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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

#191

Post by aziaziazi »

vrotaru wrote: post #134
stavros wrote: post #122

Earlier 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.

Company profits is not always aligned with consumer interests, didn’t understand why you switched them.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#193

Post by vineyardmike »

glandium wrote: post #33
dan-robertson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the company is public, one can simulate the scheme by buying their stock, I guess. Taxes may be different and phrased like that, it seems weirdly risky to buy more of the thing you’re most exposed to (if the company lays you off, the stock may be down too).

> if the company lays you off, the stock may be down too Don't most layoffs make the stock go up?

TLDR: Research says no

Some companies experience short-term improvements in price as their costs drop, but usually it has a longer-term impact on morale and productivity that takes longer to play out. Additionally, layoffs are typically performed on unhealthy companies (eg. not usually companies like Google and Meta that print cash and have huge margins), and unhealthy companies typically have other secular or structural issues beyond too-many-employees.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#194

Post by robertlagrant »

stavros wrote: post #122
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…

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…

How does this work in practice, though. It's easy to say what you're saying, or go slightly further and say "let's stop optimising for work and start optimising for everything to be free".

What's the actual plan?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#195

Post by dash2 »

stavros wrote: post #122
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…

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…

Better still, optimize for social value provided. If taxes and regulation are right, companies that provide social value will make profits and their owners will get rich. The proposed changes would make that less likely to happen. If nothing else, (a) individual companies all optimizing their own workers' welfare does not add up to optimizing the welfare of all workers and (b) non-workers are left out of the equation.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#196

Post by wkrsz »

stavros wrote: post #122
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…

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…

Would those companies be able to compete in a global market?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#197

Post by enugu »

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…

> fully employee-owned

There are more possibilities which open up, if we drop the 'fully' criterion, both for decision making power and share of the profits.

If employees had, say, a 30% share in board decisions (not share of profits), then the CEO would have to be more mindful of how their decisions affect employees, just like they have to constantly track the markets today. Or a more local version of this, where decisions/appointments in each unit of the company are partially handled by employees of that unit. Not enough for a badly performing group of employees to have a veto, but also not something ignorable by management.

Regarding share of profits, there were high tax regimes in Western countries in the 1950-70's. For instance, top bracket of income tax could sometimes reach 90% and corporate tax 50%. In effect, this is saying that the public has a non-voting share(sometimes even a majority share) of the profits of the company. Of course, a large organization like the government is itself often corrupt/inefficient and fails to represent the public, so the taxation could happen at a more local level.

'Market socialism' proposals sometimes involve public ownership of the stocks of privately run companies, but a high tax regime can have a lot of the same effect.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#198

Post by SkiFire13 »

infotainment wrote: post #42
cess11 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's someone who can take blame to protect branding and is easily replaced.

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

To be fair if I were to be a scapegoat for Boeing there's no way I would do that for cheap.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#199

Post by vineyardmike »

kryptiskt wrote: post #181

So you make all the employees equal partners, what will happen? If the company is a money-making machine like Google, the employees will not be sad if the employee base is kept small and most stuff is outsourced to other (likewise worker-owned) companies that gets a slim margin above their cost. So I predict that this world will have very small, very profitable companies which have some secret sauce but hands off mos…

> If the company is a money-making machine like Google, the employees will not be sad if the employee base is kept small and most stuff is outsourced to other (likewise worker-owned) companies that gets a slim margin above their cost.

Google does this already, even not being a co-op. They have a huge contractor army, and their core employees are handsomely rewarded with massive salaries.

> So I predict that this world will have a have very small, very profitable companies which have some secret sauce but hands off most of the work to big companies making much less money.

This is kinda what we see already, except everyone want to grow their kingdom, (and hire their friends and family) so it seems inevitable that the "Small profitable secret sauces" will still get diluted without strong control

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#200

Post by arrowsmith »

stavros wrote: post #122
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…

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…

Overoptimize on worker happiness -> underoptimize for profit -> company goes bust -> workers lose their jobs -> no worker happiness
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