Mission & Manifesto
Work stopped being tied to a building. The rules did not follow. This is the charter we hold ourselves to, and the one we would like the rest of the industry measured against — so the future of work can work for the many, not the few.
Keeping count · Audited September 2026
Three are live today. Two are in build: the Grader and the Manager directory. Two we committed to in 2023 have not started — invoice collection and rights guidance stay on the board rather than quietly disappearing. The last three are positions, not products: nothing to ship, and nothing to hide behind either.
The best opportunities are still reserved for people in the richest countries, or holding a passport with the right to work in them. A company that can hire anywhere has no honest reason to behave otherwise.
Roles advertised across Europe, the Middle East and Africa disproportionately go to Europeans. Candidates in the Middle East and Africa spend three to four times longer searching for jobs they were told they qualified for, and are sometimes told outright: “Sorry, this job is only available for EMEA (Europe).”
A number withheld until the third interview is a number being used as leverage. Pay belongs on the post — internally transparent as well as externally, because a company that publishes bands publicly and hides them from its own staff has only bought itself a marketing line.
Eligibility for perks, pay and protection is routinely decided by where a person happens to live rather than what they actually do — most visibly when the employer is headquartered somewhere else. Two people doing the same job should not be covered by different rules because of a document in a drawer.
Employers show their best face and conceal the rest under the banner of employer branding, and many review sites are reputation-management products in costume. If criticism can be bought out, the star is advertising. Candidates are left choosing between “this place is perfect” and “get me out”, and the truth is in neither.
Your experience of a job is governed almost entirely by the person you will report to — their leadership style, their philosophy about the work, your relationship with them. By the offer stage you have usually met them. But by then you have spent weeks getting there, and knowing changes nothing. Knowing before you apply is the only version of this that is any use — because it changes which jobs you go for at all.
Freelancers and contractors carry unreliable hours, clients with no concept of a boundary, and projects that stop without warning. The most basic version of the problem is simply not being paid, and it is astonishingly common.
Employment law is never taught in school, so most people sign contracts they do not fully understand and never challenge a clause — usually because they are afraid the offer will be withdrawn. That fear is not an accident, and the knowledge gap is worth a great deal of money to someone other than the worker.
Full-time employees are given preferential treatment over part-time, contract, freelance, intern, apprentice and temporary staff doing comparable work — fewer benefits, lower pay, improvised tools. Most contractors are contractors by necessity, not by choice.
It would be hypocritical to say the future of work will be built together, and then build it as a closed thing with no input from the people it is meant to serve. This clause has no completion date and never will. It is measured by one question: are the people this was built for actually in the room?
Clause 07 and clause 08 — collecting unpaid invoices, and plain-English employment rights — were committed to in 2023 and have not been started. Not delayed. Not started.
Both serve the people with the least leverage in the entire system, which is exactly why they should not have been the two that slipped. We are leaving them on this page rather than editing them out, because a charter you are allowed to quietly revise is a brochure.
Each clause answers something we watched happen repeatedly. These findings are undated on purpose — not one of them has been resolved since we first wrote them down.
Refreshed September 2026. The 2023 manifesto cited PwC 2022, Owl Labs 2022, Kona 2022 and the 2022 four-day-week pilot. Three have current equivalents and are updated above. The fourth — “only 16% of companies worldwide are fully remote” — has been retired rather than refreshed: Owl Labs' current report is US-only and measures where workers sit, not what companies allow, so quoting it would be a different claim wearing the old one's clothes.
None of this requires a budget line. It requires publishing a number, meaning a location tag, and naming the manager in the post. We list employers who work this way ahead of those who don't, and we are building the tools that make the difference visible.
If you're hiring globally and you already operate like this, we would rather send you candidates than write about you.
This charter is published ungated so it can be linked, reproduced and used against us the moment we fall short of it. Joining is free, and it is the only thing that makes that pressure real.
“I've worked in tech for over a decade, and I rarely challenged a clause in my own employment contracts. Not because I couldn't be bothered — but because I was afraid the offer would be pulled.”
