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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

#311

Post by thanksgiving »

Nevermark wrote: post #294
t0mas88 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is no difference for optimizing dividends vs. stock value increases due to reinvestment, as for any other company. Employees that can sell shares at any time have the same financial interests as with any other corporation. As much reinvestment as grows value faster than the overall market is how much is best to reinvest. Distribute the rest to owners to use/invest elsewhere.

It sounds like you just explained the opposite of what you said. If you can only get the dividends and can never sell your ownership outright, it makes sense to optimize for long term, sustainable growth and profits over short term profits. So, you don't care about stock value increase as you already own your shares. Actually, I'm thinking low share prices compared to dividends are good because it allows you to buy more and earn more.

It sounds like this is a much healthier concept overall?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#312

Post by mharig »

aziaziazi wrote: post #212
jrnx wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.

[dead]

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#313

Post by solidninja »

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…

Well maybe "taking over the market" is also a monopolistic and anti-competitive practice and if we had say, working regulation that forbade the existence of these behemoth companies then the landscape of value would look a little different.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#315

Post by TrueSlacker0 »

rich_sasha wrote: post #190

I was wondering about a similar, but different mechanism. There's a pool of shares that are effectively rented for free to employees, and part of their pay is the dividend they get. When you join, you get them for free (maybe there's some vesting schedule), when you leave they go away, not as a sale but just for free again. Soo... It's not like you're always inflating your share base with options. Just part of what p…

That's a profit share plan. Something implemented like as xx% (usually 20%) of net profit is dispersed to staff each quarter. You don't buy into shares or anything. You don't get them when you leave.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#316

Post by android521 »

phoyd wrote: post #247

Giving employees stock options does not solve the "employes should own the company" problem, when there is a market to sell the stock. Shareholders and employees have different goals and interests regarding the company. For example, the employees they may have to decide on the elimination of their own jobs in order to secure the value of their stock holdings (which btw. would make the company not owned by their emplo…

so in the extreme case, the employees can decide to return 99% profits to themselves and return 1% to shareholders? It sounds cute but will be hard to make it work when incentives are not aligned well. Just like Communism sounds good in theory and everyone with a kind heart will like more equality but in practice, it destroys the entire cake.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#317

Post by zby »

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…

To take over the market companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better. Usually there are more consumers than employees - so I think that measure works quite well with optimising for humans. Profit is a side effect of taking over the market.

But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway. And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - otherwise everybody would work for cooperatives.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#318

Post by bregma »

briandear wrote: post #231
vsuperpower2021 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is precisely the failure that advocates of communism fail to grasp. They failed to read their Adam Smith. We saw this play out in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union never even attempted communism.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#319

Post by defrost »

jltsiren wrote: post #310
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free markets almost never can survive longterm without (sometimes extensive) regulation. There is no such thing as "without regulation". Nobody is suggesting a system in which murder is legal and the most powerful warlord gets a monopoly. But there is a difference between "the government enforces contracts and anti-trust laws and prices major externalities" and "the government micromanages the economy and is captur…

"The government" is a fictional entity. In reality, it's just a bunch of people. I think the real issue is that free markets and free speech are not really compatible. If people are allowed to express political opinions, some opinions will inevitably become popular. Sometimes that happens because people don't like the outcomes of the market. Then they try to change things by regulating the market. Repeat that often e…

Some would argue that the freest markets are regulated to prevent collusion, to ensure free and equal access to all relevant infomation, to penalise deliberate falsehoods, etc.

Certainly the OG Free Markets that inspired the first order Invisible Hand model were.

'free market' is such a nebulous term, bandied about en masse in forums where rarely is it questioned what specific type of free market a specific person might mean.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#320

Post by SomeoneFromCA »

lupusreal wrote: post #217
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…

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 g…

Yes exactly. This is why, European countries, with the strongest worker protection, such as Norway, Sweden, Germany etc. are so much poorer and far behind than US in terms of QOL and quality of goods they produce.
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