What Is A Fair Trade?

By James Stout , Writer for Barter News

We can consider many perspectives in setting our values in bartering.  

1. We can transfer our regular dollar-salary into a barter situation. For example, if we earn $40 per hour for our computer repairs, we exchange a two-hour repair for our barter partner's $80 bicycle.
2. We can decide that "all labor is equal; your hour equals mine in trade." That attitude comes from people who are idealistic -- and are usually unskilled. The difference between a minimum-wage laborer and a $100-per-hour professional can be too obvious when they are trying to do a direct trade -- at a ratio of one hour for about 16 hours. Some barter organizations insist on a strict hour-for-hour trade between members. But at one barter club where a similar rule was enforced, few professionals were willing to participate; eventually the club's director discarded the rule and instead he allowed the members to make their own agreements.
3. We create our own subjective values. Those values are based on various factors:
   • Our personal appreciation of particular goods and services. For example, if we knit sweaters in exchange for goods and services, one doctor might give us a checkup in trade for two sweaters. But a doctor who is particularly fond of sweaters might notice the extraordinary quality of our work, and thus be happy to accept one in trade.
   • The emotional tone of the trade. In some deals, we are interacting with friends (or with friendly strangers). We might place a higher value onto goods and services which are created and delivered with love, warmth, and care. On the basis of that friendship, or just the humanness of the encounter, we both might reconsider our fees into the kind of easy deal which is offered from one friend to another.
   • External influences. Our judgment of value can be influenced by the media (particularly advertisements), or by a profession's charismatic image. We can reject those external standards in favor of our own, to decide what is important to us.

Get an appraisal of the other person's goods and services. Especially when we are trading expensive merchandise, we should check with experts: store owners, directories, catalogs, magazines, books, price guides, and consumer-oriented web sites. Ask professionals to verify that the camera is fully functioning, that the painting is authentic, that the motorcycle really is worth that much. Show the power saw to a carpenter who owns a similar model. Go to appropriate stores to compare prices on furniture, equipment, plants, clothing, and other goods. Ask a jeweler to appraise the jewelry. At one barter club, a car mechanic has offered to inspect vehicles before we buy them; the mechanic can be paid via the club's units.

Cover your costs. Consider the costs of supplies and depreciation. For instance, if I am roto-tilling your big garden, are you paying for the gasoline, or am I? If you wire up my lights, am I purchasing the materials, or am I expecting you to bring some materials from your shop? (Usually, the person who is receiving the service pays cash for the materials.) If you are a businessperson, consider your overhead, the money which you have paid to your suppliers, etc.

Community Time Banks Continue Expansion

The Boston area has several community time banks: The Lynn Time Bank, incorporated in 2004, has more than 300 members. The Cape Ann Time Bank, founded last year, has 120. The nascent Time Trade Circle in Cambridge, with 50 members, expects to ramp up this month when a full-time intern comes on board. They join a network of 140 time banks established over the past two decades in the U.S. and abroad.

A time bank is where people donate their services and receive credit for the time, which can then be “spent” for other member services. The brainchild of University of the District of Columbia law professor Edgar Cahn, they offer a twist on the age-old interdependence of tight-knit communities as an antidote to the isolation that can plague modern life. He estimates a time bank opens every week, thanks in part to software that eases the arranging and recording of transactions.

In Maine, the decade-old Portland Time Bank has 750 active members, mostly lower-income, who last year engaged in more than 25,000 transactions, including medical care at a health center that accepts time dollars. The District of Columbia’s Time Dollar Youth Court allows first-time offenders charged with minor infractions to sit on youth juries to earn time dollars to ‘‘buy’’ refurbished computers. In Texas, members of a time bank planted a community garden.

Unlike the monetary economy, which values a doctor’s time more than a day-care worker’s, in time banks the lawyer’s hour equals the same time dollar as the laborer’s. Unlike a barter economy of traded favors — the auto mechanic tunes up the car of the plumber who then fixes the mechanic’s leaky sink — time bank members pay it forward.

Unlike a traditional bank, time banks regularly schedule social events and, in more diverse communities, build bridges across racial and ethnic divides. For example, the Lynn Time Bank is an outgrowth of a support group for parents of children with mental retardation and other developmental delays, and the Cambridge group is an outgrowth of one for parents of children with mental illness.

Time banks offer people of limited means a way to ‘‘purchase’’ conveniences — even luxuries — usually reserved for the more affluent. Lynn Time Bank members can find entertainment from a mime, help organizing closets, assistance with grocery shopping, pet sitting, and rides to the doctor.

Some see time banks as a way to help the elderly stay in their homes, with younger residents, for instance, offering home repair and snow shoveling and older residents offering themselves as surrogate grandparents. The first time bank in Massachusetts, founded in 1987 at Kit Clark Senior Services in Dorchester, was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to help the elderly.

Dr. Edgar S. Cahn is creator of Time Dollars and the founder of TimeBanks USA, as well as the co-founder of the National Legal Services Program and the Antioch School of Law. He is the author of No More Throw Away People: The Co-Production Imperative, Time Dollars, Our Brother's Keeper: The Indian in White America, and Hunger USA.

Cahn’s philosophy is five-pointed: Every individual is an asset, some work is beyond price, helping works better as a two-way street, we need each other, and every human being matters.

For more information on time banks go to www.timebanks.org.

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