by E.F. Schumacher like "Good Work": https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/313764.Good_Work

Or maybe "Honest Business"? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/582299.Honest_Business

Also, "What Color is Your Parachute" is also great.

Or maybe stories related to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster

Another tip: the more frugal you are, the more flexible you can be about jobs and living arrangements.

Frankly, I can find problematical things about pretty much any profession in our modern society -- from sanitation worker through school teacher to medical doctor to shoe clerk. So, yes, it can be a challenge to make peace with that when, without a basic income, you need to exchange your labor for ration units to then exchange for food and shelter. Yet, people need, say, shoes -- so you can help a lot of people by making or selling good shoes to people who really need them. But as you point out, a lot of business and related jobs go far beyond the basics (for good or bad).

You can also find lots of post-scarcity thinking on my personal website. Or by many others in many places if you look. So, you are not alone. It seems though that, short of broad social change like, say, Andrew Yang proposes, solutions that work for specific individuals in late-stage capitalism may have to be individually crafted based on on interests, abilities, circumstances, tools, social network, local community, and so on.

Anyway, there are some non-startup jobs here in who's hiring for January 2020 (including at PBS): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21936440

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decodeNov 2012

This reminds me of a similar story told by E.F. Schumacher in his 1979 book "Good Work." Quoting from the chapter "A viable future visible in the present":

  The second link of my little chain is this company called Scott Bader,
  a plastics company founded by Ernest Bader, a Swiss Quaker immigrant to
  England before the First World War.  He's now about eighty-five.  Ernest
  Bader was penniless when he started in England.  He said, All my life I
  will have to work for others.  What a dreadful system.  Well, it didn't
  work out like that.  He was an entrepreneur and he had a business and in
  1951 he suddenly woke up and said, I am now doing to all these people what
  I suffered from when it was done to me.  I am not going to go out of this
  life with this feeling.  No, I must do something.  So he got in touch with
  various people, including myself, and said, I want to put this on a basis
  that I as a Quaker and a pacifist believe in.  I don't believe in what I
  am doing.  And so we worked very hard and hammered out a constitution for
  this firm.  Ernest Bader said, No, I don't want to have ownership of this
  company, and so all the capital, except 10 percent, was vested in the
  commonwealth, which was set up for this purpose as a limited company.  The
  equity doesn't lie anymore with Ernest Bader, it lies with that
  commonwealth, and everybody who works for a certain length of time becomes
  a member of the commonwealth.  Legally speaking, the commonwealth is the
  owner of the operating company.  At first the family retained 10 percent
  founder's share, so arranged that they had a majority, not with the
  intention of using it but as a last resort.  Because it is jolly difficult
  to build something up but it is very easy to ruin it.

  [...]

  It was not until 1963, that is, twelve years later, that we felt it worked.
  The founder's shares were also put into the general pocket of the
  commonwealth, so it is the administration of the commonwealth that owns
  the thing.

Schumacher goes on to describe how this created a radical realignment of incentives for the company and to list some of the effects created by this realignment. For example, they put a cap on the maximum spread between the highest paid and lowest paid employees, committed to staying small (spinning off new companies when they needed to grow), and required that a significant portion of all profits be invested in the local community.

Scott Bader still exists and is still owned and run by the employees:

http://www.scottbader.com/governance.html

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