Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 81 posts

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

#51

Post by dragonwriter »

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.

There are a number of large coops in industries where the firms require everything from professionals to manual labor; equal pay isn't common in those kind of coops, though the pay ranges are probably flatter than conventional firms. A co-op, ultimately, can be very much like a conventional firm, where the voting stock is held equally by the employees, so that management is ultimately accountable to the employees.

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

#52

Post by geofft »

wyager wrote: post #22
geofft wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it the case that with this sort of system that if you increase your skills, your company is more profitable and therefore you all get paid more? (Which is a common system in capitalist America - the exact same job with the exact same skills at different companies pays differently based on the company's ability to pay, and year-end bonuses are often linked to the company's profits that year. And employees who ge…

> Isn't it the case that with this sort of system that if you increase your skills, your company is more profitable and therefore you all get paid more? Your reward is not commensurate with the opportunity cost of improving your output. It gets worse with larger companies.

Sure. But I think that's also true in capitalist America (or, at least, in my / my friends' experience in tech) - at least in the sense that it's much harder to get your current employer to reward you for your own increases in skill than to put the increased skills on your resume and start interviewing elsewhere.

I don't know any system (other than perhaps a carefully planned and unusually benevolent and well-funded central economy) that rewards people for the opportunity cost of increasing their skills, as opposed to the increased output gained from using their skills - one advantage of this system is that it's very clear that if I use my skills more efficiently or in a way that helps the company, a portion of that reward will go to me whether or not I can prove it to management. If I save my current traditionally-capitalist employer $1M/year due to cleverness, I'd expect to see $0.00 of that. I'm far more incentivized to get good at writing self-reviews that portray the things I'm already good at in a good light than to learn the skills to, say, optimize our AWS spend.

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

#53

Post by dang »

blorsh wrote: post #44
dang wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ???

It's a shallow dismissal. It makes a grandiose claim without support. More importantly, it doesn't teach us anything. An example or two could have rectified that.

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

#54

Post by aaronchall »

I'll recount a short twitter conversation I had with some engineers who wanted to be in a collective, I suggested them all being equal partners, and was promptly blocked...

> My company laid off 17 engineers including me when we tried to unionize. Now I’m having a hard time finding a job. Any leads for junior-to-mid software developers in the DC area or remote, send em my way. And please share. #LanetixUnion #jobsearch - Sara J. Martinez ‏

> Software developers are generally well treated and compensated. What drove you to attempt unionizing? - Me.

> There should be interviews with Lanetix engineers coming out soon which will go in depth. For a quick overview, here is what we wrote to management: - Björn Westergard ‏

> If you're a collective of software engineers worth bargaining with, you should all form your own consultancy firm, and forget about that "client". This might be your best, realistic solution. Thank me when you're making 2x, in nicer conditions and fewer hours... - Me

> This “solution” doesn’t scale due to the competitive race to the bottom dynamics of capitalism. Unions demonstrably do work at scale. Everyone is “worth bargaining with” for those who don’t to serve mammon alone. - Björn Westergard ‏

> You have limited options as I see it, and you probably need to ask yourselves what's more important, getting back to work (but apparently not at Lanetix), or grinding an ideological axe? If you're so egalitarian, make everyone an equal partner, and start looking for clients. - Me (https://twitter.com/aaronchall/status/970717102465323008)

Björn promptly blocked me at that point.

> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

In this case, his non-existent union salary, I suppose...

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

#55

Post by steveax »

jubal00 wrote: post #13
lev99 wrote: post #2

I'd be interested in the economics of founders selling to their employees from a founder's point of view. It seems like a way to protect a founder's legacy after they exit. Where does the money come from? Do the employees get a loan and then the money from the loan go to the founder? Does the founder provide a loan to the employees and receive regular payments on the loan? Do the employees have to have cash? Do all e…

Employee Stock Options Programs (ESOPs) are the way most conduct this transaction. It's frequently a way for a founder to sell to employees due to relationships/promises, to get a higher valuation than the market offers, or, like with options, to incentivize productivity and retention. The employees can get a loan with the business as collateral but the founder/s is going to hold a note as well. Assignments of stock…

That’s what Bob and Charlee did with Bob’s Red Mill when he decided to retire:

https://www.bobsredmill.com/bobs-way-meet

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

#56

Post by smsm42 »

rayiner wrote: post #26
morgante wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. Can you imagine trying to hire a skilled professional who has put years of effort into acquiring a skill when you won't pay them any more than a retail cashier?

In a world where that was the expectation for everyone, sure. Professional jobs are a hell of a lot more interesting/rewarding than being a cashier. I don’t think you’d have programmers quitting to do service work if they weren’t making more money.

How would you create such a word? For that, you'd have to forcefully suppress all voluntary exchanges at labor market, since if somebody can do something others can't, there would be otherwise lots of people offering them more money to do that special things for them. The only way to counter that is to eliminate any freedom in job assignment or distribution of benefits for a job.

You can learn from a historical lesson. Do you know why medical insurance so inherently linked to the employment in the US? Because at the time of WWII, wages were fixed in a lot of places (they could pull it off since a lot of freedom suppression can pass in wartime) but employers still wanted to attract more and better workers. Thus, side benefits like employer paying medical insurance proliferated. If that were banned, there would be some other kind of compensation. Only by centrally regulating absolutely every aspect of life you could ensure this is not happening. But why would you want to live in such society? I lived in one, and it's not much fun.

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

#57

Post by golergka »

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…

> 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.

Russia went from one of the leading european powers to a country ran like a prison. It's easier to score up country-wide achievements like moon probes if you have slaves instead of citizens — a system that even the legendary lead engineer Korolev was a victim of.

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

#58

Post by notyourday »

dang wrote: post #53
blorsh wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ???

It's a shallow dismissal. It makes a grandiose claim without support. More importantly, it doesn't teach us anything. An example or two could have rectified that.

Do I need to provide an example that water is wet? But ok, just for you:

Largest scale:

USSR North Korea Cuba Recent entry: Venezuela Recent entry: South Africa

Smaller:

https://www.economist.com/news/business/21589469-collapse-sp...

Even smaller:

https://munchies.vice.com/en_us/article/gvkqnm/marxist-vegan...

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

#59

Post by notyourday »

golergka wrote: post #57
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…

> 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. Russia went from one of the leading european powers to a country ran like a prison. It's easier to score up country-wide achievements like moon probes if you have slaves…

You do realize you are posting on HN, where people adore communism because they think they are going to be the ones on a top, and not on a bottom?

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

#60

Post by gremlinsinc »

morgante wrote: post #4
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…

Seriously. Can you imagine trying to hire a skilled professional who has put years of effort into acquiring a skill when you won't pay them any more than a retail cashier?

If retail cashiers and engineers at company A earn more than an Engineer at company B, then why not?
Post reply on HN