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Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

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Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#121
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was an interesting observation at some day cares in Israel. When their day care closed, parents would drop everything to make sure they picked their kids up on time, but some would still be late. At some point, these day cares decided to start applying fines whenever the parents were late, and it completely backfired. Parents were suddenly always late and in large numbers, because parents felt guilty about maki…

It's different because companies don't feel guilt. Instead, they are motivated purely by revenues and profits which makes a carbon tax a viable incentive for them to decrease carbon emissions. As of now, there are almost no real repercussions for companies who destroy the environment.

It might not be guilt per se, since it was only an example, so consider it what you want. Be it bad PR, obligations, compliance, etc.

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#122
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No true scottsman, eh?

There is a formal definition of what makes a coop. and outsourcing your lower paid members job's fails he sniff test.

Would you also fail Mondragon corporation in the purity test, because it now hires contractors?

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the point of a worker coop just that the rewards are distributed equitably :-) an d yes that does mean the cleaner / office admin get as much as the CTO

Modern tech companies are halfway there: contract out low end support functions and high end specialty expertise, so that actual FTEs are paid substantially the same.

this is not in the spirit of the worker co-operative movement...

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#125
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the point of a worker coop just that the rewards are distributed equitably :-) an d yes that does mean the cleaner / office admin get as much as the CTO

Can you elaborate on "gets as much as". Do you mean they get as many shares? Earn the same salary? I'm a bit unclear on that.

It depends on the workers themselves. The salary policy is democratically decided. For example, a very well known large scale worker-coop umbrella Mondragon does this:

At Mondragon, there are agreed-upon wage ratios between executive work and field or factory work which earns a minimum wage. These ratios range from 3:1 to 9:1 in different cooperatives and average 5:1. That is, the general manager of an average Mondragon cooperative earns no more than 5 times as much as the theoretical minimum wage paid in their cooperative. For most workers, this ratio is smaller because there are few Mondragon worker-owners that earn minimum wages, because most jobs are somewhat specialized and are classified at higher wage levels. The wage ratio of a cooperative is decided periodically by its worker-owners through a democratic vote.

Compared to similar jobs at local industries, Mondragon managers' wages are considerably lower (as some companies pay their best paid managers hundreds of times more than the lowest-paid employee of the company) and equivalent for middle management, technical and professional levels. Lower wage levels are on average 13% higher than similar jobs at local businesses. Spain's progressive tax rate further reduces any disparity in pay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation#Wage_reg...

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#126
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with some consultants who did this sort of thing for companies, and their main spiel was... Sometimes a company’s owners have no one to pass their ownership down to (not having kids or their kids not wanting to take on the family business, etc). So they either sell the business off or do layoffs and liquidate and move on. There have been instances where companies that employed a good amount of people in a to…

I work for a ~80 employee company, the two founders probably want to retire in 5-10 years, and this is an important topic for us. What about the monetary value of the company, do the employees buy it (probably too expensive, cheaper for the employees to shut it down and form a new company with the same people) or is it usual for the founders to give away the companies? Do they just keep a good percentage of the share…

In Italy the gov't has policies for this kind of situation. The Labour party is pushing for the same called 'Right to Own'.

Personally, I think the employees have the right to get ownership. Nothing gets produced without human labour. They may have ownership of the factory (by some divine reason), but nothing gets produced without labour (including management labour).

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one watches a movie because it's made by Aardman (99% of the people would not know who they are anyway). Speak for yourself, I know I certainly do.

I can second this. I grew up with Wallace and Gromit (Canadian, here), and I've always loved their work.

Dudes, we are talking here about the creators of the (almighty) Shaun The Sheep !!!!

Re: Aardman Animation Is Giving the Company to Their Employees

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black sheep in what way?

They outsourced their cleaners and some of the way the constitutional set up works is counter to the spirit of the coop movement

Only cleaners? Anyone else?
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