No Rest for People Who Pay Attention

I wish I could get back the nights I have spent not sleeping because of worrying about the market. Over 51 years, they are countless. 

It is now two years since I have attended a Board meeting. I separated myself from it as I felt like the only person in the room doing any work, and I was not only providing a clear and comprehensive public record, but keeping up all of the checks and balances needed to guide a largely uninformed and unskilled group of people who were veering off into the unethical due to terrible leadership.

I had resisted being pushed out, stubbornly, since I knew my service was holding the market together, and as the Board progressed into blithely terminating two memberships of food booth owners because they correctly identified the lack of professional skills in the GM, their evidence based solely on her gaslighting and the collusion of a couple of her sycophants, I had to step away rather than be accountable for that. I was telling myself to get out of leadership for months, in great distress, as I was discovering how manipulated and controlled I was, along with all of the members. 

One of the hardest things in extracting oneself from a toxic and predatory situation is that you have already been complicit in many ways that you will be unpacking for months or years as you try to forgive yourself for not stopping it somehow. I still go through that. I had to say repeatedly "I'm not fixing it this time," as people kept looking to me to correct the ways we were straying from our normal into the psychopathic and authoritarian. It wasn't something one person could fix although somehow people still seem to be looking for a hero. 

It has devolved, of course. Some of the ways are ludicrous, some predictable, some so egregious that it is a wonder we still are operating. Obfuscation and outright lying are the norm, and the gatekeeping of information is thorough. You used to be able to at least keep up by reading committee and board minutes, but that was one of the first things that had to be destroyed and it was. Reports and minutes just don't contain the info about what was done, the transparency of the process and the steps that were taken to be fair and egalitarian. Committees are controlled and turned into tools to change policy so that the admin has much more power than is good for members. 

And members are mostly scrambling to make enough money to survive this economic disaster time, which has affected almost everyone except those who keep getting paid no matter what the membership is experiencing. The disconnect is dismaying and although I understand it, it's depressing to know that no one wants to tell the truth or get into the line of fire, since we see what happens.

Things are done in the dark that wouldn't stand the light of day. It seems that hats and my hats in particular were discussed at length for the last many months at the Standards Committee, but I was not notified. It has always been the practice that no one's business is discussed without their knowledge and notification, in a committee or at the Board level. Now it is common practice, and the minutes leave out the details and decision-making process so not even the committee members know what is happening. 

Members of the Standards Committee and others are asking me what process resulted in this new hat standard, and I have no idea. No one told me my (and the one other member) exception was being dissolved despite it saying right in the handbook that it was for the life of our continuous membership. I don't know if the Committee even knew they were doing that. I don't know anything about it. All of a sudden an important guideline was thrown out and there was no member input and no notification. I was distracted by a Notice of Concern that not even the Committee Chairs got to see, much less the committee members. 

It turns out that NoCs are no longer shared with the committee, but are summarized, however inaccurately that may be, or shelved if the GM doesn't want to forward them to the committee. This was never the practice in any of the past decades, that they were treated confidentially. They were generally printed with the minutes, if relevant to a number of members, and the discussion about them was shared in the minutes long before Board recommendations were made. And recommendations came from the committee meeting, not from the Chairs or any one person, with time built in so any stakeholders who would be affected were notified and consulted.

I saw with the proposed weapons policy that a member who makes knives was not made aware of the process, even though it would have greatly affected him, though he trusted he would be. I don't know if the policy was passed. 

I see with this new hat guideline that it was aimed at baseball caps but now broadly covers any and all hats sold by our members. It sounds simple, but a 50% assessment of member contribution is so loosely defined (it's not defined,) subjective, and open to interpretation that it may not be useful at all, and certainly can't be fairly applied to all the affected members.

What is worse, is that this now applies, apparently, to all products, even those that have been sold for decades. This is not how guideline changes were ever handled. It isn't right to change the rules, move the goalposts so to speak, and outlaw products that were already approved. So by rights, the two of us who had these lifetime exceptions should still be holding them and not be subject to this 50% assessment. Maybe that is why I haven't been notified. Maybe nothing has changed for me.

But this NoC that is not being transparently handled seems to give the lie to that. Why does anyone have the power to do this? 

The answer is simply because someone has taken power and is using the committees, board, and policy process as a weapon against members who are disagreeing with things and being vocal about it. 

The committee members don't know their process has been subtly changed and their powers have been dissolved. Most of them are new and a concerted effort has been made to drive anyone out who asks questions (two members that we know about have been either terminated or given an impossible process and walked away from the market, and there may have been more,) or brings up the past ways of doing things. 

This can't be comfortable for committee members, and many of them must be getting the inner signals that the process isn't fair. What can they do? 

Identifying a restored process for dealing with NoCs is one step. They are not confidential. Past managers have put them in the board packets, along with their explanations of actions taken, and certainly committee members should see the actual complaints before engaging in discussions of them. And the person targeted needs to see the complaint as well. While the complainant can be anonymous, that does not mean the complaint can be secret. Any member complained about has a right to see the charges. This is basic due process. We can't not have due process at the market. 

The fact that it appears that a guideline change was brought about in secret from this secret complaint should bother everyone. The pattern is evident. The weapons policy was brought up by an accusation that was never examined for truth...someone can say anything and there is not a process to verify it. This complaint about my hats apparently said I made a hat that said "No." That is false. 

I will repeat that I have no problem that more hats will be accepted into the market. I will be friends with those members just as I am friends with other members who make tote bags. We can talk shop. We can share resources. That is always how we have faced what other orgs might see as competition. We don't compete. We all have our own equal chance to make a success of ourselves. We are all happy to share the successes of each other.  

We need to hold tight to our values of fairness, transparency, and honesty in our community. It needs to be real. The current narrative is that the GM "has changed" and "has learned" and I will remind you that you can't change basic personality characteristics, though you can surely lie about it. There are so many false narratives it has become ponderous to keep up with them, and many decisions are based on them.

Let's demand honesty. We deserve it. How many other members are losing sleep and feeling isolated and not seen? I know it isn't just me.