Human wellbeing as a priority — creating a microcosm of reality
Accidentally creating the change you think someone else is going to do, and looking behind-the-scenes of one worker cooperative.
I want to live in a world where human wellbeing is a priority. Full stop.
I’d guess if you’re here, at least some part of you agrees with that statement, but it can be a weirdly audacious thing to say, given the culture of individualism and profit that we live in. Trying to implement it from a top-down policy level seems even more radical, though it really shouldn’t be.
Shouldn’t it be weirder that human wellbeing isn’t already a collective priority?
To me, it’s just a common sense baseline, the standard of living on the ground floor.
The idea that people should have access to a fundamental level of care has been in me for as long as I think I’ve had a sense of justice. (And while that might be an idea I got in childhood, I definitely don’t think it’s childish. It’s not naive thinking, just humane.)
Still, I don’t always move through the world like I personally have the agency to make human wellbeing around me more of a reality. I want it, but I don’t usually act like I’m the one to do it. I try to approach as many situations as possible with the benefit of the doubt. I try to be kind as much as possible. I try to give money and time and self-education to the causes I believe in. I try to have conversations about equitability and systemic change and being soft with ourselves and each other. But to create my own thing? I’ve almost always supported someone else’s initiatives from the inside out, someone else’s ideas.
Even though I know that change only happens due to regular people like me who just decided to be brave and try, I often look outside of myself for someone else — anyone but me — to build the realities the world needs. Despite educating myself to recognize and dismantle harmful and oppressive ideologies within me, despite “knowing better,” I often find myself in a cycle of thinking I’m always just short of the understanding and proficiency I need to meaningfully act.
I did not plan to start an anticapitalist worker cooperative, because I did not fully realize I could.
It had literally not even crossed my mind a moment before it actually happened. If I’d given any notice to worker cooperatives before, it had been an intriguing but a passing interest at most, so at first I didn’t even realize that’s what we were making.
Ever since the astrology company CHANI unveiled their exceptional list of benefits some years ago, I kept applying for job openings hoping to be hired. But as it turns out, there are a lot more humans who want humanizing work environments than workplaces prioritizing and publicizing them. It seems like a wild blindspot to me now that I never actually thought about creating these same benefits or similar somewhere else. Even though I’ve been self-employed for many years, I thought it was all going to happen at some time and some place beyond me, not by me.
I’d love to say it was intentional, but it just sort of…happened. The idea of creating a microagency came from my friend Maggie through the copywriting work I already do in her mindful marketing business alongside her and our systems and operations genius, Jillian. I had asked Maggie to keep an eye out for projects we might be able to pull my designer friend Rylee onto, and she came back with the idea that we fully reshape our existing business to bring Rylee into the fold.
Maggie then said she had previously registered a URL with “anticapitalists” in the name, and it got me thinking: if we start from scratch, how much could be possible to create this next evolution of business in as equitable and enjoyable a way as possible?
So that’s how our anticapitalist cooperatively owned microagency, Rest Day Creative, happened.
The origin story isn’t exactly revolutionary, and in that way, it’s pretty much like any other business. The structures and values are the secret sauce.
Our business is a worker cooperative because it’s employee-owned, and we each own an equal 25% in the company.
The basis of our operation starts with universal wages. Everyone makes the same amount of money, and that money is not based on hours or output. There are so many reasons for this, reasons I’m full-on nerd excited to talk about in future, but at its most basic, we believe that each person is inherently worthy of receiving care, regardless of their ability or productive output. It’s when people are at their least able to provide labor that they usually need the most care (and we need money for most care in the world we live in) — so why make that care more difficult to access by linking it to labor and output?
In our business, we are all interdependent and need each other, so why value someone’s work over another’s if that work couldn’t happen without the others’ in the first place?
Universal wages are a fairly novel idea, but they don’t require any special conditions to implement, only that the person or people at the top don’t take more than anyone else. Pretty simple, but not usual. In 2022, CEOs in the US had average salaries that were 344 as much as much as a typical worker’s (source), and 603 times as much in the S&P 500 companies with the lowest median worker pay levels (source). I’m going to hazard a guess that CEOs are not making 300-600 times the impact or contribution as their workers. Even if that ratio was smaller, the CEOs would have nothing without the labor of their workers, so it does take some mental gymnastics (and a certain level of belief in human expendability) to justify significantly higher salaries in comparison.
In our model, when excess profit comes in, first that money will go toward raising our salaries to fully meet our needs and be a floor for living wages, and then over time, extra profits will go toward building in a number of equitable and quality-of-life practices for us as employees and raising the contributions we can make to the communities and organizations we care about.
Another time I’ll dig into these in more detail, what all of them mean, and why, but here are some of the benefits we already have in place to start with, plus ones we’re prioritizing gradually as we eventually grow.
Benefits we’re starting off with: flexible remote work and a four-day work week, unlimited vacation, unlimited menstrual and sick leave, birthdays and grief anniversaries automatically off, and quarterly redistribution and reparations to organizations and causes that are important to us (this one is more of a policy than a benefit, but we do think of benefits in terms of both personal and collective, and we each have a say in the organizations, so that’s why it’s listed here).
We can offer these benefits at the beginning, because these structures don’t require extra resources for us to create, just policies. Because our work is based on project outcomes instead of hourly or time spent, as long as the work gets done, there’s space for time off. We also have some other mechanisms in place to support the time off policies as well.
Benefits to prioritize as we’re able: fully funded health benefits, including vision and dental (with some equivalent benefits to be determined for our Canadian co-owner, Jillian), a health stipend for non-insurance-covered services, generous paid parental leave and medical leave, multi-week office closures in summer and winter, retirement benefits with a company match, a personal and professional growth and learning stipend, a tech stipend, and a community wealth stipend.
Clearly, these benefits will require significant resources on behalf of the company, which is why we’re not implementing them first thing. Eventually, they’ll be possible because this is our form of profit sharing, where a surplus of income goes toward building these structures.
If you’re familiar with the CHANI benefits I mentioned above, then you’ll see we have many of the same ones listed. Their list was the initial inspiration, along with a few other companies like Tunnel Vision clothing and the budgeting software YNAB.
One thing CHANI doesn’t have listed is the “community growth stipend,” an idea I came up with based on their wealth-building stipend. I haven’t heard Chani and team talk about what their stipend entails so I can’t speak to it, but my hope is that once we implement all of our other benefits, that will be enough of a foundation for individual wealth on its own. On our team, each of us wants to live lives that are comfortable and where we have enough to survive, rest, create, access joy, and take care of the people and things we care about. That’s a high bar for quality, but not necessarily a high dollar number.
To speak to the wealth part of wealth-building, wealth is an inherently capitalist idea, which is something I first learned about specifically through the radical business consultant and social justice educator Bear Hebert. It’s clear why wealth hoarding happens, because we feel like we have to create safety nets for ourselves in lieu of greater structures to ensure our survival and we’re not exactly living in systems that make it a given.
But when we operate from a space of enoughness, we make sure both that we have enough to be tended to and we see where we have extra. Instead of holding onto the extra, the idea of the community wealth-building stipend is that each member of our team can eventually become a financial foundation for the people we care about who don’t have the privilege or means for wealth on their own.
We’ll iron out the details of this down the road, but the initial thought is this stipend can go toward things like: supporting a loved one to get out debt, contributing to retirement or medical expenses for aging parents, funding education for children in our lives, funding community resource initiatives, buying land to build cooperative housing with friends and age together in place (personally, this one is the glimmer at the back of my mind). I’m not sure exactly how this piece will look, but I do know I’m really excited by the idea of it. This idea has to exist in some other context, but I personally haven’t heard about it as an organized thing before (please tell me about it if you have!). I’d love for it to be more of a thing.
So that’s some of the behind-the-scenes structures we’re building from. We haven’t even talked about the client-facing structures, or gone into the values on which all of this is standing, but I’ll leave those for another day.
The main thing is, I’m struck by how immediately and clearly this business became a mechanism for putting my values into action, when I tend to hand over the idea of that action an honestly embarrassing amount of the time.
I know what we’re building is small, and no part of me thinks that our four-person company is the means for a wide-scale revolution. But it’s something.
Not only is it something, but it’s one thing I can point to and say to myself, “Look, you are creating something out of nothing, and that something out of nothing is in support of the future reality you want to be a part of. You’re doing this, you’re creating this possibility — what else is possible?”
I don’t know if we’ll ever get to see a reality where human wellbeing is a top priority. I hope so, and I am a person who leans on hope, but I also highly doubt it will be in our lifetimes, if ever.
It’s not up to me to know, and I honestly don’t care. Maybe it never happens, but I will live a better life knowing I tried.
I do feel like it still means something anyway, to try in our small ways, and I do think those small ways matter. Not just in business, not just in activism, but also in art making, in relationship building, in community growing, in meal cooking, and joy making, in really living and living for a life worth living.
It’s not all about, “How do we build equitable work structures?” Lying down in the grass and looking at clouds when you could be producing something, savoring your time, savoring your senses, can in fact be a valuable form of resistance to capitalism and its oppressive edicts.
I’m not going to pretend that just because I’m here it now means I’m going to completely stop being complicit in all forms of harm. I certainly want to, but there are still greater systemic realities and my own human fallibility to account for. If we’re living, we’re harming to some extent, but I’d like to do it less of the time.
One degree more toward equitable, sustainable, restful, joyful living matters, because it’s one degree less that points toward suffering, and that’s not nothing.
We still live under capitalism, so we still have to engage in commerce to materially survive, but on a microcosm, there are still some things that can be done to lessen exploitation (of others and of ourselves), and they can be done by us.
We can decide to be the ones to do them.
If we only look at anticapitalism as a response in opposition to or against, we just see a fraction of the whole. But in being against systems of harm, we can also be for human livability, we can be for human joy. To make that happen, anticapitalist efforts aren’t just about dismantling harms and preventing them, they’re also about the new realities we build in their stead.
We build those new realities one small way at a time.
However that looks for you, I hope you’ll join me.
Love,
Iris
Resources and Inspiration
I finished reading A Psalm for the Wild Built and its sequel A Prayer for the Crown Shy by Becky Chambers the day before the idea sparked for the microagency, and there’s a very specific feeling of softness I’ve carried from it in ever since. The underlying humanity and tenderness throughout both books struck such a chord for me, and I want as much as possible for our venture to approximate that feeling in whatever we do.
In case you’re wondering how it makes sense to have an anticapitalist branding agency and whether those terms are contradictory, I plan to talk about that in the future. Bear Hebert (mentioned above) also has a really great breakdown of the differences between capitalism and commerce in their Marketing for Weirdos course. Enrollment is currently closed but it’s a useful resource to save for any self-employed folks who are grappling with ideas of selling coming up against their values.
This 2015 article from The Jacobian, How to Be an Anticapitalist Today by Erik Olin Wright, gives a straightforward breakdown of primary anticapitalist logic and strategies as one useful framework to think about approaching resistance efforts. As a small-scale and mostly individual initiative, our microagency is under the strategy of “eroding capitalism,” and we’re drawing on the idea of the “real utopia” referenced in the article as something of a model for what we build.
The book I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt by the owner of Tunnel Vision clothing, Madeline Pendleton, is part-memoir and part-money survival 101. I recommend it as a straightforward way to look at how our systems can be disenfranchising, along with some tips for individually navigating alternatives. Toward the end, Madeline also details some of the ways she implements equitable work structures in her business, which helped demystify some ideas for me around concepts like universal wages.
This episode of the Let’s Make Work Human podcast with the CEO and Co-founder of CHANI, Sonya Passi, speaks to some of the company’s benefits in greater detail and the thinking behind them. I started listening hoping for some deep and complicated insights, but the underlying reasoning really just is: treating your employees like humans who matter is just good business and makes good sense.
I’ve been getting a lot of useful structural and legal perspectives from listening to the Whiskey Fridays podcast with the business owners of Wanderwell Consulting and Unlawyer, and I’m sure I’ll have much more to say on all of that soon.
I’ll do a deeper dive on worker cooperatives down the road, but if you want a quick primer in the meantime, here is one from the Democracy at Work Institute.
Regardless of what we do in our own lives, no one is free until everyone is free. This week’s post by
breaks down to the cognitive dissonance at the core of Zionist rhetoric (which is in no way actually synonymous with Judaism), and I can’t state enough how important of a read it is in regards to Palestinian liberation and truly understanding the magnitude behind what we’re witnessing in Rafah, in retaliation to student protest encampments in the US, and beyond. If you only do one thing for a more just and equitable world this week, do it for Palestine.
Thank you to the friends who pointed me in the directions of these resources. We’re all each going to get where we’re going a lot sooner with the support of each other, so if you have any resources to share too, I’d love to know about them.
About Rest Day Creative
Rest Day Creative is a cooperatively owned microagency with a community-oriented, anticapitalist lens that builds brand foundations and systems for divergent thinkers, artists, activists, values-centered organizations, and helping professionals.
We create websites, copywriting, and visual branding, as well behind-the-scenes setup for businesses. We also create digital resources, including for branding, design, and cooperative work.
We’re in the process of restructuring existing structures into this new business from the ground up, but if you’re interested in learning more about our services, you can sign up here to know when we’re open for new clients.
Writing in Real Time
The Rest Day Creative section of this newsletter chronicles our business in real-time as we build it. As of now, Rest Day Creative is six weeks out from when it was first an idea, and I knew from very early on that I wanted to document our inception even in the initial messy stages of creation. (Like, we’re literally in the process of creating our own branding as I write this.)
Anyway, I imagine I’m not the only one who finds the idea of worker cooperatives intriguing...but potentially also kind of opaque. I always think it’s cool when businesses are doing new things to bring generosity and care into their work, but I’m often left thinking, “Okay, but how??” So this is my answer to that question.
We are not people of significant influence. We are not anticapitalist, anti-oppression educators in any sense, nor are we trying to be (there are many incredible resources for that, and I highly encourage you seek them out and financially support their work). We are just a few self-employed people with an idea, which is exactly why it feels important to document our team’s process to create equitable work structures from the ground up. Because if we can do it, there’s probably something others like us can do too (even if whatever it is ends up being something entirely different!)
I wholeheartedly appreciate you being here and reading, and I hope you get something out of it, whatever that is! I promise not every post is going to be nearly so dang long. (If this writing not for you, you can change your account settings here to only receive personal essays, or to unsubscribe.)