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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

#201

Post by sgu999 »

daedrdev wrote: post #40

If you have every company owned by its employees, it can cause big problems for society. There are many arguments to make, such as how investment and hiring would decrease but an interesting one is that it prevents people from de risking their savings. Normally, if your company goes under your savings which are invested in a wide range of companies will be fjne. But since we cant invest in other companies your saving…

Your savings don't need to be tied to the stock market, it's actually not the case for most people outside of the US afaik. Your retirement pension even more so. How we choose to redistribute the extra wealth generated by others is mostly political.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#202

Post by pie_flavor »

infotainment wrote: post #26
xmprt wrote: post #18

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…

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.

If it's so easy, why aren't you doing it? Presumably it requires some amount of investment to break into, but with such a high upside it's still massively +EV.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#204

Post by sgammon »

rendaw wrote: post #150
sgammon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding?

IIUC you think it's obvious but it's possible it's not obvious or that different people have different views on it, all of which they consider obvious.

It's an honest question.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#205

Post by stavros »

arrowsmith wrote: post #200
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…

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

Well, there are worker-owned coops, and they haven't gone bust, so how does that work? It's almost as if the workers don't actually want to lose their jobs!

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#207

Post by _s_a_m_ »

arrowsmith wrote: post #200
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…

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

That's the cliché, and I dont think it's even remotely true.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#208

Post by etothepii »

t-writescode wrote: post #163

I was speaking to an employment lawyer about how to structure the business I'm trying to start. I wanted partial ownership from all employees and, more importantly, aggressive profit sharing. 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, an…

I'm interested in why you want to do this? What is the goal you are trying to achieve? Why would you not do this with salaries? Will there be some people paid more than others that do different roles? If so, why would their profit shares be the same? Who decides on war chest size? Ownership is an interesting word, because as you say if it was ownership then when an employee leaves they still get a share of profits and surely they could sell (otherwise it's not ownership). I've wondered myself about whether I should have some sort of union but what I really mean is an alternate reporting line to hear about problems. My suspicion is that there's a lot of what founders think of as profit that isn't really profit. My founder salary is probably around 25% of what I'd need to be willing a job. I'd everyone at the company did this we'd have a lot of extra "profit" to share out but it isn't real profit.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#209

Post by dash2 »

dgb23 wrote: post #175
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…

I've read studies about workers coops and some of them somewhat contradict what you say in your last paragraph, specifically (b). Worker coops often cut down on their individual profits in hard times to keep the boat afloat. I think ultimately a company creates and maintains a culture, regardless of the legal structure. Maintaining a good culture requires effort and especially a sensible, trusting image of humanity.…

> Worker coops often cut down on their individual profits in hard times to keep the boat afloat.

Sure, I believe that. Do they do it enough though? Co-operatives were big in 19th century Britain; now they make up a small part of the market for most things. In particular the Co-op supermarket, though it's cute, is now small (6% market share).

> A single worker doesn't move the statistical needle in a very large corporation? For one, the same fallacy comes up with voting. Secondly: This notion that people are rational robots who only optimize their profits and then also calculate the statistical impact of every of their actions is not just too theoretical, it's just wrong. Loyalty, trust and engagement are things you earn and maintain. A generous compensation (including stocks) can be a part of that.

It's really true that your vote won't decide the next election! I'm sorry :-)

You're right that generous compensation can maintain loyalty and I agree people aren't robots. But for that to save the argument you need more - stocks have to be better at maintaining loyalty than just straightforward pay. Is that true? Maybe: stocks are a "stake" in the company. Is it so true that many companies could improve efficiency by paying in stocks not cash? I'll believe it when I see evidence. Is it so true that we should force companies to do it? I find it highly unlikely and the evidence is clearly inadequate.

>An additional approach is to decentralize and enable partial ownership of franchises. Now suddenly the needle can be moved, day by day and year by year.

Sounds like McDonalds is your ideal of corporate structure :-) Maybe! It's certainly successful.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#210

Post by stavros »

robertlagrant wrote: post #194
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…

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?

I'd encourage you to Google for some articles on how worker-owned coops stay in business. This isn't a radical new idea that's never been tried.
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