411–420 of 1001 posts
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Stop optimizing for consumers, start optimizing for producers. Maybe, you want to rethink that.
Company profits is not always aligned with consumer interests, didn’t understand why you switched them.
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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.
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Obviously they exist. But they are only certain types of business. How is a company that requires hundreds of millions of dollars before it's profitable supposed to be a co-op? Step by step?
It would be nice to have a legal framework for companies to increase employee ownership, but be able to do it incrementally with no requirement to go straight to 100%. Or ever. For instance, even public companies might increase the percentage of employee ownership over time. But capital needs could still be met, as the public or private non-employee stock class would still exist.
But this framework exists, and is used by a huge number of firms.
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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…
You haven't said why worker cooperatives optimizing the benefit of their own workers wouldn't add up to more welfare if the entire economy was based around worker cooperatives.
in my opinion worker ownership of the means of production is just socialism, and that doesn't have a good historical track record.
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This isn't about stock options or public markets. These kinds of companies are owned by the employees . You or I can not buy stock in them. This can be a much bigger incentive than regular options or the toilet paper options startups offer. Payout is over several years after you leave, so people care about the long term rather than next quarter. From your comment it seems you're not at all familiar with this model. I…
> You or I can not buy stock in them. But that means employees cannot sell their stock, either. So if one of those millionaire employees retires and the company goes bankrupt one year later, the million is worthless all of a sudden.
Right, so everyone is interested in the long term health of the company.
It's a different model, one that may well be better than what most are doing. Of course most CEOs, private equity, and folks on Wall Street want you to think otherwise.
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I was going to say this. In addition to what you say a lot of shareholders are in i for the short term. They are interested in what the share price will do in the short term. Directors remuneration mostly decided by other directors (and just approved by shareholders who are not bothered), who tend to take the view that it is worth paying directors very highly. Its something that has got worse, but its not new. As GK…
> "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself." The board decides the CEO's salary, no?
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> 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.
Major companies are regularly prosecuted for conspiracy to suppress wages. It if weren't for government intervention your wages would be much lower and there wouldn't be anything you can do about it.
This blind faith that billion dollar corporations would behave ethically is highly inappropriate
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
To resolve current very unbalanced society we need another thing: public money. We need to ANNIHILATE central banks and the current banking system. Money must be created by the government with public investments, so the government propose a new road, the parliament accept the proposal, some will make the new road getting "new" money from the State. Doing so regulate enough to avoid hyper inflation but still tie money on a physical substrate, tied to the real world resources avoiding pure finance.