Every company should be owned by its employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#211

Post by robertlagrant » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:28 AM UTC

vkou wrote: post #76

creato wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> because whoever takes the job is signing up for some miserable work I'm ready to do it for a mere 5 mill/year (less than a sixth of the incumbent), and I'll happily take all the blame for all my predecessor's failings, and more. Will I do a worse job than the incumbent? Maybe, maybe not, how the hell will anyone know?

I disagree that everyone is equally suitable for every job. Why should someone pay you £5m? What would you do better than anyone else?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#212

Post by aziaziazi » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:28 AM UTC

jrnx wrote: post #154

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…

> (a) they find it hard to raise capital (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit at the end a company needs to be financially successful and for this it needs to provide competitive products and services. Otherwise, they'll just be replaced. There of course may be a chance they'll get replaced by another employee owned company, but the odds of a free-capital owned company repla…

My pension depends on other members of my country, as well as they depend on my. The feeling of safeness (event if it’s not 100% safe) and bound is what I call “society“, meaning we go forward together very much like what most feel with their family. Never ever will I live in a country that encourage people to compete instead of collaborate, it sounds better for the 1% stakeholders but not for the 99% others.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#213

Post by chii » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:30 AM UTC

dools wrote: post #98

hurril wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is gained by preventing the company from accepting more money than your revenue cap? It would be bad for everyone. What are you trying to optimise?

They can have more revenue than the cap I’m just saying they should be publicly listed.

what makes public listing a good criteria for which the revenue cap be removed?

in fact, i dont get the rationale for revenue caps at all. It doesn't produce less inequality, and only produces inefficiencies.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#214

Post by chii » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:31 AM UTC

t-writescode wrote: post #176

dools wrote: post #68

Worker co-ops and ESOPs are already available as business structures. If they’re better, they will be more common, it’s as simple as that. Mandating employee ownership is ridiculous. In terms of policy I think a cap on revenue per employee for a privately held company and a cap on individual ownership is a better solution to reducing income inequality. That and eliminating involuntary unemployment so that companies h…

> If they’re better, they will be more common Unfortunately, the word "better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Better for the employees is a world of difference compared to "better at getting funding to start a business", "better at getting Venture Capitalists or Angel Investors or Banks" interested. It takes working two jobs, being independently wealthy or getting outside help to start a company, and most of t…

may be the word is 'fitter', rather than 'better'.

After all, darwinian natural selection is taking place in a free-market economy.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#215

Post by throwaway2037 » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:32 AM UTC

vineyardmike wrote: post #199

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 worl…

Microsoft was pretty famous for this in the 90s and 00s. Huge amounts of work was done by contractors, who were treated like second class citizens. There was even a big lawsuit about it, that changed how Microsoft uses contractors.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#216

Post by zokier » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:32 AM UTC

The article seems to imply that the company would need to hold cash enough to buy back all outstanding shares, which sounds absolutely bonkers to me?

Are the shares getting constantly diluted, how is that handled? How is valuation of shares done here? I can't really see this scheme working for public companies

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#217

Post by lupusreal » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:32 AM UTC

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…

If every company that offers goods or services prioritizes "worker happiness", by for instance refusing to excise unproductive divisions, then the result will be a world where everything costs more and takes longer. Not just consumer goods, but any sort of public infrastructure project, R&D, etc. If you think it takes too long or costs too much to build a school or fix a road in America these days compared to a few generations ago, it would only get worse. Every single sector of the economy would start dragging its feet with no regard for efficiently getting shit done.

If only some companies are coops, then those have to compete with companies that aren't and consequently they have to work efficiently or fail. The idea behind making them all be coops seems to be removing this pressure to perform. Bad idea.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#218

Post by chii » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:33 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #157

hgyjnbdet wrote: post #20

I suppose a side effect might be employee loyality, which might be a good thing. And the wealth disparity we have now is obscene. But all this is predicated on the company doing well, where's the story about the companies set up like this that struggle or fail? Are the employees worse off than those in a traditional company?

Wealth disparity is a function of overall worker comp, but it doesn't matter whether you force companies to pay part of that comp in shares instead of cash.

what the proposal for employee ownership _actually_ want to achieve is for the existing owners to have part of their ownership reliquished (without much, if any, compensation), and given to the workers.

AKA, the workers do not take on the prior capital risk that the owners have, but reap the rewards of success. Obviously, a failed company means no such shares given to the workers (by definition). Therefore, under this imagined scenario, the workers only gain.

of course, reality cannot work like this.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#219

Post by dash2 » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:34 AM UTC

yieldcrv wrote: post #167

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…

There are additional options 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…

It's possible. But note that Germany has struggled to move out of declining sectors (petrol cars) and into new ones (tech) - which fits what I said about worker control making creative destruction hard. Its economic performance has been dramatically bad recently.

Equally, I wouldn't want to judge Rhineland capitalism on a few bad years, or claim that the US "open the casino" approach dominates it on every dimension.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#220

Post by robertlagrant » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 8:34 AM UTC

graemep wrote: post #112

roenxi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was going to say this. In addition to what you say a lot of shareholders are in i for the short term. They are interested in what the share price will do in the short term. Directors remuneration mostly decided by other directors (and just approved by shareholders who are not bothered), who tend to take the view that it is worth paying directors very highly. Its something that has got worse, but its not new. As GK…

> "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."

The board decides the CEO's salary, no?