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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

#431

Post by sotix »

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…

> The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else

I asked my Greek teacher what they biggest change she experienced moving to the US was, and she said that in Greece, her community prioritized happiness above all else, but everyone she met in the US prioritized making money.

I also asked her what the financial crisis was like in Greece, and she said that you couldn’t find an empty seat at a taverna in her village on the weekends. They barely had any money, and few around her were employed, but they had certain priorities.

Meanwhile in the US, I had a teacher condescendingly tell me that the Greeks were lazy (ignorant of the history that led to 2008). It can be hard to see through certain cultural biases. Particularly when the primary goals are so different.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#432

Post by Droobfest »

vrotaru wrote: post #391
stavros wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It sounds good to me.

Just an example. Should teachers be judged on how a pleasant life they live, or how good they teach?

Obviously by how well they teach, but if we give them a stake in their teaching performance, their teaching should improve even more…

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#433

Post by jrnx »

aziaziazi wrote: post #212
jrnx wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (a) they find it hard to raise capital (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit at the end a company needs to be financially successful and for this it needs to provide competitive products and services. Otherwise, they'll just be replaced. There of course may be a chance they'll get replaced by another employee owned company, but the odds of a free-capital owned company repla…

My pension depends on other members of my country, as well as they depend on my. The feeling of safeness (event if it’s not 100% safe) and bound is what I call “society“, meaning we go forward together very much like what most feel with their family. Never ever will I live in a country that encourage people to compete instead of collaborate, it sounds better for the 1% stakeholders but not for the 99% others.

I wish it were that simple... even if everyone tried to "collaborate" to produce the same product, there would still be some competition somewhere, at least for ideas. somehow the final products to be made need to be decided upon and the other won't be made. That also means, that somehow the people overseeing the final products have more power than the ones that were not chosen by whatever process is in place to make those decisions...

It really has not been proven, that there is a more effective organisational form for this competition better than capital allocation using markets with a lot of freedom.

For your case or "cross-generational" pensions where the young pay for the pensions of the old: That worked well while the baby boomers were working. This may go sour when the baby boomers retire and the numbers of their first and second generation of offspring decline... Even worse: if they have made the economy, tax and debt burden for those offspring so bad, they can barely buy their own home.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#434

Post by high_na_euv »

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.

Hint: impact

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#435

Post by Qwertious »

mantas wrote: post #381
brabel wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're ignoring the proportions. Your happiness is maybe 80% related to your job and salary (at least up to a point where you can be considered wealthy, after that there's decreasing returns), and each product you consume from each different company affects your wellbeing by a minuscule amount. Even adding them all up won't give more than, say, 15% as most of your expenses are not on products, but things like housing…

EU is on the same path. Actually even worse with over-the-top ecological requirements. Making it harded for local businesses, while making trade deals with iffy countries left and right. For now it's rolling on selling assets to China or US. But obviously that's not sustainable long term. Either we need to protect our internal market and tax the crap out of imports, or the party will be over.

>Actually even worse with over-the-top ecological requirements.

That seems hard to judge in the short term - if in 50 years some economically-critical ecosystem collapses like the north atlantic fisheries did, they will have been absolutely necessary in retrospect.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#436

Post by forgetfreeman »

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...

The market has spent the GDP of Madagascar to fuck over cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US. Meanwhile "efficiency" in the ISP market has lead to regional near-monopolies and some of the worst residential bandwidth on the planet. Let's not with "efficiency and innovation" yeah? The emperor is clearly buck-ass naked.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#437

Post by jandrewrogers »

vrotaru wrote: post #134
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…

Stop optimizing for consumers, start optimizing for producers. Maybe, you want to rethink that.

Everyone is both a producer and consumer, these are not different groups of people. While production is a prerequisite for consumption, producers have interests as consumers.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#438

Post by lesuorac »

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #370
roughly wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Doubling profit is relatively easy.

If you have 10M of revenue and 9.5M of expenses then an increase of 500k in sales doubles your profit. Given that everybody in the company is needed (for sake of argument) to produce the initial 10M I wouldn't say that the CEO inking a new sale for 500k is worth the entirety of the original company.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#439

Post by nicholasnorris »

piva00 wrote: post #378
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…

> 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…

The investment schemes do not have to stay static while only the structure of businesses change.

Even if it did, would it not makes sense that investor priorities would change if their only options beyond cooperative businesses were some very small startups and mom & pops?

A system of public banks could handle investment based on the priorities set by all citizens. Everyone would effectively become a shareholder. Successful businesses could be taxed based off what the public invested in those new cooperatives, and those taxes would be used at least partially be used to fund more startups.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#440

Post by freilanzer »

dheera wrote: post #184
freilanzer wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I earn 30 million a year, I have next to no risk and can retire anytime I want. Hell, I could retire after the first quarter.

Do you realize that for the first N years of Nvidia, he probably made less than minimum wage, AND had immense responsibilities on his back to try to get the company to profitability? That's the risk. He's getting a 30M paycheck today only because he built a trillion dollar company from nothing and sacrificed the job opportunities he could have had at other companies for three decades.

Do you realise that CEOs don't all start at a company from day 1 and instead get hired and immediately have a huge salary?

According to Wikipedia:

As of 2024, Huang has been Nvidia's chief executive for over three decades, a tenure described by The Wall Street Journal as "almost unheard of in fast-moving Silicon Valley".[14] He owns 3.6% of Nvidia's stock, which went public in 1999.[5] He earned US$24.6 million as CEO in 2007, ranking him as the 61st highest paid U.S. CEO by Forbes.[5]

This should tell you all you need to know.

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