Vision

Says Us is a proposal for the creation of a web facility, that allows anonymous complaints about fulfillment  of basic needs, by people all over the world, in their own language.

The site will collect “pros” and “cons” of work, housing, healthcare, school, the military, prisons, and unemployment with a recognition of what works, and identification of what does not.  

“Cons” or complaints, will allow our users to identify what needs to change, and if they choose, work with others to create those changes.

Says-Us will act as a portal, allowing people to find each other, necessary resources and organizations that might help them to organize, unify activity and respond to injustice and oppression.

Complaints can be about work, housing, school, government, food, prison, police, courts, anything.  Anonymous users can create a site ID that enables them to communicate with others with similar complaints. In addition to finding each other, the site will contain links to hundreds of relevant organizations and resources (see Actions for examples).

Jobvent.com, before it was eviscerated by Glassdoor.com, proved that a site for job related complaints, works. As many as 100,000 employees wrote critical reviews about almost 10,000 different companies.

The outpouring of employee complaints resulted in some improvements and showed employees how management was helpless to stop anonymous complaints and whistle blowing. Critical reviews caused some employees to leave and alerted job seekers to  problems at those companies.

Jobvent did not offer workers, contributors ways to communicate with each other or to find helpful resources.  Quitting was the only option.  The same is true today about glassdoor.com

As a vehicle for personal and political change Says Us will be giving people a place to write, record, and communicate, anonymously, about their own  problems and needs with work, housing, health care, child care, food, and school.

Entries, “reviews” could be organized, sorted, and searched by employer, institution, landlord, agency, school, location, ratings, and other demographic.

Anonymous users would include as much demographically as possible without identifying themselves, so that people with related complaints could find each other.

Entries could include text, sound, and video.

Reviews could allow numeric ratings of various aspects.  Reviews submitted as sound files or video could be offered to radio stations, news sound sites, and video sites, like youtube and vimeo.

You could read what others have written and see if your problems and needs are shared by others.

You could see examples of what has already been done in similar circumstances, find resources, like government and private agencies, community groups, church groups, unions and other organizations, and communicate with other contributors.

You could take action through links to hundreds of other sites and people.  Helping sites could post the services they offer, and those services too could be reviewed.

For an example, we have included here employee reviews that were posted on the now-defunct website, jobvent.com.  Read reviews that employees of Northbay Mental Health posted, see examples of critical reviews that were removed, censored, when Glassdoor.com bought Jobvent.com and renamed it, jobitorial.com.

The outpouring of employee complaints on jobvent was noticed by employers, and in some cases, may have gotten improvements based upon employer embarrassment.

Jobvent did not offer contributors ways to communicate with each other or find helpful resources.  None-the-less, Northbay employees communicated through other channels, and as a result, often “voted with their feet”, causing a rapid turnover of personnel. Job seekers were alerted to Southbay problems by the jobvent reviews.

Next Steps

“Whatever happened to jobvent?” from Yahoo Answers

An example of Northbay content that was on the jobvent site and was removed

Draft requirements for says-us web site and mobile application

Says Us homepage