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Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

theguardian.com

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Re: Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

#41

Post by pfooti »

wyager wrote: post #28
balance_factor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> skills and professionalism can be valued by the free market by people competing for them; why, despite pure populism for the lowest common denominator, someone wants to return to something like this, is completely beyond me. The real determination of where the money goes is by the owners of the business. If one looks over the Forbes 400 richest list, we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from…

> we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from the labor of those who work If successful people couldn’t pass ownership onto their heirs, the value of ownership itself would drop dramatically. If Bud and Sam Walton knew they couldn’t pass on their business to their kids, they would either have never done it in the first place or they would structure the business to close out well before they died.…

Hot take: if the Waltons (and their ilk) had not built the walmarts of the world, to maximize profits by externalizing costs (food stamps for employees who are not paid a living wage) and then dodging the taxes that pay for that externalization, then yes. Things would undoubtedly be better.

Pretty sure that if there were a much higher estate tax and other ways to de-incentivize generational wealth inequality that people would still find ways to exploit a semi-capitalist system by arbitraging the interface between public good and private service (c.f., the modern 1099 economy)

Re: Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

#42

Post by maksimum »

wyager wrote: post #28
balance_factor wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> skills and professionalism can be valued by the free market by people competing for them; why, despite pure populism for the lowest common denominator, someone wants to return to something like this, is completely beyond me. The real determination of where the money goes is by the owners of the business. If one looks over the Forbes 400 richest list, we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from…

> we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from the labor of those who work If successful people couldn’t pass ownership onto their heirs, the value of ownership itself would drop dramatically. If Bud and Sam Walton knew they couldn’t pass on their business to their kids, they would either have never done it in the first place or they would structure the business to close out well before they died.…

> If Bud and Sam Walton knew they couldn’t pass on their business to their kids, they would either have never done it in the first place or they would structure the business to close out well before they died

How confident are you in those conclusions? There are plenty of very rich people who claim that they don't intend to leave much for their heirs.

Re: Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

#43

Post by Cyph0n »

jessriedel wrote: post #36
Cyph0n wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. The first successful non-hierarchial company that comes to my mind is Valve. I recall reading that Valve has a higher revenue per employee than any company in the world... Edit : profit, not revenue

Seems to me the causality works the other way. Industries where companies are formed from a small number of employee who are individualy quasi-millionaries (elite SV talent) are more likely to function well without a heirarchy than industries built on coordinated entry-level manual labor (Walmart). Also, I don't really get this claim. Valve has ~360 employees with annual revenue under a billion dollars, https://en.wi…

> Also, I don't really get this claim. Valve has ~360 employees with annual revenue under a billion dollars,

Looks like I was wrong: Newell claims that Valve has the highest profit per employee.

I'm sure the numbers are not accurate, but that is still a very impressive figure for revenue/employee.

Re: Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

#44

Post by blorsh »

dang wrote: post #32
notyourday wrote: post #15

This has been tried multiple times. All of those attempts failed, regardless of the scale. It won't be different this time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I found the comment to be insightful. I'm trying to find his violation, and I can't really. There are a few things that are close, maybe, but not really.

"political or ideological battle" and "shallow dismissals" seem most plausible, but neither really fits. It's not as if the entirety of his comment was "more dumb leftist shit". There was more substance to his comment.

???

Re: Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

#45

Post by SlowBro »

golergka wrote: post #3

> We all get paid the same hourly rate regardless of the roles we do. Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then. One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers. No matter how much do you put into your skills, the system had standard pay scale that you couldn't break out from. I'm happy th…

> Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then.

I was thinking exactly the same. I’m spinning up a small technical manufacturing business and my first products will have wireless capabilities. I’d better not pay my wireless engineers and programmers the same price as my unskilled assemblers. The former can save me hundreds of thousands per year with their acquired knowledge; the latter, dozens of dollars over China. And if I ever get big enough to need C-level execs, I’ll never fill the positions with good employees on tech support pay.

This world is set up to reward value, not hard work. It’s hard work to dig a ditch, but not terribly valuable. A well-paid, intelligent, quality C-level exec can create more value in a week than a hundred cashiers can in a month.

Re: Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

#46

Post by icebraining »

wutbrodo wrote: post #24
remir wrote: post #19

I find worker-owned businesses very interesting. Obviously getting paid the same regardless of role may be an obstacle to attracting highly skilled people, but if salaries are competitive and established in function of role and experience, in a transparent way, that could be great.

Yea, i wondered the same thing. I like the idea of a worker owned Co-op in general, but it's subject to them actually being functional. I don't see how that could be the case with industries with large productivity/talent gaps, like software. Most of the co-ops I've come into contact with are smallish restaurants or grocery stores, which makes sense: most tasks can be handled by anyone and those that aren't can be ju…

I don't see how that could be the case with industries with large productivity/talent gaps, like software.

And yet: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops#coops

The gaps problem seems self-correcting; anyone who thinks they are underpaid will leave, and conversely the team will probably push out those badly underperforming. You'll still have gaps, but only among people who don't mind getting paid the same despite them.

Re: Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

#47

Post by genericthrow »

balance_factor wrote: post #20
golergka wrote: post #3

> We all get paid the same hourly rate regardless of the roles we do. Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then. One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers. No matter how much do you put into your skills, the system had standard pay scale that you couldn't break out from. I'm happy th…

> skills and professionalism can be valued by the free market by people competing for them; why, despite pure populism for the lowest common denominator, someone wants to return to something like this, is completely beyond me. The real determination of where the money goes is by the owners of the business. If one looks over the Forbes 400 richest list, we can see the heirs who drain off so much profit each year from…

> At least Lenin, Stalin and Molotov rose due to their merits, not their birthrights. Russia went from being a country pushed around by the Japanese, with an GDP equivalent to 1917 Brazil, to a superpower sending satellites, men into space, probes to the Moon (the first country to do so). It also had little crime and little poverty.

Following your logic so did Hitler. Whew, my first Reductio ad Hitlerum ever, but to my defence you've started with tasteless jokes.

It's easy to fell into this 'communism was good idea but bad implementation' meme. I've lived in communism era in western Europe and believe you me same things were happening as you describe (Kochs, Waltons etc), there was still '1%' just not mentioned in newspapers as 'those who got wealthy by hard work'. Lower and middle classes were basically under oppressive regime.

Re: Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

#48

Post by dragonwriter »

golergka wrote: post #3

> We all get paid the same hourly rate regardless of the roles we do. Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then. One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers. No matter how much do you put into your skills, the system had standard pay scale that you couldn't break out from. I'm happy th…

> Good luck retaining any skilled professionals then.

It's a good wholesaler where employees “multiskill” so that roles re flexible; virtually all skilled professionals are probably outsourced (which isn't uncommon in firms where professional services aren't the core business, even if they aren't coops.)

Equal pay isn't a universal (or even dominant) norm for worker coops, though they do tend to have flatter pay structures than traditional firms.

> One of the most repulsing stories that I got from Soviet Union from my grandparents was about excellent engineers being on the same pay scale with manual labour workers.

Which would be germane if we were talking about either the Soviet Union or a system with that feature, which we are not.

Re: Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

#49

Post by philipkglass »

typeformer wrote: post #37

German companies are pretty great at finding the balance between corporate profitability and worker interests.

In the post-WW II economic "golden age," roughly up through the early 1970s, American manufacturing workers and the corporations they worked for were also both doing well. That fell apart as America went from a net exporter to net importer. I'm unsure if the importer/exporter transition is a direct cause, because a lot of things changed in the 1970s, but that's about the time the party ended.

I wonder if Germany will do better when/if Germany no longer has a substantial export surplus. I hope that it can. It's mathematically impossible for every country to run an export surplus, so "look to Germany" is a useful prescription only if there are other good ways to imitate Germany.

Re: Worker-owned businesses: 'We get paid the same regardless of role'

#50

Post by slavik81 »

remir wrote: post #19

I find worker-owned businesses very interesting. Obviously getting paid the same regardless of role may be an obstacle to attracting highly skilled people, but if salaries are competitive and established in function of role and experience, in a transparent way, that could be great.

Worker cooperatives tend have the problem that it's hard to compare contributions of labour. The coop model tends to work best when most or all the workers are of a similar sort. More cohesion and less resentment that way. That's probably why the company has everyone do every job.

Specialists are hard to employ like that, but the trick is that you don't need to hire them. Rather than keeping an accountant in house, you can just contract an accounting firm to handle it. You might not have an in-house lawyer, but you'll be a client for a law firm.

That being said, there may be some soul searching when Jim the Janitor complains he's basically a second-class employee because technically he just works for the company you're leasing the building from.

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