Libs

Liberties – Actual Days Off

This post is in regards to the April 24, 2025 poll. Be sure to get your votes in on this weeks poll.

Libs day was the one day we looked forward to every week. In Sea Org, the week ended at 2:00 p.m. Thursday. This was true no matter where you were and is still true to this day. That means that all around the world, the artificial week ended at a different time. But it definitely ended. Exactly at 2:00 p.m.

At that precise time in every Scientology Org around the world everything comes to a full stop. Statistics are collected and turned in. Then the next week begins anew with new goals set to reach even higher heights. In Scientology, there was never the option of simply doing the same as the week before, and certainly you’d better not do worse.

Then comes Friday. That’s payday. Maybe. Yes, maybe. The deal is, payday hinges on the statistics of the organization. The whole organization. Not just the statistics of a single department, but every single department. Of course some areas are more important than others. The biggest thing all Scientologists care about is money.

This has been true for time immemorial whether or not it is spoken. The almighty dollar is the driving force behind a lot of what happens each week and what will happen the future week.

In 1975, in Sea Org, we were still getting paid $5.00 per week. My social security statement shows I made $2674 for the year 1975. That’s a lot more than $5.00 per week. It’s also because I made $2600 of that in the first 8 months of the year before I joined Sea Org. In today’s dollars, that’s almost $16,000. In the last 17 weeks of 1975, I made $74, an average of $4.35/week or about $18.00/month for the last 4 months of 1975.

Sure, I had a place to stay if you want to call where I was living a place to stay and there was food to eat, if we made it to the galley during mealtime. Some of the food was even palatable.

But, except for our dress uniforms, we were required to provide all of our own clothing, toiletries, and do our own laundry and housekeeping with the cash that was handed us in an envelope every week. We did not know until we were handed our pay envelope how much we would be getting. Never more than $5.00 but it could be less depending on how much money had come into the org that week.

Then came the best day – Saturday was libs day. It was our day off from our post. We were free to do what we wanted. Well sort of. We were required to clean our berthing that day. We had cleaning stations at the Org that we had to man that day. If we wanted to eat food we didn’t pay for with our own money, we had to make our way to the galley to do that. And we had to do our laundry that day.

If stats were abysmal, laundry went by the wayside as it was more important to be sure the next weeks stats were higher. Besides, how were we supposed to do laundry when we didn’t get full pay? Even if we had the money for laundry detergent, it still cost to use the washer and dryer at the laundromat.

On the days when we did laundry, it actually became our time to have fun, well what passed for fun then. I had a group of male friends who would join me as the little hick from the sticks ventured down Hollywood Blvd. carrying her duffle full of laundry.

I was so green and innocent that the one time they goaded me into walking into Frederick’s of Hollywood with them, I almost had a panick attack. We got in the habit of joining arms as we walked past XXX theaters, marching in step, singing “Third Rate Romance, Low Rent Rendezvous.”

So, back then, there was a teeny bit more freedom granted the Sea Org members. They did have what appeared to be time off. They did have what passed for freedom to do what they wanted with those precious few hours. However there was never the financial freedom to do anything that would actually make life less dreary. Our freedom was just a different routine for one day. A different scramble to complete everything that it was impossible to do in the rest of the time we were doing what needed to be done just to meet artificial goals.

The carrot was the same. The stick was just more nicely presented. No Sea Org member was ever allowed enough free time to actually think about what was happening in their lives or whether they were enjoying it. That has always been the case.