Your skill stays yours.
Thirty years of knowing how a job goes has never been something a person could own, sell, or be paid for twice. Machines are starting to learn it anyway. Even Steven is the instrument that makes that fair: you keep the skill, you license the record, you are paid for every hour it works, your name stays on it, and you can take it back.
What a person knows has never been property.
Wages pay for a person's time. Nothing has ever paid for their method.
The best hands in any trade are known for what does not happen. The machine that did not go in. The line that did not get undercut. The batch that did not have to be dumped. A careful day and a lucky day look identical on a timesheet, so that knowledge has never had a price on it, and it walks out the door at retirement.
It is now recordable. Someone will record it. The question that decides whether the people who own that knowledge take part is what happens to it afterwards, and that question currently has bad answers: a one-time fee, a clause nobody read, and no way out.
The whole instrument.
The session
The record of you working. It is information about an identifiable person, so it is yours to allow and yours to withdraw. We hold it under licence and we never acquire it.
The built thing
What a machine or a model actually runs, made from the session: your way of working, as a machine can carry it. That is ours: our instrument, our work, our checking. You cannot take it and sell it, and we cannot use it without you.
The consent
Separate agreements, given one at a time and withdrawn one at a time. Yes to one is not yes to the others, and a no is honoured without emptying anything else.
The count
Every hour your way of working is in use is counted, and you see the count. The people counting the hours are the people who owe you money, so you get to check it.
Five things, and every one of them survives us.
- 01Your skill stays yoursNothing here stops you working, teaching, bringing on apprentices, or going somewhere else tomorrow. We never ask for that and we would not take it.
- 02Paid every hour it worksNo lump sum and no handshake. A share for every hour your way of working is in use, for as long as it is. You are paid because you kept the original.
- 03Your name on itIf a machine is working your way, it says so. The name is the point, and it stays attached to you.
- 04You can end itGive notice and nothing new starts under it. The job already running finishes, and that is the one delay in it. No penalty, no clawback, no fee for walking away. A right that costs money to use is not a right.
- 05You can check the countYou see the hours it worked and what you are owed, and you can check both against the record that shows who cleared the work.
Every one of those is written against its counterpart on our side. The test each clause has to pass is whether it would still be acceptable if the two sides swapped places.
Anywhere a person runs a machine better than the next person.
Equipment and industrial process operation. The setter whose jobs come off the machine right. The crane operator who lands a container without a swing. The board operator who sees a process going wrong long before the alarm does. The driller who feels the formation change.
The test is simple and it is not about how good somebody is. It is whether anyone would ask for that person by name.
Two readers, and a page for each.
If the way of working is yours
Your page carries what the rest of this site does not: why people ask for you by name and no number ever ranks you, and which protections stay with you when the one doing the recording is your own employer.
What protects youIf you own the machines
Two arrangements that get confused: your own operator teaching your own iron, or a specialist's way of working licensed by name for the job nobody on your crew can do. Your page says which one you need, and what stays the same on your site either way.
Which one you needOur own crews and our own machines come first.
Every page on this site describes an instrument that is designed and written down. What has happened so far, and what has not, is set out below and in full on its own page.
No capture session has ever been recorded. The instrument on this site is designed, specified and written down, and that design is what these pages set out. The agreements are being written now and nobody signs anything before they are done. We are working it out on our own people, on our own ground, before asking anyone else to take part.