Terri, Hello! And this is good! Are you in then? We’re working on having a forum for discussions and hashing out of things just like this, I hope you’ll come when it’s ready? (Or is it ready now? No one has told me.) I obviously haven’t had a chance yet to consult with everyone who had a hand in this idea so far, nor the Phases (did you see the Phases links?), but what’s at issue here is a new form, it will take a new kind of ‘mass creativity’ to bring it into being. Some things we know, but most can only be decided when there are enough people involved, since that’s kind of the point of the Point (bad pun), that nothing moves forward unless and until there is the collective will to do it.
So, what’s gone on so far…1. You can’t call it ‘We-Bay.’ If you manage to get this off the ground, the microsecond you go live, the lawyers of the 800-pound gorilla will descend on you for trademark and copyright violations. Come up with a new name.
Yes, this is definitely true, we know. Same with Re-Bay, FreeBay, and a bunch of others. That’s actually the reason it’s in single quotes a lot of the time, and also why the plan says the final site name will have to be chosen later by mass vote, since they’d definitely go after an actual site called WeBay. (And the domain is taken, anyway.) Several attorneys have been consulted and that is the consensus, but it seems it should be safe as an organizing concept, a short of shorthand for an idea of a people’s site, which is how we’ve used it so far. What’s your feeling on the concept issue? It’s cute as a concept…does anyone have a suggestion of something better to call the plan?
2. Based on my experiences, which include both management and labor sides of serious union disputes, SUBAT isn’t really a union. There is no intent to form a negotiation unit and sit down at the table with eBay. Sellers aren’t labor, they are independent businesses. The laws that govern unions, specifically the NLRA, do not apply to SUBAT.
There has been a lot of debate about this lately, the dictionary definition of union has been pulled out, and some theoretical debate about trades unionism verses industrial unionism. The NLRA and U.S.law in general obviously take the trades union model as unitary, but it’s thought this new form of commerce/labor via the internet is really going to require some new approaches and new solutions. Attempts in the past to officially charter anything capable of negotiating with eBay Inc. have always failed, mainly because eBay frankly runs off any who try to form that union using the web, which is the only way most users are connected. (Countless webpages attempting to promote and organize such a negotiation unit have been disappeared by providers, bowing to eBay pressure.) Trouble starts long before any difficulties of sellers being better seen as labor, piece workers, independent contractors, or private small businesses even have a chance to be debated internally. And this is not even mentioning the trouble with showing eBay to be technically a monopoly when the anti-trust laws are set up to regulate quite different things. There seems to be a need for a third way, a new model that matches the new situation. Tens of thousands of people depend on eBay income now as their only source of support so being at the mercy of this company, which has what is really the only single viable venue in the industry now, is a serious issue, a survival issue for many. In the current plan (“Phase II” below, I think), the SUBAT gets officially chartered only when 20,000 people are signed on. That number is felt to be enough to make something happen, but also enough to ensure safety in numbers. On the other hand, that number still wouldn’t be enough to truly influence behemoth eBay Inc. (there are apparently 222 million users now), especially since they are doing all they can to replace the old users even now, conducting active recruitment efforts even at the Post Offices, etc. 20,000 might be enough to start a ball rolling, though, so that if they ignored that, the way they ignore every boycott for a decade now, the power to proceed would not lie with the management anymore, but with the users, to forge ahead anyway and make something new.
_The proposed SUBAT is a cooperative. As in “A cooperative or co-op is a business that is owned and controlled by the very same customers who use its services. The voice of every person makes a difference. The economic benefits of a cooperative are given back to the members, reinvested in the co-op or used to provide member services.” [Taken from a co-op site]
This is a better definition. SUBAT can be and should be a confederation of independent businessmen who pool resources for a common good. Think Farmer’s CO-OPs in the midwest._
Yes indeed, that’s exactly the model advocated by some members now. But not all. This is why everything is so tentative, because there would have to be mass agreement and, for that, masses signed on to agree, or not…to debate the thing and decide. So everything is premised on gathering enough people together who want to do it somehow, then deciding collectively just how is best, possibly using the Motions feature of the Point site. ‘The grange model’ has some definite advocates, but so does the ‘OBU model’ (one big union," taking the old IWW principle of one big union of all the workers and applying it here to the sellers, organized ‘industrially’ by sector of industry.) There is also the "Wikinomics model, based on the recent book and advocating peer production, a.k.a., mass collaboration as a development model, and that almost overlaps with both. It’s uncharted territory in some ways, but we do know the internet allows new things to rise, e.g., the Wikipedia, which no one would ever have believed could possibly work, until it did.
_To be more than a half-baked rant, SUBAT organizers need to consult with an attorney [most will give an initial consultation free] about how to incorporate and create the umbrella organization.
There has been some really ugly posts exchanged on this site that undercut the message and divide the audience. Just my 2 cents._
I think it’s too harsh to say it’s a half-baked rant, especially at this early stage. Omidyar’s eBay was a half-baked rant once and really so was the modern internet itself, say back in the ‘70s. The project to date only shows the early efforts of a tiny fraction of the people who will be needed to make it happen (though it does draw already on combined decades of business experience, graduate study, and even several decades of the practice of law in Europe, just with the earliest members), so the possibilities seem limitless if enough people became involved. I’m not sure I saw any ugly posts on the SUBAT page here, though. (I’ve been distracted lately…but not that much.) There were some attacks elsewhere on the Point site but of course I kind of expect that, since the idea is new (this page is not even two weeks old), and it runs counter to a lot of the assumptions we grew up with. One of the reasons things are vague in the ‘phases’ is so that everyone has a chance to contribute and improve the plan, working together to make something new under the sun, really. It might even become like a furnace, roiling and molten, but that’s how you forge something strong, I think, something strong enough to go against a gorilla like eBay…or maybe a gorilla riding on a bulldozer! It’s a terrifying prospect for one person to face alone, but if we can just unite somehow, even a gorilla on a bulldozer can’t push a million people back into the pit of dependency on eBay (GreedBay).
I, for one, really liked your 2 cents, they’re constructive! I hope you’ll join the cause and help, yes? It really needs everyone, bringing their unique skills and ideas, acting in a spirit of solidarity. I imagine the gorilla must be laughing again now, with the boycott week almost over, but I think that was just the beginning. If this finally unifies us users, the sellers and buyers together, well, we will have the last laugh…and they who laugh last, laugh best.
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