Thursday, January 31, 2008

Employee Benefits for Peer to Peer businesses?

Etsy's First Five Years

Etsy just raised a startling ammount of investment, which makes me very happy. They do so much right.

There's a very interesting post on their site about what their intentions are. This in particular caught my eye
It is immensely important to me that all Etsy workers are paid a good salary, provided with full benefits (medical, dental, vision) by the company. Many companies, far too many companies, underpay their employees, don't make workers employees at all ("permalancers" and "permatemp" are the new words for this), and provide few if any benefits. (We also know that many of the sellers on Etsy lack access to such benefits as health insurance, and we want to work to change this.)

Emphasis mine, there.

That's a game changer. A community marketplace that also acts as a kind of international, distributed trade union come employee benefit scheme? Visionary stuff.

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