An autonomous work group is an organizational model where self-employed workers unite to form a group under a single brand.
An autonomous work group acts like a worker cooperative but it is not legally recognised as such. Members of the group support one another during work, devolve part of the profit to a mutual fund and comply to an ethical code.
Such autonomous work group could adopt the form of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization to formalize their structure and increase its mutualistic component, recognising a credit for the job done between members.
This DAO would have:
- statutory constitution as a worker cooperative with mutualistic prevalence
- an internal token for mutualistic credit bound to the work done (Fungible Token)
- a mutual fund in cryptocurrency
- membership certified by a NFT
- possible automation via smart contracts
General Traits
- Members buy and sell work from other members at a discounted rate set in tokens (e.g. tokens per hour, tokens per task, tokens per project)
- The member status is certified with a nominal NFT
- When a member takes a new job from an external client she will select a team and will pay the coworkers in tokens as per the agreed rate
- at cash-in she will transfer a commission (established as a percentage of the total amount) in cryptocurrency to the DAO fund
- The fund is hosted as a multi-signature wallet, the governance of which follows an ad-hoc organizational model
- the governance could follow the consensus decision-making method and use a tool like Loomio to discuss and ratify decisions
- the money in the fund is intended for later investment on the growth and sustenance of the group itself
Mutual Credit Tokenomics
- The mutual credit tokens are minted and kept in a total supply which is always proportional to the number of members.
- Every new member gets a certain number of tokens when:
- she starts offering services
- she brings new job opportunities
- A member cannot hold a number of tokens over a certain number
- Tokens can be hold and not exchanged, but there’s not incentive in doing so since the exchange value is only with other member’s work
- Inflation is contained by the token-work rate which is substancially fixed. The exchange value of the token with the work should be kept stable.
- Transactions and account balances should be public to ensure transparency.
Implicit Incentives
As a member I am incentivized to:
- engage with other member both for the discounted rate and because the credit I hold in tokens amortizes the cost of work in future projects
- participate to the work group since the working conditions are better than the market’s. E.g: I can amortize fixed costs, diversify and compose a team, have branding, support etc.
- participate in the fund, giving up a part of profit, since the group’s growth is an investment the return of which is more work at better conditions
Care Work and Commons
The mutualistic credit can be used to pay not only productive work (professional services) but reproductive work and commons creation too.
For instance a member can be payed for pro-bono work, administrative or maintenance work, creation of new shared resources, education or support.