A History of the Sliding Scale, it may not be what you think..

essays

Jun 10

If you've spent any time around justice-oriented yoga spaces, you've probably seen it. Three prices for the same class, community, sustainer, supporter, and an invitation to choose the rate that matches your circumstances, no questions asked. I offer them mostly in workshops and classes, and maybe you do too, and for the longest time I treated the sliding scale as something that just exists, a thing equity-minded teachers do because it feels right (and it does feel right, which is maybe why I never thought to question where it came from). But in the past few months, I went digging into its actual history, and it gave me so much perspective on the Sliding Scale. So here's me trying to put words (again, a lot of it) into it which I hope may be interesting to you

I. Tracing the Term “Sliding Scale” across histories. (that I’ve researched)

The term "sliding scale" was noted in literature, it did not seem to have anything to do with care, which honestly surprised me when I started researching the etymology of this term. It showed up in Britain in 1828, in the form of ²Corn Laws, a tariff on imported grain that slid up and down with the price of bread, dropping when prices rose and climbing back up when prices fell, all to protect the profits of wealthy landowners (not the people buying the bread, in case you were wondering).

Another time the term sliding scale³ was used, is in the version in the coal mines and iron mills of the late 1800s, where sliding scale agreements tied workers' wages to the market price of whatever they produced. When prices go up, wages go up and when prices go down, wages go down too. And workers actually liked the idea at first (because it sounded like profit-sharing, like being let in on the upside), until the long slumps came and they learned the hard way that the scale mostly slid in one direction, which is why by the early 1900s unions had walked away from it entirely and fought for guaranteed wage floors instead.

And to me, this was the first sort of introduction of how the term “sliding scale” was first primarily used as a strategy to transfer risks in a downward direction of power which gives us a hint that it’s roots were not neutral to begin with.

The third instance is one that we may be more familiar with which are fees adjusted to what someone can pay, and this started out of charity clinics and settlement houses in the late 1800s before getting formalized over the twentieth century in community health, legal aid, and mental health care. By the 1960s and 70s the community mental health movement had solidified he "sliding fee scale" a fixture of accessible care (community health centers in the US are still required to offer one today, which I didn't know until I started this research).

It is also worth noting that tracing the term to Britain doesn't mean the practice didn't exist elsewhere. Methods like this tend to be more documented in Western literature because of who controlled the archives, the printing presses, the academic journals (the whole apparatus of what counts as a record), but documentation is not the same as authority and can create a sense of false origin. On this, I share a bit more about practices of sharing financial power in the section below.

II. How it became part of the Financial Yoga Scene.

Yoga's encounter with the sliding scale begins with an irony that equity-minded practitioners are now courageous enough to name. The practice from which students supported teachers through voluntary generosity, according to their means and gratitude, comes from many traditions. In Vedic traditions, you have versions of guru-dakshina. In Buddhism, you have dana. And this bleeds into religion as well. In Christianity, you have tithe and alms. And in the religion I grew up in, Islam, teachers in mosques and madrasas were traditionally sustained by waqf endowments and community sadaqah.

As yoga was brought into the West during the rise of neoliberal spiritual capitalism¹, wellness became a commodity that can be purchased by a drop-in fee, the membership package, and the matching set carefully placed in the windows of the boutique retail floor. (which I have totally bought into as well, so I’m not without fault here to be clear). The typical studio price point, alongside the industry's overwhelmingly white, affluent, and able-bodied visual culture, effectively excluded the communities living with the most chronic stress and the least access to care.

From what I was able to trace, sliding scale pricing entered the yoga world along two converging routes. The first was the donation-based model, most visibly popularized by Yoga to the People, founded in New York in 2006, which invited students to pay whatever they wished. The model spread widely and demonstrated real demand for accessible practice, and actually made millions, eventually collapsed because of tax evasion, misconduct and discrimination.

The second route came not from the fitness industry but from grassroots healing communities made of herbalists, bodyworkers, therapists, and teachers working at the intersection of healing and social justice who adapted the sliding scale from the mutual aid and community health traditions and redesigned it for spaces without administrative verification.The sliding scale entered this world through two doors, and they could not be more different from each other.

One of the more frequently read and referred-to articles is the 2015 blog post by herbalist Alexis J. Cunningfolk called "The Sliding Scale: A Tool of Economic Justice," what most of us now know as the Green Bottle method, and the shift it made was deceptively simple: in place of income verification, it offered a structure for honest self-reflection visualized by bottles filled to different levels, each paired with concrete markers of where you actually sit, like whether you own property, carry debt, support family members, have savings, could absorb an emergency) so that instead of asking how you feel about money (and feelings about money, as we all know, are unreliable narrators), it asks you to locate yourself, truthfully, in a landscape of class.

Britt Hawthorne of Embracing Equity later expanded the framework and named the thing underneath it that I think many of us needed said out loud, which is that poverty is a condition that systems maintain, and you are not poor because you didn't work hard enough.

My guess is that the Green Bottle spread quickly through healing and yoga communities because it filled a real gap which was practical guidance for running a sliding scale on trust instead of surveillance, and it also gave folks a visual that was easily understood by many. And by the late 2010s the three-tier scale had become a kind of signature of justice-oriented yoga spaces (which was where I first was introduced to it through Skill in Action as well as Amplify and Activate).

III. The Argument for Why This Is Not a Discount

Here's the thing: it's easy to look at a sliding scale and see a discount program with progressive branding, and honestly, sometimes that's exactly how it gets run (although I do think it’s from a well-intentioned place).

This is where Dean Spade's work on mutual aid gives us the language for understanding why [Add source for Spade’s article] Spade draws a hard line between charity and solidarity, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. Charity flows downward, from those who have to those judged deserving of help, and it arrives wrapped in screening, conditions, and a quiet hierarchy where the giver gets to be generous and the receiver is expected to be grateful (while the systems that created the need in the first place, conveniently, remain completely untouched), whereas mutual aid describes people meeting each other's needs side by side, with a shared understanding that scarcity is produced by design and a commitment to building collective power rather than managing poverty from above.

Now look at a discount through that lens and you'll see that a discount runs on charity logic, with the seller holding all the power over the price and graciously extending a reduction to whichever customer can prove they qualify.

A true equity-rooted sliding scale unwinds almost every part of that arrangement, because instead of being screened by someone behind a desk you are trusted to locate yourself. And instead of the economics being hidden they are laid out in the open (including the fact that the people paying at the top of the scale are knowingly making the lower tiers possible) which reframes paying more not as overpaying but as an act of solidarity. This obviously also involves an understanding of a redistribution between community members who understand their economic positions as connected rather than separate. And because the scale arrives with an analysis attached, teaching right at the point of payment that class is structural, it ends up working as a small machine for making class visible in a culture that would really rather not talk about it.

IV. What We Still Don't Know

For all its influence, almost nobody has actually studied the equity-rooted sliding scale, and we have no data on how people choose their tier. Even though people who have used a sliding scale will tell you about a double distortion they see all the time (me included in this), which is comfortable folks sometimes claiming the lowest rate while people shaped by scarcity overpay out of pride or shame (which, if you sit with it for a moment, is the whole class story playing out inside a single checkout page).

This may be my science research background creeping in but if we did have more info, we may be able to have more concrete markers on if this actually changes how people locate their class positionality. But also data mining is a thing, so maybe someone out there can figure this out.

We also don't know whether equity-priced spaces survive over time, or whether a sliding scale can sustain a living wage for teachers and gig-workers alike, especially teachers from the very communities this model is meant to serve, who often end up absorbing the cost of access as unpaid labor and that question matters because it determines whether the model redistributes resources or merely redistributes precarity.

What I'm also interested in continuing to understand is whether a solidarity practice can survive inside a commercial market at all, because the sliding scale makes class visible at the register but doesn't touch studio ownership, or who ultimately profits from yoga's commercialization which leaves me wondering whether it's a doorway into solidarity economics or a substitute for it, a way of feeling like we've addressed the structure while leaving it as-is.

Clearly I have more questions than answers, but I love questions and the quest of learning as well as sharing what I’ve learnt. But here is the good news, because there is always some: every sliding scale, run honestly, at the very least is a small ongoing conversation about class in an industry that was built to avoid having one. And I hope this opens the door to more of us contributing to this topic.