whaat, is this anarcho-syndicalism?
Every company should be owned by its employees
131–140 of 1001 posts
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#132I think the most surprising thing about trends in modern executive class pay is just how steep it is compared to the median employee. It makes me wonder why shareholders outside the company are happy with it. For example, the Boeing CEO made 22M in 2022 and 32M in 2023. I'd argue that he did a much worse job in 2023 than in 2022 but somehow got paid almost 50% more. Even Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is "only" being p…
I doubt they are happy as much as disinterested. The economy has been heavily financialised, interest rates have been at 0% [0] and a big chunk of economic activity is government spending. Shareholders don't appear to be worried about how the company actually runs in the details. What matters is that the CEO is positioning them to tap in to the money printing and borrowing game. IE, the wages suggest workers don't re…
More to the point, Boeing's revenue is over $16 billion. Some tens of millions are a rounding error when it's only being paid to one person, and that is the real source of the disparity. Paying one CEO $32 million is two tenths of a percent of their revenue. If they tried to pay each of their 170,000 employees even 1% of that, it wouldn't be 0.2% of their revenue, it would be >300% of their revenue and they'd be out of business.
This, in turn, is caused by the size of the companies being so large.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#133Employee 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…
> they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit
Oh no
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#134Employee 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…
Then maybe "taking over the market" is a bad metric, and we should be optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better. The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else, and a company that forgoes profit to make workers happier must thus be less good. The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing…
Stop optimizing for consumers, start optimizing for producers.
Maybe, you want to rethink that.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#135This is a rabbit hole miles deep, and don't get me wrong, I sort of support the idea, but:
> Just like Jeff Bezos can sell a portion of his Amazon stock to buy a new house, employees at ESOPs can pull money out of their stock accounts to pay for tuition, medical bills, or as a downpayment on a primary residence.
Maybe I'm missing sth, but, erm... what happens with the stock after? Because that portion of the company is no longer in the hands of its employees, and it's unlikely that it's a closed circuit.
I get that your stock need not be publicly traded. But that brings a variety of other issues to the table.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#136Ownership is such an empowering concept it is a bit of puzzle why there aren't larger numbers of employeed-owned companies. There is definitely a historical / cultural aspect to this:
Exhibit 1: In agricultural societies land ownership was highly concentrated for the longest time (feudal society) before there were land reform movements [1].
Exhibit 2: Owner-occupancy is celebrated in many cultures but less so in others. E.g., it ranges from 10% to near 100%. [2]
Given that modern corporate organization and culture is typically endured (pays the bills) rather than loved and given that legal frameworks to establish alternatives do exist, there must be various fundamental reasons for the ESOP paucity (beyond the obvious resistance of vested interests).
One explanation might be that if judged purely on financial returns (i.e., ignoring the externalities of bullshit jobs, burned-out, disillusioned employees etc.) - the advantage of employee ownership in securing financial returns (especially short term) is not dramatically higher than a conventional external shareholder entity.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#137Are 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? A…
I'd guess Wawa or Publix might be. They're both ESOP but from the people I know who work there it doesn't end up being much cash difference.
There is a whole book about Wawa that talks about the ESOP decision and such. It's called the Wawa Way. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19986572W/The_Wawa_way?editi...
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then maybe "taking over the market" is a bad metric, and we should be optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better. The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else, and a company that forgoes profit to make workers happier must thus be less good. The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing…
Stop optimizing for consumers, start optimizing for producers. Maybe, you want to rethink that.
Why? It sounds good to me.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#139How 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?
Shares of the company they work for would incentivize them to care about the company.
Shares of other public companies means no skin in the game. A day trader cash out whenever they want and wipe their hands clean of any adverse effects made by the company in the name of growth.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then maybe "taking over the market" is a bad metric, and we should be optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better. The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else, and a company that forgoes profit to make workers happier must thus be less good. The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing…
Stop optimizing for consumers, start optimizing for producers. Maybe, you want to rethink that.
Good luck producing and not selling.