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Every company should be owned by its employees

elysian.press

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Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#101

Post by roughly »

bpodgursky wrote: post #69
infotainment wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so bizarre, considering that the modern CEO's only job is to issue meaningless positive statements to shareholders. If you look at many top CEOs resumes, they are almost always devoid of any real experience. People talk about replacing various jobs by AI, but I'm pretty sure an LLM could replace most CEOs and no one would notice.

I don't want to be rude but you have no idea what you are talking about and clearly have 0 insight into the day-to-day of an actual CEO. It's fine to argue that a particular CEO is underperforming, it's often true, but very few of them are "underworking" by any reasonable definition.

How’s this for a definition: the average CEO gets paid 350x what the average worker gets paid, so unless they’re generating 350x the value of the average employee, they’re underworking.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#102

Post by b800h »

croisillon wrote: post #67
b800h wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolute rubbish. This is a classic trope of the fully-brainwashed. The bread queues that resulted from collectivised agriculture that couldn't respond to market conditions had nothing to do with feudalism. The mass-murder of the middle-classes in Cambodia had nothing to do with feudalism. Communism is a brutal, oppressive system that has to erase individual liberty in order to force people to comply with its absurd,…

they wrote "same old russian feudalism" and "still not emancipated citizens" and you non-sequitur it with "if it was so great"..?

Fair point - my argument is that it added a load of additional garbage on top. It clearly didn't achieve anything substantially positive, and it hasn't done anywhere it's been tried.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#103

Post by instagraham »

dash2 wrote: post #94

Employee stock options are not a new idea, obviously. If the story is "every company should offer stock options to its employees", then sure, that's often a good business plan. The reason not every company does it to all its employees is probably that for those employees, it wouldn't affect incentives much and it would make payment subject to the vagaries of the stock market. Your barista at Starbucks is not going to…

For people living cheque to cheque, pre-IPO ESOPS are not really a great incentive either. If ESOPS come at the cost of actual salary increases, it feels more like a corporate smokescreen than an actual value-add (not everyone can afford to think long-term with their sole source of income).

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#104

Post by eru »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #58
konschubert wrote: post #32

How about every employee instead gets money every month, and then can go out an buy shares in any company they want, their own or others?

Why not both? The author hasn't given any indication that the equity given to employees is subsidizing their wage.. It seems like yourself and others are just arguing against a company providing bonus compensation to workers for their work. Peasent brain has grown far and wide these days. Keep slaving away for less compensation, I'd rather not.

They can give a cash bonus just as well.

There's two questions: how much comp to pay, and how to divide that comp between various forms. They are nearly independent of each other.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#105

Post by lynx23 »

Just pay a decent salary, and the rest is moot. I dont really want stock from the company I wor for. Because if it is doing well... Yes, but that pendulum can also swing in the other direction, and experience has it that just because my company is doing badly, it mustn't be my fault. Everything between bad luck and co-workers slacking off for some reason can define my outcome. Thats pretty communist in my book. But well. Anyway, stock is a risk-taking behaviour, now force onto you because you're trying to fix your bad salary. Nope, thanks. Also, this smells of "we are a family" because "if the company is well, everyone is well". No, thanks.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#106

Post by eru »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #34
talldatethrow wrote: post #8

The company I work for sucks. I rather take more cash and just by stocks in companies I believe in more.

Why not work for a company that sucks less?

Perhaps talldatethrow believes that his employer sucks as a business, because they are overpaying workers?

Or when I was working for Google in the mid-2010, I thought Google was a great company and I liked working there; but I also thought that their stocks were probably overpriced. (These days, I guess Tesla or Nvidia might fill that role for some? These are just examples, I have no opinion on them.)

In the other direction, one can love Amazon as both a customer and a shareholder, while simultaneously not wanting to work there.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#107

Post by djokkataja »

Are there any companies that are hybrids of this, where they have some fixed structure in terms of voting power that's, say, 60% employee-owned, and 40% which is publicly traded and has a board? So the employee-owned side of things maintains the primacy of their skin in the game because the 60% control that they have is not something which can be amended, but they can also receive outside investment to some degree? As someone who's definitely not an expert on these things, the idea seems intriguing to me, but I have no idea if there are some reasons why this obviously cannot logically or practically work (as opposed to simply being something which people don't presently do--or something which I just haven't heard of people doing).

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#108

Post by psychoslave »

bpodgursky wrote: post #69
infotainment wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so bizarre, considering that the modern CEO's only job is to issue meaningless positive statements to shareholders. If you look at many top CEOs resumes, they are almost always devoid of any real experience. People talk about replacing various jobs by AI, but I'm pretty sure an LLM could replace most CEOs and no one would notice.

I don't want to be rude but you have no idea what you are talking about and clearly have 0 insight into the day-to-day of an actual CEO. It's fine to argue that a particular CEO is underperforming, it's often true, but very few of them are "underworking" by any reasonable definition.

There are things that needs inner insights to understand and conclude anything meaningful. And there are things that can be judge by external insights alone, or even only from external point of view not being embedded in the system internal consideration while trying to emit the judgement.

We don’t need deep packet inspection to spot a very out-of-the-chart huge traffic.

We don’t need micro-details of an economical agent actions to spot an anomaly in wealth distribution.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#109

Post by dash2 »

cess11 wrote: post #77
infotainment wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly; is someone who is essentially a replaceable scapegoat really worth millions per year in salary?

Sure, if it allows owners to stay in control and keep profiting from the people that perform the labour in the organisation. It's someone you can pin board and shareholder decisions on, as well as changes in market and accidents, that just goes away and lets some other people keep their power and profits instead of being accountable for their mistakes or lack of strategic performance.

I very much dislike these threads where two people act like sockpuppets of a single not-very-advanced llm, agreeing with each other's views which are invariably exaggerated, uninformed and cynical. I've been seeing more of them recently; if you see one, downvote it.

American capitalism has lots of problems. The idea that CEOs "almost always" have no real-world experience is hardly worth arguing against: "almost always" is meaningless rhetoric and "real-world" likewise (what counts as real-world experience for Google? WPP? Northrop Grumman?). Jensen Huang is mentioned literally at the top of this thread and is an obvious counterexample.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#110

Post by nitwit005 »

ossobuco wrote: post #54
konschubert wrote: post #32

How about every employee instead gets money every month, and then can go out an buy shares in any company they want, their own or others?

How does that work when 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? When you're not sure if you'll manage to pay the electricity bills to keep your fridge turned on, is your first thought going to be "let's invest in the market!"?

I presume it'll work exactly as well as paying them partially in stock, as the stock and cash are interchangeable.

The people who need money now will just sell the stock as soon as they can.

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