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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

#341

Post by s0l1dsnak3123 »

pembrook wrote: post #325
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…

The point of a company is to make a product that customers want, and make it as accessible as possible. “Taking over the market” and producing profit is only a byproduct of doing that. A competitor would wipe out that profit if there existed a cheaper option that delivered the same value to customers. The minute you start optimizing for employees instead of customers, you’re delivering less value to customers (the wo…

I think this is a bit of a misnomer: what's being said is not to "start optimizing for employees instead of customers", but rather to keep customers where they are in the pecking order, and to re-align the owners in this dynamic. Customers are paramount, owners are less important, workers are what make the business move.

I think workers should have a seat on every board; workers should have a right to first refusal - with a preferential price - on companies that are going through an exit; and that the state should provide an investment fund to allow for this to happen on the condition that the business be ran as a worker co-op.

I think policy such as this would bring stability, long-term thinking, and more genuine customer empathy that isn't solely profit-driven, while reducing costs and driving up baseline wages.

Democracy is important in our politics, but we spend more time at work than anything else. Therefore democracy should be part of our workplaces too.

It's worth adding that none of this prohibits businesses from starting up and reaching the point where they exit with a handsome reward.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#342

Post by strikelaserclaw »

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…

This phenomenon is a function of attributing all the positive developments within a company to the C-suite executives. Just as shareholders profit from the productive work of many employees, the C-suite executives often receive credit for the achievements of a large number of people. I think it is related to a fundamental characteristic of humans, that being we can't understand information unless it is calculated into simpler versions ( concepts like medians, averages, variance, "who is the best", "who is the worst", "who is the most evil", "who is the least evil" all come out of the same human need to get simplified answers). When credit and information moves up up the funnel from employees to c - suite, it gets - credit gets assigned at higher and higher levels. It is not team xyz that did it, it is their manager, or their manager's managers until it gets to the ceo who only knows that "svp x was responsible for this successful product launch" - since the people at the top determine pay scales, if theres 10-20 million to pay out in terms of increments, the board rewards the ceo with 10 million because he is apparently responsible for ALL the successful product launches, the ceo decides to reward svp with 2 million increment etc... It truly does pay to sit at the table with the decision makers.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#343

Post by ossobuco »

Sankozi wrote: post #331
ossobuco wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A tiny, tiny percentage of Americans would literally go hungry if they didn't get their next month's paycheck "71.93% of Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck Have $2,000 or Less in Savings"[0]. So no, it's not a tiny percentage. $2k or less in savings means being one emergency expense away from not being able to pay rent or your house loan next month. - [0]: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-t…

This only shows how big economic illiteracy is. Not how much people are earning vs the cost of living.

The personal savings rate has slowly halved over the past 60 years[0].

Did everyone become illiterate or maybe the inflation rate has exceeded the growth rate of wages[1], among other things?

What's funny is that on two comments rejecting my argument one accuses me of considering people "too dumb" to take their own financial decisions, the other tells me people are actually too dumb and that's why they are in financial trouble.

- [0]: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/personal-savings

- [1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#344

Post by _thisdot »

aziaziazi wrote: post #241
_thisdot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point. Most of salary is decided based on how much of a loss it would be if you left. A CEO leaving a company can immediately lead to serious consequences whereas an individual employee can leave and no one might bat an eye

> A CEO leaving a company can immediacy lead to serous consequences Is it something that has been study or observed? Most company are resilient enough to handle the leaving of an individual, being a Chief or not. The opposite would be a flag for an instable company. Far tangent exemple: Belgium without government.

I’m looking at this from a casual stock market perspective. If I came to know the CEO of the company is unhappy and planning to leave, surely I expect the stock prices to take a hit. And the recovery will mostly depend on their successor and is altogether an expensive exercise

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#345

Post by pembrook »

tempfile wrote: post #333
pembrook wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of a company is to make a product that customers want, and make it as accessible as possible. “Taking over the market” and producing profit is only a byproduct of doing that. A competitor would wipe out that profit if there existed a cheaper option that delivered the same value to customers. The minute you start optimizing for employees instead of customers, you’re delivering less value to customers (the wo…

> The point of a company is to make a product that customers want, and make it as accessible as possible. Who says? What if we said the point of a company was to make its employees' lives better? > In the US a vast majority of adults now own index funds in proportion to their wealth . That's the problem - ownership is distributed unevenly, and the inequality causes social problems.

What if we said the point of a company was to make its employees' lives better?

Good news. The world spent the entire last century experimenting with that idea. It did not work out well. I’ve already explained why.

But, you are of course free to start a company doing that. If it turns out to produce better outcomes for customers (the world), you will win and society will win!

I’m guessing you won’t test your ideas though, and will instead vote for authoritarian central planners who will deploy this straight to production via laws. Then your country will cease growing, and will be forced to slowly dismantle this worker-optimized system as a result. See Europe over the next 50 years for more info.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#346

Post by ozim »

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…

Apple has 160k employees - biggest holder of Apple stock is Vanguard that has 50M customers who are de facto owners. Let’s skip other investment companies to make it easy and assume every Vanguard customer owns piece of Apple.

By the virtue of your argument we should optimize owners wealth because there are more owners than employees.

World is much much more complicated to be throwing simple arguments like that :)

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#347

Post by charlieyu1 »

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'm pretty sure the stock options of the corner shop near my house won't be very attractive to employees.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#348

Post by nec4b »

ossobuco wrote: post #304
lennixm wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to stop using this stat. It's completely useless. There are literally people making top percentile incomes saying they're living paycheck to paycheck in these surveys because they interpret the survey questions wildly different than other people. A tiny, tiny percentage of Americans would literally go hungry if they didn't get their next month's paycheck the rest would have to cash out some small percenta…

> A tiny, tiny percentage of Americans would literally go hungry if they didn't get their next month's paycheck "71.93% of Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck Have $2,000 or Less in Savings"[0]. So no, it's not a tiny percentage. $2k or less in savings means being one emergency expense away from not being able to pay rent or your house loan next month. - [0]: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/banking/living-paycheck-t…

>> "71.93% of Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck Have $2,000 or Less in Savings"[0].

It's a meaningless statistic. They can still have high net worth and/or large incomes even if they don't keep cash on hand.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#349

Post by cess11 »

dash2 wrote: post #180
cess11 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I don't mean for my views to hurt your feelings. I find it obvious from the context that they were referring to celebrity CEO:s in global corporations and not Mom or Pop in some small mom-and-pop corner store. When I look at en.wikipedia on Huang it seems he graduated into a managing role and then founded Nvidia. By "real-world experience" I'd mean experience as a worker, but I can't answer for the person you'…

Huang started as a chip designer and then founded a company developing chips. What other kind of work experience would be relevant? AI contains scams, but also obviously important real progress; your points about war and surveillance are pure mood affiliation and irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Production of chips, for example. One could argue that design is a form of administration rather than work.

I'd say so called AI is largely a scam. It's wobbly databases with non-deterministic query languages dressed up as a substitute for intelligence. Email is similarly a scam. Through mail you send someone an item, which might or might not have some script on it. Email is very different, and it's largely used for spam, even though the name seems to say it is very similar. Is this what you call progress?

No, I'm pointing out that Nvidia are supplying criminals and tyrants with the tools they need for their abusive and oppressive activities. I do not expect your mood to change from having this pointed out, rather the opposite, I expect you to already be somewhat aware of it. Personally, I try to avoid doing business with such people, and I would prefer to not be dependent on their enablers, though that is almost impossible for systemic reasons.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#350

Post by charlieyu1 »

rendaw wrote: post #64
dheera wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is "only" being paid $34M in 2024. 26.6M of that was stock. In percentage terms it's just equity that he effectively handed out before as a founder and is getting back in return for growing the company even more. I don't see a problem with it, considering that the median employee takes almost zero risks and can leave whenever they want.

What risk does Jensen Huang take and why can't he leave whenever he wants?

He is giving a ton of business to Taiwan. That's probably enough personal safety risk.
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