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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

#541

Post by alephnerd »

randomdata wrote: post #443
piva00 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yk a Labor Union is entirely different from a Credit Union right?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#542

Post by merely-unlikely »

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…

Only partially true. Unions themselves aren't structured for investing, but unions have some of the largest pension funds and the managers of those pensions are some of the largest institutional allocators in the world.

Think CalPERS, CalSTRS, Teacher Retirement System of Texas, Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, and many others.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#543

Post by panarky »

ozim wrote: post #535

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?

When a company's shareholders are employees, their wages don't stop just because the company loses money two years. Just like a company whose shareholders are pension funds and index funds doesn't stop paying its employees when they have a couple down years.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#544

Post by ragebol »

SoftTalker wrote: post #537

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 pr…

(These) shares yield dividends right, even if the stock price itself is low? Profit sharing doesn't give you any say in anything.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#545

Post by stale2002 »

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.

> cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US.

The ones that were overcharging consumers?

Yeah it is great for customers when prices go down.

That's a benefit, not a drawback.

Those cabbies should have offer better service at a lower price if they wanted to compete.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#546

Post by aleph_minus_one »

alephnerd wrote: post #541
randomdata wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yk a Labor Union is entirely different from a Credit Union right?

For sure, but who says that they can't become more similar ...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#547

Post by darby_nine »

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…

> Your barista at Starbucks is not going to increase the stock price no matter how well he fills your order; at the same time, maybe he wants to know how much he takes home every day.

I imagine the goal would not be to get rich off of the work, just have a democratic say in how the work is done and what work is to be done.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#548

Post by nox101 »

apantel wrote: post #529
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…

People who want to make money above all else are pursuing that because they think that will make them happy. It’s just their idea of the path that will get them to happiness. They see Mark Zuckerberg wakeboarding at his Lake Tahoe retreat and think, ‘That’s happiness — having billions of dollars, not having to worry about meeting basic needs, being able to do what you want.’

Zuckerberg doesn't get to do what he wants. He's in meetings constantly and rarely has a free moment

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#549

Post by s1artibartfast »

aziaziazi wrote: post #241
_thisdot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter point. Most of salary is decided based on how much of a loss it would be if you left. A CEO leaving a company can immediately lead to serious consequences whereas an individual employee can leave and no one might bat an eye

> A CEO leaving a company can immediacy lead to serous consequences Is it something that has been study or observed? Most company are resilient enough to handle the leaving of an individual, being a Chief or not. The opposite would be a flag for an instable company. Far tangent exemple: Belgium without government.

I dont know, transitions can easily cost many millions of dollars of swirl when our director changes. They only lead 100 people, in a small part of a large company but we spin up and cancel projects with 250 million dollar budgets. Change in leadership and direction is expensive. Bad leadership and direction is expensive too. greenlighting one more/less wasteful project pays for many years of CEO salary.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#550

Post by havblue »

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…

>There is some kind of derangement in the English speaking West, any attempt to reign in power of capital must be communist.

I do believe corporatism is a problem with modernity. That being said, the article does sound fairly similar to "workers must own the means of production". Are we not in the ballpark of Marx, for better or worse?

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