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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

#451

Post by bluGill »

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.

The problem is most employees don't have enough control to do anything about bankruptcy. Even if you see it coming you can do nothing about it from your position. seeing it coming is also hard as employees are rarely given that information - odds are a significant chunk of employees find out about the bankruptcy via the nightly news when it is too late. Once you have hindsight it is easy to look back at the financial statements and see it coming, but most people are not qualified to read those statements and so won't understand what they mean - or how a bankruptcy event looks different from normal ups and downs.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#452

Post by jandrewrogers »

infecto wrote: post #360
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…

Why are there so many more startups in the US compared to Europe? While not a perfect measurement, there is more innovation and economic generation that happens in the US compared to Europe. Time will prove which culture of business wins.

As a generalization, American culture is significantly more optimistic than European culture. The fixation of the latter on risk and the former on reward reflects baseline cultural assumptions about what the future will look like. Building a high-growth startup, or investing in one, does not look like a sensible decision to a pessimist and this is reflected in attitudes and behaviors.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#453

Post by Sankozi »

aziaziazi wrote: post #351
Sankozi wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only shows how big economic illiteracy is. Not how much people are earning vs the cost of living.

> Economic illiteracy I respect your opinion but the stats presented before does not “shows“ illiteracy but low investments. Lack of liquidity to invest seems a very plausible raison because a revenu threshold has to be passed to be able to buy food before founds. This stat is probably almost a proxy for how many Americans are below that threshold.

It is really hard to believe that 71.93% of Americans are on the verge of homelessness and starvation. Much more plausible (and even mentioned in the linked article under "Lack of budgeting and financial planning" and "Social pressures") are just bad habits.

Of course there are economic literate people who really are struggling, but I doubt they make even half of those 71.93%.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#454

Post by tristor »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #425
Jensson wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> just like how communism There is some kind of derangement in the English speaking West, any attempt to reign in power of capital must be communist. If free public libraries didn't exist and were proposed today, they'd be accused of communism. If free public legal deference did not exist today, anyone proposing it would be accused of being a communist. Also notice that using public money to hurt a person, i.e. prose…

This criticism would carry more weight if this entire thread wasn't full of snippets of communist fanfic about using legal force to try to upend reality and ending the profit motive for companies and enforcing worker collectives.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#455

Post by itake »

paxys wrote: post #413

Something doesn't add up. The company claims to be 100% employee owned, and hands out new shares to employees every year as part of their salary. But the employees can also sell their shares to fund purchases. So...who do they sell to? And what happens when an employee with a bunch of shares quits or gets fired?

The company might buy those shares back

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#456

Post by nradov »

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…

It's tough to be happy when you're broke and worrying about whether you can get another loan.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#457

Post by empath75 »

t0mas88 wrote: post #281
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.

I think the idea is that employees make most money from the profits paid to them as owners, instead of an increase in the stock price and then selling.

Companies frequently make no profits. Imagine missing your rent payment because your company had a bad quarter.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#458

Post by li2uR3ce »

zby wrote: post #317
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…

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…

> companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better.

Companies need to sell the *idea* of making lives better. They don't actually have to make a customer's life better and many don't despite selling lots of product. Profitability is not a strict function of quality. If it were, we'd not give the slightest fuck about monopolies. It takes a great amount of effort to get companies to compete on "making lives better." If bettering lives is not the most profitable it is very often eclipsed by what is.

It's much more complicated than the simple lie that "you get what you pay for."

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#459

Post by tempfile »

pembrook wrote: post #449
tempfile wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is not a non sequitur! You called them "authoritarian central planners". Am I supposed to think you consider "authoritarian central planners" a totally neutral phrase with no connotations? It's telling you mention central planning in your response, when I objected to your use of authoritarian. If you had originally said "you will vote for who will " your original comment is not quite as punchy, I think.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#460

Post by Qwertious »

cen4 wrote: post #222
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…

Now please use the barista argument on what house wives should be paid.

The word "housewife" is interesting - the job of housewives has historically been to spin thread and make clothes, which was at the bare minimum 40 hours a week of work. This is on top of cooking, cleaning, and childrearing, which was its own full-time job.

There's this myth of the idle housewife which was true, but only for the aristocracy and in the last few decades, the upper middle class (who are tooootally separate from the aristocracy, yes sirree). Most housewives, for most of history, have worked full-time.

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