Fiat Benefits
RADs sound like it’s going to let businesses bypass their responsibilities and put my benefits at risk.
Vacations, parental time off, and sick days are Fiat benefits that people throw up as an objection to the Radical model. The RADs system is sold as all goodness, but there has to be a downside to them, right?
Perhaps our job is to create the conditions for things to get better, not to predict that they won’t.
Seth Godin ∇
Radical Threat
The Radical model is not about tweaking the Fiat system. They are very, very different. And it seems like a threat. The current system is all I know. It has been built over many, many years and it has made our lives better, right? Why change it so drastically? What is so dramatically wrong with it that you want to pull it apart?
Actually, the end result will not be that different. People will continue to be people. Our lives will keep improving, but without the exploitation of other people. For me to be “rich”, you don’t have to be “poor.” For my life to be better, we don’t have to break Earth. For me to feel better, I don’t have to make you feel miserable.
| Radical Goodness | |
| Bonus |
Replaced by earned dividends, which are calculated based on the number of RADs. They, in turn, are calculated based on the number of recognized contributions your peers have given you. Keep in mind that the RADs you have with previous companies are still generating income. |
| Salary |
As your company matures and people are more experienced with RAD distributions, salaries can be replaced with a predictable recurring income (PRI) system. |
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Radical Difference |
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Vacation, Time Off, Sick Days Holidays, Comp Time, Sabbaticals |
You determine how long you want to be inactive (i.e., how much time off you want to take). Since the earned dividends are going directly to you, you get to “pay” for any time you take that’s not generating income. Keep in mind that the RADs you have with previous companies are also generating income that can “pay” for your inactive time. |
Banners
You can also create Banners for these eventualities. These can be individual Banners, company-wide, or anywhere in between. For example, some of your peers may agree to reserve 10% of their income for “benefits,”
But you want to put away 20%,
Later, the whole company learns from your experiments and everybody, including you, decide to put away 15%,
After a while, you will figure out that this “benefit” thing is,
- Born of a nostalgic fear
- From being born, growing up, and living for so long in a Fiat environment
- Where the wealth from the value created by all, goes “up” to the owners
- And “benefits” are handed “down.”
Retirement
“Retirement” is yet another Fiat “benefit” that is handled very differently in the Radical model.
- For example, your RADs may be your “retirement” fund. This would work if the revenues of all the companies you have co-owned are generally going up ahead of the number of co-owners.
- Alternatively, a company that you are part of may decide to reserve a percentage of its earned dividends to pay inactive co-owners.
- Another company may treat it as an expense and take it off the revenue (i.e., before calculating its earned dividends).
- Yet another may decide that once your income falls below a certain level, they’ll make up the difference (i.e., similar to a PRI fund, but out of cashflow).
Why the Quotation Marks?
I have consistently put quotation marks around the word “benefit” because they are not benefits. At least, they are not a benefit to you as much as they are a benefit to businesses.
Over centuries, we have been tweaking the pay system to accommodate people’s basic needs to survive and work another day. As Chuck Blakeman remind us, ∇ the range starts at zero pay during slavery to higher pay (plus poverty). The “signal” to pay more usually comes as some form of violence: strikes, revolution, or war.
Eventually, governments impose taxes and benefits to calm things down. This imposition is a form of violence, but most businesses go along with it because they know it is better for them than the more violent alternative.
As a result, we have ended up with a hodgepodge of “benefits” worldwide. Primarily because of lack of trust, of the business owners and the workers, the money for these benefits goes first to governments. Then a bureaucracy develops to “manage” this money “on behalf of” the workers.
The Radical model assumes that people know their needs better than any government, as benevolent as it may be. It follows, then, that people are the best “managers” of what they need to live. In the Radical model money in the form of earned dividends go directly to each of us. And, yes, we all have to learn a lot to deal with this responsibility and there will be many bumps along the way until it works smoothly, but all adults are capable of learning it and doing it.
If you are thinking, yeah, but people will never…, keep in mind that you are right to think that of people in a Fiat environment. In a different environment, where people are not conditioned to be afraid of learning and people help each other learn, things will go much faster and smoothly.
ENDNOTES
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Seth Godin. Dawani’s Law. 2021. <https://seths.blog/2022/10/dawanis-law/>
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Chuck Blakeman. Rehumanizing The Workplace By Giving Everybody Their Brain Back. 2020. <https://radicals.world/NlQpLW>
