161–170 of 1001 posts
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Layoffs generally imply the company is contracting rather than expanding.
Depends on if you are cutting fat or cutting muscle.
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What capital risks? Private equity many times purchases a company, loads it up with debt, strips it off assets, pay themselves fat dividends and then walks away when it all falls apart.
A fracking rig costs 900k and many of them sit idle for years at a time: https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2022/0415/Demand-for-o... You are essentially saying that the roughnecks that work the rig for $30-40 an hour should be owning it. They don't have the capital to own it and pay for the oil rights to use it, or the risk tolerance that it will sit idle and still have to be maintained, stored in a rented wareho…
The particular models that I wanted to look at - the partial ownership - turns out to be incredibly expensive when hiring on new employees - from what I've understood - and so I'm leaning in to the profit sharing model, hard, and perhaps the company design will be one that enforces that aggressively. I didn't understand everything the employment lawyer was discussing and it was just a preliminary discussion. I think it's worth it for every person interested in starting a business to work with and speak with a lawyer.
I'm not really much of a fan of everyone owning stock, though, myself - especially everyone gaining stock over time. There's a million ways to build a company, of course. Giving employees stock over time seems like it could be a good plan if there is real intent to become publicly traded at some point. I personally wouldn't want the profit sharing to be tied to a stock amount. It would reward seniority or tenure a bit too much (in my opinion).
A system I would prefer would be one where:
* all employees regular salaries and all business costs are paid
* a reserve 'warchest' is kept or grown where the goal 'size'
of the 'warchest' is relative size to keep the company afloat for
x years of low or zero income (to survive bad years).
* profit share "the rest" (or most of the rest).
* a flat "every employee gets 1/(# employees) the rest".
* each division gets a percentage and then each employee in that
division gets 1/(# employees in division)
* a point system where tenure gives you more points and you get Xi/(sum X)
portion.
I prefer profit-sharing myself because it doesn't lean in the direction of becoming public and everyone experiences the fruit of their and their coworkers' labors.
I've been warned a bit against partial ownership because "what if the existing employees don't want to be profit sharing anymore", etc? I dunno. Lots of thoughts.
I 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…
Hiring a Boeing CEO must be pretty hard right now because whoever takes the job is signing up for some miserable work (like testifying to a hostile congress and dealing with criminal liability on behalf of Boeing), and is likely to be blamed for decades of mismanagement coming to the surface now. Said another way: I’d demand a lot more in compensation to be CEO of Boeing than NVIDIA (or any other role for that matter…
I'll take the role for a wildly discounted $20m.
It would be hard to do much worse than the recent incompe .. uh, incumbents.
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Stop optimizing for consumers, start optimizing for producers. Maybe, you want to rethink that.
Stop optimizing for financial leeches sucking value out of the system and externalizing all the societal consequences, start optimizing for the vast majority of the population. ....sounds better when you elaborate on the categories you selected.
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? A…
German companies come pretty close. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany Also see how many cooperatives are run. You can definitely make these kinds of things work and eg worker cooperatives are generally legal to set up around the world, but they don't necessarily work any better than vanilla companies (and that includes not necessarily being better for the employees).
Worked for one with this setup. It was all great until the stock price fell to ~20 % of its original value and has stayed that way since. Employees didn't like it, which was kinda funny (it's a risk they signed up for).
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…
Co-determination was born as a compromise in Germany (between the capitalist occupiers and the communist occupiers trying to find common ground for decades) that has done well, essentially its that the Employee Union has at least one board seat, by law
employee representation on the board in combination with US stock ownership concepts would be very novel and very attractive
I think both classes of stakeholders typically have some common ground and can find a way to make austerity and growth measures economically practical with more sustainment of employee consideration
whaat, is this anarcho-syndicalism?
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!"?
Or are you suggesting that employees just get a fixed share when they join the company? That model exists, but it typically only works for companies that need no outside capital to get started. Like law firms.
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> Your barista at Starbucks is not going to increase the stock price no matter how well he fills your order But 400k barista all doing it well might.
This is not tenable. 400k people aren't going to all individually work extra hard for starbucks if their own work doesn't individually benefit them.