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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

#511

Post by strikelaserclaw »

joker99 wrote: post #373
strikelaserclaw wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This phenomenon is a function of attributing all the positive developments within a company to the C-suite executives. Just as shareholders profit from the productive work of many employees, the C-suite executives often receive credit for the achievements of a large number of people. I think it is related to a fundamental characteristic of humans, that being we can't understand information unless it is calculated int…

I don’t consider this being a bug. The big issue is: while they get the praise, they reject or pass on the blame to the employees.

It is not the same thing but probably related to whatever mechanism in the brain causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity - The people in a position of power regularly interact with the ceo, so they can see all the nuances that go with that but to most people at the top, "employees" is a homogenous bunch of replaceable cogs.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#512

Post by JohnFen »

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.

> Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.

And even then, there are lots of companies who want to provide the highest pay possible. I have always strived for this in my companies, anyway.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#513

Post by randomdata »

rakoo wrote: post #387
CodeGroyper wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it a wild statement? The whole point of a company is to make money. It's like asking why workers care about their salaries.

My point isn't that a company shouldn't optimize for profit. My point is that the supposed logical conclusion stating "if it doesn't optimize for profit, then it will die" needs to be backed up by strong arguments. There are myriads of examples of companies not optimizing for profit and still surviving, and there are myriads of examples of companies optimizing for profit and still going bust.

> and there are myriads of examples of companies optimizing for profit and still going bust.

Do you mean there are myriads of example of companies who say that they are optimizing for profit, but don't actually follow through in their actions? Humans do, indeed, have a penchant for saying one thing and then doing another. But if they are truly optimized for profit, how could they possibly go bust?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#514

Post by zby »

typicalset wrote: post #412
zby wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if you don't allow the traditional company governance and everything must be a cooperative - then these employees cannot choose a traditional company governance. But my comment really was about restricting the choice of a potential employee - someone who has not yet decided what company to join.

This is similar to arguing in favour of the existence of dictatorships, as not having them restricts the choices of what kind of society people can choose to move to. The point is that in a democracy, at least in principle, people can choose their "boss", and discarding this has bigger implications for everyday freedoms.

The difference between a state and a company is that it is much more difficult to change the first.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#515

Post by Aeolun »

tomp wrote: post #323
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…

I think this is just your anti-capitalist bias showing. “Market” is meant in purely game-theoretic terms. > The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing for worker happiness instead. All these workers could set up cooperatives and work for / own them instead. The fact that this hasn’t happened suggests that in reality, the for-profit companies are b…

> The fact that this hasn’t happened suggests that in reality, the for-profit companies are better at optimising workers happiness than cooperatives

Or everyone is too exhausted from their daily grind to even consider doing so, which is honestly not very surprising.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#516

Post by Workaccount2 »

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.

CEO's get paid by shareholders, workers get paid by companies.

The money that workers bring into a company is often not being used at all to pay these CEO's. It's why so many CEO's have $0 salary or $200k salary.

It's a critical distinction because it clears up so much confusion people have about this topic. Those 300x multiple stories you see are almost always comparing two completely different income sources. You can almost think of it like a 3rd party is paying the CEO to run the company.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#517

Post by JohnFen »

Gormo wrote: post #411
aziaziazi wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Company profits is not always aligned with consumer interests, didn’t understand why you switched them.

Not always, no, but as the general case, they are. At the end of the day, people need to be willing to pay a business in exchange for its goods and services, and if they don't feel like they are obtaining net positive value from the transaction, they won't be.

> if they don't feel like they are obtaining net positive value from the transaction, they won't be.

Excepting for the cases where people have no other choice.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#518

Post by UncleMeat »

CodeGroyper wrote: post #271
rakoo wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> underoptimize for profit -> company goes bust That's a wild statement that is going to need some strong proof

How is it a wild statement? The whole point of a company is to make money. It's like asking why workers care about their salaries.

Why is that the whole point? A company needs enough revenue to pay its employees, but it doesn't need more revenue in any absolute sense.

"Just existing in the world, providing a service to customers and a wage to employees" is a fine and stable way for a company to exist.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#519

Post by pavlov »

stavros wrote: post #448
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…

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.

I was recently in Lisbon and was surprised that an espresso still costs 70 cents despite the influx of tourists and expats. If it's the same in Greece, I can easily see how an unemployed person can afford to hang out.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#520

Post by UncleMeat »

Gormo wrote: post #385
olex wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an often stated postulate, but I'm not sure I agree. Sure, making money is necessary for a company to survive, but it doesn't have to be an end goal, and imho it's detrimental when it is. The goal can and should be to make a great product, create and make available something that otherwise would not exist, improve some product or process, etc - money and company itself are or should be just a means to a goal…

And the measure of how well you are making a great product, creating something that would otherwise not exist, or improve some other product or process is how much your customers are willing to pay you for what you are doing. If you are creating value for other people, you are making money -- money is a measuring unit that quantifies transferable value.

I don't think that this is true. There are plenty of businesses that make shitloads of money off of frustrating or downright crappy products because of captured markets, constrained customers, lack of transparency, and more.

Look at something like Dark Patterns. These make a business more money by making a product worse.

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