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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

#371

Post by kerkeslager »

zby wrote: post #317
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…

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 - other…

> 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.

Quantity of people benefitted isn't the only measure: magnitude of benefit is also relevant. The customer at a 7Eleven benefits in that they get to... what, buy snacks conveniently? Versus the worker who receives their entire livelihood and benefits, it becomes obvious that workers are the primary beneficiaries of a company.

> But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway.

This is quite obviously false. All companies have to do is present a united front on keeping pay low and benefits nonexistent to prevent workers from having better options. I.e. USA 2024.

> And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - otherwise everybody would work for cooperatives.

Why is that exactly?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#373

Post by joker99 »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #342
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 int…

I don’t consider this being a bug. The big issue is: while they get the praise, they reject or pass on the blame to the employees.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#374

Post by kerkeslager »

dash2 wrote: post #195
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…

Better still, optimize for social value provided. If taxes and regulation are right, companies that provide social value will make profits and their owners will get rich. The proposed changes would make that less likely to happen. If nothing else, (a) individual companies all optimizing their own workers' welfare does not add up to optimizing the welfare of all workers and (b) non-workers are left out of the equation…

As opposed to now, when non-executives and non-shareholders are left out of the equation...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#375

Post by zby »

typicalset wrote: post #354
zby wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you cannot choose to work for an organization that is governed in a different way - then this is a restriction on your rights.

The employees can democratically decide how they want to run things. They can choose to issue stock, they can choose other people to make decisions about the business e.g. appoint a manager to make decisions for them. They cannot do these things in a general employment situation. At the most bloody-minded level a food-service worker must wash their hands after going to the toilet and this is a restriction on their ri…

Well if you don't allow the traditional company governance and everything must be a cooperative - then these employees cannot choose a traditional company governance.

But my comment really was about restricting the choice of a potential employee - someone who has not yet decided what company to join.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#376

Post by protocolture »

I think I read some compromise position years ago where the workers didnt just own the business, but the business would issue new bonds/shares every year based on effort put in.

The problem with traditional worker owned businesses is that you assume that being a shareholder would incentivize work, but it turns often enough into a race for the least effort while still getting paid. A classic coop failure mode.

If share of profit is proportional to effort every 12 months you eliminate that.

That said, I cbf reading the article. Sorry but at least I am honest.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#377

Post by danaris »

Draiken wrote: post #361
pembrook wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> We're into late stage capitalism and you're telling me the world was experimenting with making employees lives better?

They're repeating propaganda about communism and socialism.

It's tiresome, really, the degree to which Americans have bought the propaganda that countries like the Soviet Union themselves spread, that they were communist, when in fact they were authoritarian dictatorships with a few very-badly-thought-out planned-economy features.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#378

Post by piva00 »

zby wrote: post #317
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…

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 - other…

> 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.

There's much more at play than just "cooperatives are not any better". Cooperatives don't get as much funding from investors because investors won't be owning a larger share of them, and taking their returns, they instead invest in a traditional company because then they can extract as much as possible from their investments.

That by itself already puts small scale cooperatives at a competitive disadvantage, you can't raise as much capital as the non-cooperative startup, even if their product could be better and their employers could be happier the lavishly monied startup will try to outcompete them by throwing money away until they get a larger share of the market.

If somehow this situation was improved where cooperatives are not immediately disadvantaged from an earlier stage we could see more of them popping up, right now there's not nearly enough cooperatives for this comparison to be possible, simply because they get extinguished by others with more capital.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#379

Post by underbiding »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#380

Post by zby »

peepee1982 wrote: post #355
zby wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet people overwhelmingly prefer to work for these non-employees owned companies instead of working in cooperatives - how do you explain that? They could take those humongous profits for themselves but they don't do that. My answer to that question is that organizing people is much more difficult than everybody thinks and politics is the biggest source of inefficiencies on any human organisation bigger than a few…

Not so many cooperatives to apply for, are there? Otherwise I would definitely prefer worker owned.

But you can create one? If many people wanted to join a cooperative - then it should be easy to do?
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