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Every company should be owned by its employees

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Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#631

Post by alephnerd »

randomdata wrote: post #604
alephnerd wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yk a Labor Union is entirely different from a Credit Union right?

Typically[1], but both are unions. Had the previous commenter been talking about labour unions then you might have something, but it clearly says "union" and "union" alone. [1] Although definitely not necessarily. A group of labour unions in these parts collectively own one of the largest hedge funds out there.

> Unions should put their money where their mouth is and invest in cooperatives

As in Labor Union.

Pedantry and HN - name a more iconic duo.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#632

Post by sidmitra »

hemantv wrote: post #617
Nifty3929 wrote: post #594

I think it's easy to look at this with an existing, successful business in mind - but things don't always work out that way. How would a business like this get started? Usually the owner is the one who invests a lot of their own time and/or money into the business to get it off the ground in the first place. Would we be asking workers to pony up in those early years when failure is likely? With Central States, the st…

Individuals have visions not committee. We build monuments for individuals not for committee. Having said that no man is island of itself. Current incentive structure works great to motivate individuals to start companies

>We build monuments for individuals not for committee.

That's the second time i'm hearing that quote today from completely unrelated sources.

The quote is from David Ogilvy, in case anyone is wondering.

"Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees."

https://x.com/The_AdProfessor/status/1705254246109651053

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#633

Post by nostrademons »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #594

I think it's easy to look at this with an existing, successful business in mind - but things don't always work out that way. How would a business like this get started? Usually the owner is the one who invests a lot of their own time and/or money into the business to get it off the ground in the first place. Would we be asking workers to pony up in those early years when failure is likely? With Central States, the st…

The article is arguing for ESOPs, basically stock options for employees. The examples cited are actually quite tame by tech industry standards: "During Central States’ worst year, employees earned the equivalent of 6 percent of their pay in stock, during their best they earned 26 percent." By contrast, FANG employees routinely make >50% of their compensation in stock, and it can be up to 80% in good years.

As for how these get started, it's the same as any tech startup. The founding team owns the whole company at formation, and then they progressively give it away to increase the overall valuation of the company. You can do that through giving away stock in exchange for funding from a VC that you can use to pay employees, or you can give away stock directly in exchange for services rendered.

And yes, this looks bad during a down year. Tech companies have this problem all the time - employees are demotivated when the stock price goes down, which can have further negative effects on the stock price.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#634

Post by nativeit »

stale2002 wrote: post #545
forgetfreeman wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market has spent the GDP of Madagascar to fuck over cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US. Meanwhile "efficiency" in the ISP market has lead to regional near-monopolies and some of the worst residential bandwidth on the planet. Let's not with "efficiency and innovation" yeah? The emperor is clearly buck-ass naked.

> cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US. The ones that were overcharging consumers? Yeah it is great for customers when prices go down. That's a benefit, not a drawback. Those cabbies should have offer better service at a lower price if they wanted to compete.

Overcharging? It’s easier to beat their prices if you don’t have drivers or cars to pay for.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#635

Post by philosopher1234 »

Sankozi wrote: post #453
aziaziazi wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Economic illiteracy I respect your opinion but the stats presented before does not “shows“ illiteracy but low investments. Lack of liquidity to invest seems a very plausible raison because a revenu threshold has to be passed to be able to buy food before founds. This stat is probably almost a proxy for how many Americans are below that threshold.

It is really hard to believe that 71.93% of Americans are on the verge of homelessness and starvation. Much more plausible (and even mentioned in the linked article under "Lack of budgeting and financial planning" and "Social pressures") are just bad habits. Of course there are economic literate people who really are struggling, but I doubt they make even half of those 71.93%.

In this case you are revealing your own (statistical) illiteracy. It’s referring to 70% of people who claim to be living paycheck to paycheck, not 70% of all people.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#636

Post by ossobuco »

nec4b wrote: post #532
ossobuco wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it might please you then that about 50% of the respondents report low income as the cause for living paycheck by paycheck. Even more report high monthly bills as a cause. Just read it, it's all in there.

People thinking their income is to low is not exactly news. I haven't personally met anyone who would ever claim their income is to high. Why do you think I haven't read it? Do you always agree with everything you read?

I believe you didn't read it because your argument is quite poor and doesn't mention some relevant points the article makes.

I may not always agree with everything I read, but at least I take the time to read it before openly disagreeing with it.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#637

Post by WalterBright »

keybored wrote: post #493
bayareateg wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that people often put on rose colored glasses when talking about the "old country," myself included. It is a little ridiculous to think that Greeks don't prioritize making money over some nebulous "community happiness"' You should have asked her why she came to the US

> You should have asked her why she came to the US People sometimes have rose-colored glasses about emigrating to the US.

My dad was in the AF, and we rotated back and forth between the US and Europe. A friend of his married a British woman while stationed there, and took her back to the States when the tour was over. She endlessly complained about the US, and how Britain was so much better.

Eventually, they were rotated to Germany. As soon as they arrived, she was off to England. 6 weeks later, she was back, and did not complain about the US again.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#638

Post by binxbolling »

sidmitra wrote: post #632
hemantv wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Individuals have visions not committee. We build monuments for individuals not for committee. Having said that no man is island of itself. Current incentive structure works great to motivate individuals to start companies

>We build monuments for individuals not for committee. That's the second time i'm hearing that quote today from completely unrelated sources. The quote is from David Ogilvy, in case anyone is wondering. "Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees." https://x.com/The_AdProfessor/status/1705254246109651053

Seems like it's deliberately using "committee" as a pejorative to make a political point. Flip it to "you'll find no statues of groups of people" and it's patently false.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#639

Post by photonthug »

shkkmo wrote: post #476
throwaway7ahgb wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, COOPs don't fundamentally change human behavior which has doses of greed. A large COOP monopoly will suffer the same fate as others'.

This is an assumption and one that I believe is faulty. Humans' caring is often related to the degree of connection. Employees at a company are more closely connected to their customers than investors and are thus more likely to care more about those customers. Monopolies are still bad either way, but I doubt that the failure modes at employee owned monoploes is the same as at outside investor owned monopolies.

Yeah. Saying "COOPs don't fundamentally change human behavior which has doses of greed" is like saying that a kingdom works the same way as a democracy since hey, it's all just humans. Simply involving more decision makers is a meaningful change. Certainly involving more decision makers that are outside of the business/legal/accounting class is a meaningful change.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#640

Post by WalterBright »

li2uR3ce wrote: post #458
zby wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To take over the market companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better. Usually there are more consumers than employees - so I think that measure works quite well with optimising for humans. Profit is a side effect of taking over the market. But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway. And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - other…

> companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better. Companies need to sell the *idea* of making lives better. They don't actually have to make a customer's life better and many don't despite selling lots of product. Profitability is not a strict function of quality. If it were, we'd not give the slightest fuck about monopolies. It takes a great amount of effort to get companies to compete on "making…

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