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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

#281

Post by t0mas88 »

choeger wrote: post #240
phkahler wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't about stock options or public markets. These kinds of companies are owned by the employees . You or I can not buy stock in them. This can be a much bigger incentive than regular options or the toilet paper options startups offer. Payout is over several years after you leave, so people care about the long term rather than next quarter. From your comment it seems you're not at all familiar with this model. I…

> You or I can not buy stock in them. But that means employees cannot sell their stock, either. So if one of those millionaire employees retires and the company goes bankrupt one year later, the million is worthless all of a sudden.

I think the idea is that employees make most money from the profits paid to them as owners, instead of an increase in the stock price and then selling.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#282

Post by vidarh »

Jensson wrote: post #239
vidarh wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I looked at data, worker coops were less likely to fail than most other corporate structures.

[flagged]

Doesn't generally seem supported by data.

E.g. https://www.fiftybyfifty.org/2021/06/workers-at-cooperatives...

Elsewhere I've seen some reporting on cooperatives report lower satisfaction on some metrics, usually suspected to be exactly because worker cooperatives tend to give employees more of a stake and so stress levels around the future of the business may be higher.

At the same time, it is flawed to focus on any purported notion that they don't optimize for "worker happiness" because workers decide what they optimize for. And so that may or may not be "happiness" for any given coop, but it certainly does mean optimizing for what workers care about.

Comparing that to, I presume the notion of e.g. the Soviet Union as representative of "communism", where workers had near no say in what the dicators imposed on them, seems to be a rather crass and gross misrepresentation when used as a comparison for workers coops where they do have a say.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#283

Post by dash2 »

vidarh wrote: post #227
dash2 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 corpor…

Coop is not a worker cooperative. It's a consumer cooperative, owned by its members, not workers.

Thank you for this info! This is true, but workers can join for just £1, so I would expect very many workers to be members too: https://colleagues.coop.co.uk/colleague-membership-informati...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#284

Post by vidarh »

dash2 wrote: post #283
vidarh wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coop is not a worker cooperative. It's a consumer cooperative, owned by its members, not workers.

Thank you for this info! This is true, but workers can join for just £1, so I would expect very many workers to be members too: https://colleagues.coop.co.uk/colleague-membership-informati...

I'd presume most workers are members, but they have ~5 million members and about 56k employees, so even if all of them are members they amount to ~1% of the votes.

EDIT: In the UK, the most prominent retail workers coop of sorts is the John Lewis Partnership. It has more employees than Co-op, at ~80k (in addition to John Lewis and Peter Jones it owns Waitrose), and it could be argued that in some senses it may not strictly be a workers coop - it's owned by a trust for the benefit of the workers of the business so its employees does not have the same direct say in the operation as a pure workers coop - but the terms of the trust makes it somewhat close.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#285

Post by [deleted] »

Gooblebrai wrote: post #142
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…

> they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit That this a "con", says something worrying about the values that, as society, we have decided are more important

[deleted]

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#286

Post by jltsiren »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #56
oleg_antonyan wrote: post #3

It's insane how socialism is growing in the west after defeat of soviet union

How do you define socialism? I think it’s one of those terms that people define differently for themselves.

This sounds like actual socialism. The kind of socialism that seeks to abolish private property and the concept of ownership. Only personal property remains, and workers controlling the companies they work in as a natural extension. It may not be intended to be socialism, but it would lead to socialism if universally adopted.

On the average, when someone says "socialism", it's intended to be an insult. It also serves as an indicator that the person is not interested in having a real discussion. But this is not it. This is real socialism. The kind of socialism that died as a mainstream option in Europe with the USSR, but which is still somewhat popular in the US.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#287

Post by Nevermark »

robertlagrant wrote: post #276
Nevermark wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be nice to have a legal framework for companies to increase employee ownership, but be able to do it incrementally with no requirement to go straight to 100%. Or ever. For instance, even public companies might increase the percentage of employee ownership over time. But capital needs could still be met, as the public or private non-employee stock class would still exist.

But it would be nicer if everything were free, though. Why would an investor invest in a company that, if it fails, they lose their money, and if it succeeds, their ownership is taken away?

Nobody “takes” ownership.

Owners are bought out. For a public company that just means buying back shares.

A company whose employees care very much about share price sounds good to me. It is not much different from companies who let employees “take” options.

That could be financially mismanaged too.

There would need to be a rational structure.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#288

Post by eru »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #248
nutrie wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> German companies come pretty close. 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).

Jeez, that must have been some giant scandal to lose 80% of market cap. What is accounting fraud?

Lots of leverage can do that, too.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#289

Post by anentropic »

wkrsz wrote: post #196
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…

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

It's in the employees self-interest for that to be so
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