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Every company should be owned by its employees

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Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#441

Post by Qwertious »

pembrook wrote: post #325
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…

The point of a company is to make a product that customers want, and make it as accessible as possible. “Taking over the market” and producing profit is only a byproduct of doing that. A competitor would wipe out that profit if there existed a cheaper option that delivered the same value to customers. The minute you start optimizing for employees instead of customers, you’re delivering less value to customers (the wo…

>The point of a company is to make a product that customers want, and make it as accessible as possible. “Taking over the market” and producing profit is only a byproduct of doing that.

Um, what? The point of a company is to make profit for its investors, and making a useful product for the customer is only a byproduct of doing that. This is why corporations are making record profits, instead of investing it all into R&D or rainy day funds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#442

Post by enoch_r »

phkahler wrote: post #416
choeger wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>> 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.

Everyone is certainly interested in the long term health of the company. But exogenous shifts like technological change, trade, COVID, etc. might cause the company to go under - or maybe you're just outnumbered by people who make poor decisions.

If this happens, people who have worked at the company for 15 years and have most of their "retirement" in the form of ESOP shares will a) lose their jobs and b) lose most of their retirement savings. On the same day.

Libertarians sometimes fantasize about how if we didn't have the FDA, people would be incentivized to do their own research on food and drug safety. Sure, sometimes dumb people would get it wrong and kill themselves! But that's just the price we (well, they) need to pay for everyone to have good incentives. This seems like the same category.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#443

Post by randomdata »

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…

> Unions aren't structured for investing, and that's not their reason to exist.

Depends on the union. A credit union is structured for investing and is literally their reason to exist.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#444

Post by pembrook »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #436
pembrook wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ahhh yes, the old "because the market didn't turn out the way I wanted it to once, it means the entirety of the capitalist system and the idea of free markets is fundamentally broken" retort.

I call this the "Jr. developer fallacy." Start a job, encounter some bugs, suggest rewriting the entire codebase from scratch on [insert-trendy-framework].

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#445

Post by seneca »

Droobfest wrote: post #432
vrotaru wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They do have a stake in their performance. It's their salary. If their performance is poor, in a functioning system they lose that salary.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#446

Post by bdw5204 »

throwaway7ahgb wrote: post #401
kerkeslager wrote: post #371

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. 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.

As it turns out, the Federal Reserve chairman happens to be on record as wanting to suppress wages because he blames high wages for inflation[0]. In other words, the current dumpster fire of an economy was the intended goal of the Federal Reserve's interest rate increases.

[0]: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/30/feds-powell-inflati...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#447

Post by Qwertious »

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?

The Democratic People's Republic Of Korea is ostensibly a democracy. Words are cheap, how much political power do the people actually have?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#448

Post by stavros »

sotix wrote: post #431
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…

> 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…

Yeah, this is spot on. It's just that the priorities are different (even unemployed Greeks scrape enough money to have coffee with their friends), which can seem to Americans like we're lazy.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#449

Post by pembrook »

tempfile wrote: post #408
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…

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.

This is a non sequitur. I'm not saying central planning in general is bad. Companies are an example of central planning. So are families.

I'm saying communism is bad.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#450

Post by MichaelZuo »

dukeyukey wrote: post #279
MichaelZuo wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Survivorship bias. You have to compare against all that have in fact gone bust over the same timeframe.

If anything, co-ops seem to survive better than traditional companies - https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/2020-10/co-operative...

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