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

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#531

Post by apantel » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:33 PM UTC

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…

If labor and capital truly are in tension as so much of our social and economic philosophizing says, then it’s no surprise that a structure optimized for labor is less attractive to capital.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#532

Post by nec4b » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:33 PM UTC

ossobuco wrote: post #353

nec4b wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "71.93% of Americans Living Paycheck to Paycheck Have $2,000 or Less in Savings"[0]. It's a meaningless statistic. They can still have high net worth and/or large incomes even if they don't keep cash on hand.

Well it might please you then that about 50% of the respondents report low income as the cause for living paycheck by paycheck. Even more report high monthly bills as a cause. Just read it, it's all in there.

People thinking their income is to low is not exactly news. I haven't personally met anyone who would ever claim their income is to high. Why do you think I haven't read it? Do you always agree with everything you read?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#533

Post by philip1209 » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:36 PM UTC

Countries work well as democracies, but businesses thrive as dictatorships.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#534

Post by apantel » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:39 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 system is not perfectly efficient because humans aren’t efficient. I think the idea is, keeping a market relatively free (with a sane amount of regulation) allows capital to seek returns. This leads to a lot of independent, decentralized value production, like startups popping up out of nowhere because some founders have an idea and attract capital.

The thing is, people who pile up capital don’t have to be efficient with it. They can basically do whatever they want with their money. They can build giant vanity estates, which you could certainly call inefficient — who needs 20,000 square feet for a family of 3? But… we also care about freedom, so we let people do inefficient things. The only difference between rich people and poor people is they have more money so their inefficiencies are louder. But everybody spends money on senseless wants and vanity. Who needs manicures and hair extensions? Arguably nobody. The “poor” spend on vanity too. And we let them because we care about freedom.

If you wanted to implement a perfectly-efficient system, would that mean banning the fulfillment of any desire that wasn’t strictly a need? I don’t think anyone would want to live in such a system.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#535

Post by ozim » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:40 PM UTC

There is a little * and fine print.

Every profitable company. There is nothing written in the article what happens when company would be profitable 5 years and then suddenly crashes because of market forces. Can employees take the hit and work next 2 years without salaries to wait out until market goes back?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#536

Post by s1artibartfast » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:42 PM UTC

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.

It is very easy to generate 350x value.

If you get 1% more work out of 350 people than the alternative.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#537

Post by SoftTalker » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:42 PM UTC

This is a really bad idea for the average worker.

"We've got a number of people that have been here 15, 20 years and they have $1 million plus balances"

Sounds good but they are catastrophically undiversified. Nobody should have their entire nest egg in one stock. Yes they are motivated for the company to do well, but so many things play into a stock price that are out of any one person's control.

Just giving them profit sharing that they can invest as they wish would have most of the same motiviations. Anyone making a decent wage and saving in a 401K should be able to save $1 million over the long term. And do it much more safely in a well-diversified portfolio.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#538

Post by s1artibartfast » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

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.

It is very easy to generate 350x value.

If you get 1% more productivity out of 35,000 people than the alternative you have done it.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#539

Post by trinsic2 » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:45 PM UTC

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #467

jjmarr wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the purpose of the mixed economy in which most of us live. The government changes the rules of the game to try to align the profit motive with social good, because they are naturally not aligned. You haven't said why worker cooperatives optimizing the benefit of their own workers wouldn't add up to more welfare if the entire economy was based around worker cooperatives. in my opinion worker ownership of the m…

> good historical track record Please cite some sources that are not communist countries. You know, “just socialism.” You way want to also ignore the existence of Norway, much of Europe, and popular US federal programs too when you're doing this exercise.

Exactly. Sick of people applying the catch-phrase "socialism" to everything to marginalize a method of community good.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#540

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 2:46 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #24

oleg_antonyan wrote: post #3

It's insane how socialism is growing in the west after defeat of soviet union

Individual companies being owned by their employees isn't socialism. For that matter, the Soviet Union wasn't socialist either - the workers owned nothing, the state owned everything. All the land, all the factories, all the manufactured goods.

[deleted]