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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

#561

Post by giantg2 »

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…

"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."

It's possible companies with lower profits don't survive when they can be outcompeted by the higher earning companies. This sort of competition has killed plenty of companies.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#562

Post by trinsic2 »

Nevermark wrote: post #287
robertlagrant wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it would be nicer if everything were free, though. Why would an investor invest in a company that, if it fails, they lose their money, and if it succeeds, their ownership is taken away?

Nobody “takes” ownership. Owners are bought out. For a public company that just means buying back shares. A company whose employees care very much about share price sounds good to me. It is not much different from companies who let employees “take” options. That could be financially mismanaged too. There would need to be a rational structure.

Here is an article on ownership and one viewpoint that I support on why it's broken https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/broken-ownership

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#563

Post by fuzzfactor »

robertlagrant wrote: post #165
Arainach wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop optimizing for financial leeches sucking value out of the system and externalizing all the societal consequences, start optimizing for the vast majority of the population. ....sounds better when you elaborate on the categories you selected.

The vast majority of the population are consumers. Each of us consumes far more services than we produce. Making life better for consumers is making life better for everyone.

>Each of us consumes far more services than we produce.

Speak for yourself, not everyone is in debt all the time, and some never in debt whatsoever even when they have no unusually above-average earnings.

But as part of a vast majority, you are as correct as possible.

Then again capital is just plain Other Peoples' Money, and you can't be a capitalist without capital, no matter how much you wish it was true.

One problem with housing is that real estate has investment potential but for decades it has been too expensive for average people. Debt is crafted to barely make it possible to get into a property, and you may do well if values increase but there is an entire system in place so that others profit more from the same piece of property than you. Vehicles are another high-dollar item where debt is usually incurred, but these almost always depreciate fast. You can draw the line there and be pretty realistic, but there are plenty of people who are at the extreme where everything that costs money is borrowed.

So that's about as close to capitalist as most people get. That's about all of OPM they have at their disposal, and the only thing invested in that has upside potential is the home. For those fortunate enough to have gotten in when it was more within reach. And there can still be a gradual spiral downward which is too slow to notice until it's too late.

Sometimes it helps to do the math and not be afraid to admit how far from capitalist you actually are compared to how capitalist everbody thinks they are.

Disclaimer: this article was DOA & flagged instantly with zero comments, but it seemed OK to me and I vouched and now look at it. Nobody's fault but mine.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#564

Post by em500 »

randomdata wrote: post #496
bayareateg wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

According to OECD data Greece workers work the most hours in the EU, and in most years also more than American workers[1]. So by that metric they prioritize happiness less than most others?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#565

Post by imgabe »

sqeaky wrote: post #557
imgabe wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

It is easy to "find a new job" but things like healthcare, geographic location, and creditworthiness are tied to employment. If employment were more isolated this argument would still only be superficially reasonable, because we also live in a society with structural sexism and racism and other bigotries. Plenty of people have fewer employment options because of the circumstances of their birth. Then look at me, I am…

> Setting a floor on how shitty companies can be to their employees would a boon to everyone and likely make the whole economy more productive simply by reducing depression by a double digit percentage.

Yes, we do that. It's called "labor laws". There are many of them.

It's a question of agency. If you assign responsibility for your well-being to others, then you're always going to be at their mercy. Sure, there's structural whatevers and bigots and all sorts of things. Some people won't hire you because you remind them of the kid that bullied them in 3rd grade. Whatever. It's still up to you take control of your life. Nobody else is going to do it for you. Every time you try and demand that someone else do it for you, you are going to end up disappointed.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#566

Post by Aunche »

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…

> her community prioritized happiness above all else, but everyone she met in the US prioritized making money.

I'd bet that she was wealthy relative to the average Greek, but was perceived as "regular" because they are middle class relative to the rest of the west. The wealthy in the the US can prioritize happiness above all else. On average, Greeks works the longest hours in Europe, which is more than the average American.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/world/europe/greece-six-d...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#567

Post by sateesh »

nox101 wrote: post #548
apantel wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But that is the choice he has made. I guess he can very well afford to have a less hectic schedule or to not work too.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#569

Post by charles_f »

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…

This is so backwards!

Workers are always at the mercy of shareholders (for whom apparently it's not bad to own a share?), and whom again and again will do a little layoff here and there because we need a percent or two more this quarter. Profit sharing will be the first thing to stop if results are temporarily worse. On the other hand, if the company is owned by its workers, nothing prevents them from redistributing all of the profits in dividends, aka, profit sharing.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#570

Post by mkbosmans »

randomdata wrote: post #513
rakoo wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is not an unconstrained optimization problem. The constraints in which the company operates might result in a feasible region where even the most profitable point is still a net loss. Those constraints may of course be self-imposed, like e.g. choosing a market to operate in.
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