Every company should be owned by its employees • Hacker News Board

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#491

Post by hobs » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 1:53 PM UTC

bayareateg wrote: post #479

sotix wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I find that people often put on rose colored glasses when talking about the "old country," myself included. It is a little ridiculous to think that Greeks don't prioritize making money over some nebulous "community happiness"' You should have asked her why she came to the US

Pretty much every Greek that I have met (my father included) did it for a better future (money, no future with the military junta, american base left later.)

Plenty of Greeks have no interest in going back because they want the "American" life, but there's no question you ate better in the village, had more community, or had a sense of history - what you didn't have was more than ~35k euros a year, if you were lucky.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#492

Post by imgabe » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 1:53 PM UTC

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…

You are responsible for optimizing your own happiness. A company can't and shouldn't do that for you. Unhappy with your job? Find a different one. I don't presume to know what will make you happy and dictate to you how you need to live to achieve that and neither should you presume to do that for me.

Some people are happy focusing on their family. Some people are happy working hard in their career. Some people just want a job to pay the bills and plenty of time to play video games. These are all fine and valid choices and no company is going to optimize for all of them.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#493

Post by keybored » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 1:54 PM UTC

bayareateg wrote: post #479

sotix wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I find that people often put on rose colored glasses when talking about the "old country," myself included. It is a little ridiculous to think that Greeks don't prioritize making money over some nebulous "community happiness"' You should have asked her why she came to the US

> You should have asked her why she came to the US

People sometimes have rose-colored glasses about emigrating to the US.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#494

Post by jack_pp » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 1:55 PM UTC

cen4 wrote: post #358

jack_pp wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but how many men do you think enjoy the work they do in order to provide for their family but do it anyway in service of their family? Your analogies are all over the place, like a dog's life is similar to a circus tiger? A lot of women find that they've been sold this lie that getting a corporate 9-5 is more empowering than caring for their children or even having children at all and are going back to trad…

Those who can escape the construct will do so. The number of routes available have increased thanks to globalization. You are not being imaginative enough. Look at people who don't have opportunities in their countries. Do they sit there and cry we don't have opportunities or are they moving? People are watching all this on their streams 24x7. And one thing people are good at is blindly copying what others are doing.…

What construct? Having a job is also a construct and it seems it's the dominant one. 26% of women are housewives [1].

The status quo is working mothers, are you a chatbot that thinks this is the fifties?

I'd say you are being too imaginative. You are framing a traditional family as this abusive thing, master and slave except it's 2024. Marriage, at least in the US is extremely dangerous to men, if their wives divorce them, men could be forced to support them or else go to jail so who really has the power in the relationship since the govt has given all the power to women?

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/08/03/almost-1-...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#495

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 1:55 PM UTC

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…

If coops make it harder to raise capital, then they make it harder to invest in new tools, which makes it harder to increase productivity.

Workers keep more of the profits but there's less produced so there's less to buy? That doesn't actually make workers' lives better.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#496

Post by randomdata » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 1:56 PM UTC

bayareateg wrote: post #479

sotix wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I find that people often put on rose colored glasses when talking about the "old country," myself included. It is a little ridiculous to think that Greeks don't prioritize making money over some nebulous "community happiness"' You should have asked her why she came to the US

> It is a little ridiculous to think that Greeks don't prioritize making money over some nebulous "community happiness"'

She said that the people of her community prioritized happiness, not that the people prioritized community happiness. That might, for example, mean working less to enjoy more free time at the cost of maximizing profit. And, indeed, we can see in the data that the average worker in Greece takes 9 more vacation days each year as compared to their American counterparts.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#497

Post by geodel » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 1:57 PM UTC

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…

So "Greek are lazy" is condescending but everyone in US prioritized making money is just fact?

BTW there must be some interesting story that your Greek teacher had to move to US and deprioritize happiness.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#498

Post by Workaccount2 » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 1:57 PM UTC

zby wrote: post #324

rakoo wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Pleast don't be so naive. The reason not every company does that is that giving ownership gives power and dilutes your own, reduces the chances at doing humongus profits that can be hoarded by a minority. Business ow…

And yet people overwhelmingly prefer to work for these non-employees owned companies instead of working in cooperatives - how do you explain that? They could take those humongous profits for themselves but they don't do that. My answer to that question is that organizing people is much more difficult than everybody thinks and politics is the biggest source of inefficiencies on any human organisation bigger than a few…

Risk. Risk is the reason people aren't constantly demanding equity.

Equity is great when your base salary covers your comfortable life.

Equity is not great when your salary or hourly doesn't afford you much, and having inaccessible capital that very well may be worthless in the future is not desirable.

When people talk about this topic they hyper focus on success cases. But HN should be intimately familiar with how well start-up equity offers usually pan out.

And large stable companies usually do offer equity to employees, but that slow stable growth equity is not going to make you rich.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#499

Post by JohnFen » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:00 PM UTC

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…

If the stock an employee gets doesn't give voting rights, then it's not really even a sliver of ownership, it's just a form of profit-sharing. That's not at all bad, but a different thing.

Personally, I consider stock options to be a bit like lottery tickets. All things being equal, it doesn't hurt to have them, but I'm not going to count them as compensation and that I have them isn't going to make me work any differently.

All that said, as a customer, I tend to prefer to patronize businesses that are "employee-owned" to a significant degree.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#500

Post by blackhawkC17 » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

bccdee wrote: post #466

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...

> We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently Efficiency with regard to what goal? The current allocation of capital in the US is quite inefficient if we're interested in the welfare of the public. Billionaires have far more capital than they know what to do with, and since they're unaccountable for their investment choices, they strongly tend to steer the economy toward vanity projects. Meanwhile, many families ca…

> The Chinese state takes a rather strong hand in allocating capital, and that has treated it fairly well over the past few decades.

The Chinese government has spent massive amounts on vanity projects. A lot of government funds have also been looted by CCP honchos.

Thanks but no. I’ll take American capital allocators over the Chinese any day.

Most importantly, I don’t want to live in a dictatorship.