When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins
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When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins
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Re: When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins
#2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_stock_ownership_plan
My favorite employee owned business is King Arthur flour. I think it's a wonderful thing when a company is owned by people who are part of the day-to-day meat and potatoes of the business.
Re: When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins
#3How hard must they have tried to write that without using the word Marxism!?
Re: When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins
#4I'm sure these companies are more humanely managed and have happier employees but I doubt they're economically efficient. If they were they'd outcompete non employees
owned companies. We even have an entire sector of employee owned companies where they obviously do win consistently, professional services firms like accountancy (PWC, KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst & Young) or management consulting (McKinsey, Bain, BCG). All the MC firms reserve equity for partners after an up or out process which takes about seven years. Most people never get equity. Accounting firms don't have up or out but there are still partners and non-partners.
What's particularly damning about the efficiency/survival value of employee ownership is that all the (then) Big 5 accounting firms threw off IT project management/procurement firms, all of which were/are normal companies. Accenture os all that's left of Arthur Andersen. It doesn't have partners except the way Goldman Sachs has "partners".
If you want more humanely managed companies mandate it for everyone because employee owned companies lose, consistently.
Re: When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins
#5I am from Spain and used to work with cooperatives like Mondragon group in the North and lots of small agricultural coops in the south.
It is not paradise, but somewhat it works. It is not for everyone, everybody is the same and you have consensus lock when taking decisions.
About unions relationship, well for me they have nothing to do. Everything changes when the workers own a part of the company, nothing to do with Big Unions on Big Companies or Government.
Re: When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins
#6How hard must they have tried to write that without using the word Marxism!?
It isn't Marxism. One of the most well-known advocates of employee-owned companies, Noam Chomsky, is anarchist, not Marxist. Marxism is primarily about controlling political power to achieve economic goals. What the article talks about works without (much) political power.
Re: When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins
#7Coop models may work if decision-making structures are defined clearly and 'economically'.
>> expand the coop model by associating it more closely with unions.
A receipt for disaster. Some European states had this models in the past and completely abandoned them.
Re: When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins
#8Coop models may work if decision-making structures are defined clearly and 'economically'. >> expand the coop model by associating it more closely with unions. A receipt for disaster. Some European states had this models in the past and completely abandoned them.
Note that "union" can mean very different things in different cultures.
I don't think the model that works in Germany (unions having a significant representation on the board) would work with UK/US-style adversarial unions. Volkswagen tried - and their US employees weren't interested (http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/02/14/vw-worke...)
Re: When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins
#9Coop models may work if decision-making structures are defined clearly and 'economically'. >> expand the coop model by associating it more closely with unions. A receipt for disaster. Some European states had this models in the past and completely abandoned them.
Care to elaborate?
Unions function differently in different EU states: In the UK they were pretty much killed, in France they act as antagonists to the business side, in Germany they act more collaboratively with the business side.
In the latter case in Germany every large enough commpany has to have a democratically elected workers council, that gets a seat on the board. While not the same as co-ownership, this democratic co-determination is arguably one of the more important reasons why labor relations in Germany are much better than in other European countries.
Re: When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins
#10It sounds like an attractive concept... but I'm not sure about its long term viability.
The larger a business grows, the more people become involved in the cooperative, and the harder it becomes to gain consensus or propose more risky but sometimes critical actions for the business.
Layoffs are most probably off the table, while things like employee benefits will probably become disproportionately popular and hard to cut. Furthermore the whole "own your company" appeal seems to become less of a big deal as more and more join the coop, and you get less of a say over how the company should be run. But conversely it is usually on a large scale that the financial benefits of minority shares ownership can yield decent returns. Seems a bit conflicting.
I've heard some groceries in US converted to co-op model though. Wonder how they are doing now.