PAW Community Food Production: How Would You Deal With Slackers?

So, I think a lot about how communities might work post-SHTF and how to foster a productive, but not tyrannical community. Most community related posts I read come up with some sort of small charter or constitution type of document that everyone has to abide by. Eventually, hopefully, there would be some sort of wider government established, but I'm really just talking about SMALL communities like neighborhoods, or small sections of a rural area or something. A cluster of less than 50 households maybe.

One way we could help foster a productive community is to help the community produce its own food.

So here is a (non-exhaustive) list of some assumptions and parameters about the problem.

• LAND. I am going to assume that there is land available. Perhaps a deal can be made with one of the local farmers to use some space in one of his fields in return for a portion of the produce.
  
• LABOR. I am assuming that enough people would be willing work in the community food production to make the effort worthwhile. This might not be a good assumption, and I'm sure that not everyone can or would work.
  
• PARTICIPATION. Participation would be voluntary. I think that this is important for everything in a small community to be voluntary. You can't force people to do stuff, or give up stuff, or anything like that.
  
• MANAGEMENT. It can't just be a free-for-all. Someone, or ideally a group of experienced folks, has to be trusted with directing the food production activities and also with fairly distributing produce (whatever "fair" ends up meaning). It is assumed that enough people can agree on a management team to oversee things and distribution methods that make it fair.
  
• ECONOMY. There is no established currency that can be used for wages or sales of produced goods. WROL conditions are assumed, so there is no functioning government system to issue any currency.
  
• STATUS OF CRISIS. The initial mayhem is past and you're only dealing with folks who have somehow survived the first, say, 3 months.

So let's assume there are 50 households in the community and the community food production effort produced 5,000 lb of food. Here's some ideas about distributing the food.

EQUAL DISTRIBUTION TO COMMUNITY: Of course, you could just distribute the produce equally across the community. But one thing you don't want are slackers or freeloaders -- people who choose not to participate, but who want to benefit from the labor and resources of others. Seems like you don't want people who refuse to participate to get any share of the produce. And you can't (and shouldn't) force people to participate.

EQUAL DISTRIBUTION TO CONTRIBUTORS: A simple way to eliminate freeloaders is to keep track of who contributed and who didn't. The produce could be divided equally among all who contributed. But then, there would be an incentive to do just enough work to get your name on the list and then slack off the rest of the time. But someone has to keep the books.

DISTRIBUTION BY HOURS WORKED: If there was some way to keep track of how much people worked, then they could share in the produce to the extent that they contributed to it. For example, if the effort produced 5,000 lbs of food, and it took 1,000 man hours to produce it, then 1 hour of work would get you 5 lbs of food. So, if you worked 50 hours, you'd get 100 lbs of food spaced out across the harvest times. But, again, someone has to keep a logbook, clock people in and out, etc.

In any of these scenarios I WOULD NOT want to be the guy keeping up with the logbook! If you lost it, or it got stolen or damaged, it would be catastrophic and you might be hanging from the nearest tree.

So here's an idea. You keep a logbook of who works and how much. You have someone who keeps track of when they came in to work and then when they are leaving you figure out how long they worked and write it down in the logbook. But you ALSO give them a certificate or something that shows that they worked, say, 4 hours that day. Then, when they come to get food, they must bring their certificates to prove how much they worked and they can get the correct amount of food. You can also decrement their outstanding hours in a logbook. This way there is a backup plan for if the logbook gets lost and there is also a way to prevent counterfeiting the work certificates. You could also use some sort of stamp (like an imprint stamp like a notary public uses) to authenticate your work slips. [The work slips might actually morph into a form of currency if people started trading them.]

I know that I'm not the only one who thinks about such things. The work certificate idea is sort of like something I read in one of JDY's stories.

Any other ideas? It would be nice if there could be a system that could work for other community things (like security, etc). [Of course, currency would be the best solution, but that almost implies a functioning government, which is not up and running yet in the proposed scenario.]

--- Lobanz

Let's block ads! (Why?)

PAW Community Food Production: How Would You Deal With Slackers?