Regional Building Committee decisions boggles even a dubs mind...

by undercover 27 Replies latest watchtower scandals

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  undercover

  So I'm talking to someone from my old hall and he tells me that there are some disgruntled JWs (including elders) who feel like some bad decisions are being made by the RBC.

  For instance, one hall needed a new roof. An elder, in the construction business, made a deal with a local non-JW roofer that if the brothers cleared off the old shingles, the roofer would come in with his crew and do the new roof for X amount of dollars. The RBC elder in charge got wind of that arrangement and nixed the deal. Instead, an RBC crew would do the job, the local brothers would still clean the old shingles off and the local congregation would feed the workers. The price for the new roof was three times the amount that the local contractor agreed to do it for...and another several hundred was going to be needed to feed the RBC crew.

  Another hall across town needed some repairs. They got a quote from the RBC. The prices were very high. A local elder in the congregation, who happened to be on the RBC, instead arranged with local brothers and non-JW contractors to do the work. He got reasonable prices, the congregation approved the work to be done and it was done. The RBC leaders found out about it after the fact and were upset that they were not used to do the work. In the end, they had the brother who arranged all the work at reasonable prices to be removed from the RBC.

  Yet another congregation had bought a piece of property to build a new hall on. Several other congregations had been collecting money to donate to the new hall to help their brothers. The WTS ended up denying the congregation the permission to build a new building, instead telling them to renovate the existing building. The RBC quoted the renovation at well over $100,000. When the other congregations found out that a new building wasn't going to be built, they pulled their donations back and used them for their own halls and the brothers at the old hall had to take out a loan for almost the full amount from the WTS to pay for the renovations.

  All of these things have caused people in the know about them to question the whole RBC program and how it seems to be generating profit for the Society instead of being a cost-saving program to build/renovate buildings.

  I know that it has caused at least one elder to start to question even more as he's starting to see a pattern of deceit not only in the RBC but in the child abuse situation and other things.
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  drew sagan

  It's a tricky business.
  
  I really think that this particulair piece of the WTS would be a great point for research all on its own. Most of us never had much expierence with these things and know little of what is really going on. Just knowing what standard WTS procedure is would be interesting.

  I know that in some cases the RBC is focused on gettting contracts for JWs with businesses.
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  5go

  Typical corporation monopoly program. Ran into the same thing working at a couple of restaurants the franchises are forcing to buy everything from the mother corporation. Though one of them did fix it sort of they had two company's from which the franchisee could buy from but those companies still had to by from the mother corporation.
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  johnny cip

  I think this is my last post for the day( I'M RESTRICTED TO 5 POSTS A DAY BECAUSE I CALLED THE WTS NAZIS) But I've been screaming for years that the whole Kingdum hall building/renovations ,wt loans, special box to build halls for the poor in AFRICA. www BOX is nothing but a SCAM. The bottom line is if it don't make $$$$$$$$$$ for the wt society it's not BIBLICAL... LOL HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAA i just stop laughing, at how stupid most jw's are. john
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  sir82

  My impression is that RBCs are tin-pot totalitarian regimes. The bigshots there are on a major power trip, even more so than typical for JW bigwigs.

  I would not at all be surprised to someday see some sort of huge scandal breaking regarding some RBC somewhere, especially where they are involved in Assembly Hall construction (mult-million dollar projects). The possibilities for corruption are rife - it could be on the scale of the "Tacoma Dome scandal", or even bigger.
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  wanderlustguy

  I know that in some cases the RBC is focused on gettting contracts for JWs with businesses.

  This is just one way that the brothers make money off the sheep...
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  WTWizard

  I wonder if antitrust laws could be used against them in these cases. The common thread is that a worldly contractor can get the job done at a fair price. The Tower then gets pxxxed, pulling its support and threatening the committees, just to make sure they get the business. With the forced monopoly, they charge exorbitant prices and do crappy work (I bet that roof is going to leak in a few years, while the worldly contractor that charged the reasonable price would have lasted 20 years or more).

  And, there is never a guarantee of workmanship when the RBC gets the business. You pay three times, or more, for the work. Then, if something goes wrong, you pay again for repairs. The worldly contractor would havs stood behind their work: in case of worker errors or defective material, they would have fixed the problem at no charge. This is totally unfair to anyone that is donating money.

  Why allow someone to do the work for $25,000 if you have the power to force your committees and teams to do it, do a pxxx poor job and not stand behind their work, charge $75,000, and then put $50,000 into the Worldwide Pedophile Defense Fund? All you have to do is threaten committees that attempt to hire worldly people that would do a better job with sanctions that could include removal of "privileges". And the worldly companies do not support pedophiles with 2/3 of the purchase price.

  Hopefully all this is going to result in implosion of donations. Kingdumb Hells will be allowed to be run down or be forcibly remodeled at congregation expenses, not be paid for, and foreclosed on. I hope that happens. And I hope the embarrassment that results causes membership to continue going south, and new members to think twice before joining.
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  undercover

  I know that in some cases the RBC is focused on gettting contracts for JWs with businesses.

  When I discovered something about how that worked that's when I no longer volunteereed for RBC work.

  A brother in the hall had his own business. This particular business did a lot of work for new and remodeled Kingdom Halls. For awhile, I thought that this brother was volunteering his shop, tools, materials and experience along with labor from the friends to build the items that he supplied.

  An elder enlightened me to the fact that this brother was making money on these projects. I found out that he was contracted by the RBC to provide his product and was getting paid more than average for his work and items. The brother never said one way or the other, but it was never disclosed that he was being paid either, so I assumed we were all volunteers for the Society and not volunteers to him.

  Every project that came up, he requested volunteers from the Kingdom Hall to help on the next RBC project. When I found out that he was making profit off of my free labor, I quit. I never worked on another RBC project after that.

  Not only are these contractors getting free labor, they're making a living off of the donations that we all had made to the building work.

  I understand that contractors have to get paid, but when the RBC contractors are making good money on these projects (better than most non-JW contractors would) and they're using the rank and file for free labor, it smacks of deceit and scandal.
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  Doubting Bro

  Wow, just Wow. I was under the impression that everything was volunteer and that the RBC was used just to coordinate the work and get deals on materials.

  undercover, can you explain to me how the situation you knew about worked? Was the "brother" contractor a department head? Aren't there some employment laws that are being violated here? Being told you're working on a volunteer project and then the person you're working for getting paid seems not only unethical but illegal.

  I've seen situations where a congregation had a brother perform work (like making a sign) and we wanted him to charge us the normal price (since it was his business and we just wanted the work to go to a brother rather than someone else). He refused to accept payment for his time and just charged us for materials which was very inexpensive. But, I've not seen anything about RBC contractors.
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  JK666

  G-R-A-F-T

  JK