Every company should be owned by its employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#401

Post by throwaway7ahgb » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 12:31 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #371

zby wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

>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.

Can we leave the cynical antiwork comments out? They aren't helpful. This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help.

Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#402

Post by lo_fye » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 12:32 PM UTC

Or work for a company that's a registered B-Corp https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#403

Post by throwaway7ahgb » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 12:33 PM UTC

solidninja wrote: post #313

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…

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.

The OP is postulating they would look different but not better. Nobody has refuted the claim that if COOPs were better they would be more popular , but they are not.

Uplifting the entire global financial system to make a COOP more attractive through regulation wouldn't change this.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#404

Post by tempfile » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 12:33 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #389

underbiding wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Cuba still exists today and is ostensibly being run for the benefit of all workers. Why don’t you go visit a Cuban state-run grocery store and tell me how much you’d enjoy living there?

Mentioning Cuba as a failed example while omitting that they have been embargoed by the biggest economy in the world for over 60 years seems willfully dishonest.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#405

Post by aleph_minus_one » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 12:33 PM UTC

piva00 wrote: post #398

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Unions should put their money where their mouth is and invest in cooperatives.

> Unions should put their money where their mouth is and invest in cooperatives. Unions aren't structured for investing, and that's not their reason to exist. I don't know where you are from so I can't comment on how unions function in your society, where I live they're definitely not in the same realm as a potential investor for cooperatives. You are also asking for unions to compete against VCs, and banks, let's be…

> On top of that the union has responsibilities to provide benefits to all members, a bank or investor has none of that

A bank has responsibilities to its shareholders.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#406

Post by throwaway7ahgb » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 12:34 PM UTC

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #384

solidninja wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is maybe an underappreciated point, an employee-owned company with in a monopoly (or near monopoly) market position will act just as aggressively to screw over their captured consumer base as any other private ownership model. The employees may be better off, but the rest of us will suffer the same.

Agreed, COOPs don't fundamentally change human behavior which has doses of greed. A large COOP monopoly will suffer the same fate as others'.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#407

Post by pyth0 » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 12:35 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #389

underbiding wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Cuba still exists today and is ostensibly being run for the benefit of all workers. Why don’t you go visit a Cuban state-run grocery store and tell me how much you’d enjoy living there?

I wouldn't want to live anywhere that the US has decided to economically decimate through sanctions and embargo.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#408

Post by tempfile » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 12:36 PM UTC

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…

It's not authoritarian to outlaw unjust systems of power. I'm sure slave owners considered the US "authoritarian central planners" when they outlawed slavery. Doesn't make it wrong.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#409

Post by morning-coffee » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 12:36 PM UTC

> Every company should be owned by its employees

Today's latest example of someone, after observing the current state of some system governed by laws of economics, declaring a "solution" by merely stating how something "should" be. If only the world worked this way...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#410

Post by ClumsyPilot » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 12:37 PM UTC

pembrook wrote: post #395

piva00 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 in…

But what are you suggesting? We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently; make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation; with the sole aim of achieving a utopian worker-cooperative owned world? Hrmmm, where have I heard that before...

> make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation

I wish we didn't force capital to do things like that. Then it can run wild with Mandatory arbitration which bars access to the justice system, algorithmic manipulation of prices for rents / real-estate (1) and installing spyware on the customer's computers (2) and MITM attacks of your communication (3). They are all free market innovations. Very efficient at doing the wrong thing.

1 - https://rentalhousingjournal.com/fbi-searches-property-manag...

2 - https://www.pcmag.com/news/hp-accused-of-quietly-installing-...

3 - https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-sn...