Every company should be owned by its employees

That ignores the costs (time spent) of finding another company and assumes one has information to conclude that it does indeed suck less without actually having the experience of working there to know.

My grandfather founded a construction company by himself many decades ago. He built it up over many years to a behemoth in the region and created a culture where people worked there for life. When he retired, he sold the entire company to the employees with everyone getting a cut.

His funeral was full of so many faces I had never seen before. Somebody pointed out to me that these were the dozens of people that he made millionaires by deliberately deciding to do right by the employees. It was really moving to talk with so many people who had reaped the benefits of their labor and were grateful for his decision.

That to me is the model that I want to work for. Yes, people at the top made more than at the bottom. But they had been there for decades longer, and the gap was not as extreme at every other company I’ve worked for. Wealth was collectively shared.

My family could have been a lot wealthier if he had kept a cut of the company. But he retired comfortably and didn’t feel that he deserved any more money that others earned for him. I really admire that decision.

> Customers are paramount, owners are less important, workers are what make the business move.

No, no one is more important or less important than anyone else. Every role has to be played order for anyone to benefit. Someone has to bear the risk and pay the upfront costs; someone has to do the operational work in order to deliver value to the market and someone has to be willing to pay for the resulting product in order to generate net positive value for all participants. If any one of these items is missing, the entire initiative fails.

So the participants negotiate arrangements that mutually incentivize each other to pay their parts satisfactorily. Whether those arrangements meet the speculative standards of uninvolved strangers' dogmatic ideologies is not and should not be relevant.

This reminds me of that old funny viral video:

"democracy is government... by the people...of the people...for the people... but the people are retar*d"

Like everything, the best things probably require balance, and the devil is in the details. IMHO it has merit, but with caveats.

I would not want to have the same shares as a normal worker if I have personal risks (like a work security responsible, or CEO). For better or worse, CEOs have experience in guiding companies, and almost no employees have that.

OTOH even a small worker representation might do wonders, increase engagement, better law compliance and the like.

the options are not just 0% and 100% to workers, there could be different requirements depending on the size of the company.

Small companies could be required to have a bigger worker representation, because the impacts of the single worker is much higher.

The weight of the workers' shares in money could be different than its weight in the decisions of the company, too.

Maybe the workers just get a vote for X% on the board, regardless of actual shares.

No, it's not meaningless.

Businesses are activities undertaken by people but they are also legal entities which have no need to abide by ethical or moral standards, shielding the underlying people from liabilities incurred by such entity. People can't do that.

Citizens need to abide to cultural norms, societal expectations, etc.

Of course everything resolves back to people, in a reductive sense, but those entities (citizens, and businesses) don't have the same standards: morally, ethically, nor legally. Neither do they share the same needs, businesses can by eventuality support the needs of citizens to sell stuff but their only motive is profit-motive, not what's best for citizens.

Business-first is a prerogative of how the USA approaches regulations, it's left first to businesses to regulate themselves until issues mount up to the point where regulations are needed, at that point the businesses have had time to amass power and fight against those. Even in the cases where regulation would be beneficial to society, even in cases where the current regulations which are business-friendly are damaging to society (US's healthcare is a clear example).

It's only meaningless if you don't want to see what it means, citizens needs are considered below the needs of businesses as entities, it's a cultural trait of the USA to let businesses roam more-or-less freely (again, with the exception of some industries) until they cause enough damage to generate popular calls for them to be restrained, at that point is not clear if the government will be able to reign in them. Businesses in the USA have much more power than the people, they make policies, they donate enormous amounts to political campaigns, etc. Citizens can't play in the same field.

There are many cases from the past decades: the global financial meltdown of 2008, the dysfunctional healthcare system, the opioid crisis fueled by a single pharma company, the nosedive of Boeing, etc.

You can attack my point in many ways but not by saying "it's meaningless", businesses interests are, in many cases, not citizens' interests. A very clear example: if a business could they would not hire any Americans, simply because the workforce is expensive, shipping this labour outside of American borders would be great for any business' bottomline, it would not help at all society as a whole. They would do that even if it meant killing their own businesses, since there wouldn't be consumers to buy their products, it wouldn't matter until the issue was extreme enough to require them to actually create a consumer market by employing people in the country.