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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

#361

Post by Draiken »

pembrook wrote: post #345
tempfile wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

What? We're into late stage capitalism and you're telling me the world was experimenting with making employees lives better? I must be living under a rock!

Where are these so called experiments? I only see employee conditions getting progressively worse. If you go back long enough, we did get a few wins like weekends and some limits on hours after a lot of people died for it, but that's about it.

The last change we had was probably WFH which only affects a small portion of people and, realistically, is only being accepted because it's cheaper for companies.

>But, you are of course free to start a company doing that.

I argue nothing different than the status quo can ever succeed without deep structural change.

It's like trying to be a pacifist in the middle of a war zone. You will be killed. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with being a pacifist, but it simply cannot work under those conditions.

The part that people seem to forget is that we chose to value profits above all else. We can also choose to change that. Even if it's extremely hard to imagine this with all the propaganda we've been bombarded with in the past century, it's possible.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#362

Post by fileeditview »

tomp wrote: post #323
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…

I think this is just your anti-capitalist bias showing. “Market” is meant in purely game-theoretic terms. > The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing for worker happiness instead. All these workers could set up cooperatives and work for / own them instead. The fact that this hasn’t happened suggests that in reality, the for-profit companies are b…

I think that's a bad argument. Founding your own cooperative makes you kind of an entrepreneur but joining one doesn't. Most workers are joiners not creators in terms of companies. And I bet more than a few of them would gladly become a partial owner of the company they are working for.

But there are so few cooperatives that the chance of you joining one is very slim anyways.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#363

Post by kerkeslager »

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…

> If the story is "all companies must be fully employee-owned workers' cooperatives", then first, note that you are calling for a restriction on workers' rights:

This is completely dishonest. You're not arguing against this because you're concerned for workers.

> they have to be given part of their pay as stocks,

This is nonsense: the stock given to workers would normally be distributed to other places, so when it's given to workers instead, it's generally in addition to what they would normally be paid.

> and they can't sell them freely.

Also nonsense: this is a rule at some companies, but doesn't have to be.

> Second, that will probably make markets work worse. There's a large economics literature on this: worker-owned cooperatives have not taken over the market, although they are an available institutional form, because (a) they find it hard to raise capital (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit, e.g. they won't sack underperforming divisions or expand in ways that dilute existing workers' stake.

Ah, the real reason you care about this issue: "it will probably make markets worse". Screw workers, can't make markets worse!

As a society, is it our goal to have companies that "take over the market"? Or is our goal to have an economy that meets the needs of our people?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#364

Post by kerkeslager »

infecto wrote: post #360
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…

Why are there so many more startups in the US compared to Europe? While not a perfect measurement, there is more innovation and economic generation that happens in the US compared to Europe. Time will prove which culture of business wins.

Why is number of startups a metric we care about?

Are we just asking rhetorical questions that pick out one data point that we think supports our presupposed notions?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#365

Post by Gormo »

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…

You are making normative arguments, but the question is wholly empirical -- the metrics being applied here are the ones that actually measure the success and viability of firms, not metrics selected to fit the observer's emotional attachments.

Firms that are optimized for turning market demand into revenue streams will naturally outcompete firms that are optimized for other goals, regardless of what ideals or preferences anyone bears. This isn't something that anyone can decide upon, so a call to action based on one's own "ought" preferences isn't really meaningful.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#367

Post by maximus-decimus »

pie_flavor wrote: post #202
infotainment wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The job being easy to do and the job being easy to get are two completely different things.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#368

Post by EnigmaFlare »

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.

Says the reason we have laws to enable companies to even exist. Society want them and it wants them because of the value they provide to everyone else.

> in proportion to their wealth. That's the problem - ownership is distributed unevenly, and the inequality causes social problems.

Maybe we should work on helping people to manage their tendency towards jealousy. One way is to have a culture of personal responsibility so that if you're poor, you believe (rightly or wrongly) that it's your own fault so you're not filled with hate for people who have more money than you.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#369

Post by danaris »

Gormo wrote: post #365
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…

You are making normative arguments, but the question is wholly empirical -- the metrics being applied here are the ones that actually measure the success and viability of firms, not metrics selected to fit the observer's emotional attachments. Firms that are optimized for turning market demand into revenue streams will naturally outcompete firms that are optimized for other goals, regardless of what ideals or prefere…

That's what laws and regulations are for: ensuring that entities that are trying to do the right thing and make life better for actual humans aren't "outcompeted" by entities that are trying to make things better for themselves at everyone else's expense.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#370

Post by EnigmaFlare »

roughly wrote: post #101
bpodgursky wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be rude but you have no idea what you are talking about and clearly have 0 insight into the day-to-day of an actual CEO. It's fine to argue that a particular CEO is underperforming, it's often true, but very few of them are "underworking" by any reasonable definition.

How’s this for a definition: the average CEO gets paid 350x what the average worker gets paid, so unless they’re generating 350x the value of the average employee, they’re underworking.

If they have 350 employees, then they double the company's profit, I suppose they just generated 350x times the value of an average employee. If they have more employees, they only need to increase it a smaller proportion to be generating 350x as much value.
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