581–590 of 611 posts
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It's obviously wrong. NBA teams are a good counter-example. Nobody talks about the team's president/CEO/etc when prognosticating which team will be the best.
Do NBA CEOs get paid less than the highest paid players? I would expect them to get paid more.
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It’s a balance. Tesla employees are not having a good time, I can tell you from first hand experience. You’ll make reasonable money but it’s not really a life worth living with 12 hour days and extreme stress. Atleast the options made me rich so maybe it was worth it?
what’s something Elon has done better/differently than the GM CEO?
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The paradox of worker-coops is that workers capable of successfully running businesses together are also capable of running businesses independently, so why create more failure points?
This comment seems ignorant of basic economics - you might as well ask why mergers/acquisitions happen at all.
I've been in and started several worker cooperative businesses. I don't try to do it anymore because of what I perceive as a fundamental issue: the people that are the most explicitly attracted to worker co-ops are also the least business saavy or willing to put the business's existence ahead of ideological values. In my experience, it is a recipe for almost certain failure.
In the same way that anarchists point to Revolutionary Catalonia, workplace socialists point toward Mondragon, ignoring that these are both statistical aberrations rather than the normal state of affairs. The normal state of affairs is a bunch of naive ideologues that hand-wave away planning critical details. This isn't unique to worker co-ops; founders do it all the time, but the difference is that new ventures require flexibility and leanness, but worker-co-ops are exceptionally rigid and fragile.
Generally if worker co-ops "succeed" it's directly because they are being subsidized by similar ideologues rather than business efficiency. The actual product they sell is good feelings rather than products or services.
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Leadership is set by shareholders. There is still accountability. Public unions seem more undesirable. There we have the gov negotiating with itself with no external accountability, unlike your example.
Public union leadership is determined by a member vote. Union leadership represents the worker. The external accountability comes from you regardless if your elected official is dealing with a union or a private company
Correct. But unlike private businesses, I can not vote by taking my business elsewhere.
> The external accountability comes from you... Sure. It does via voting. Fair point.
> regardless if your elected official is dealing with a union or a private company
These are two separate things. The gov only affects private companies by regulating. It cannot negotiate benefits with the union or the private company. It is the neutral third party.
With public unions, the gov is both sides of the discussion and the mediator. There is no unbiased party in the negotiation, and seemingly no incentive to vote out pro union officials. I cannot understand why.
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Did you realize that only 5% of the cost of the vehicle is from labor? So essentially car prices would rise 1%. Sounds acceptable to me.
There is way more than 5% of the cost from labor, you are missing all the extra costs from the parts they buy from other companies. There are way more laborers working on the cars than what the car companies employ themselves, the small number of workers still working at the car companies now try to leverage that but it is unfair to give all the value of the cars to them rather than share it evenly across the industr…
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/17/labor-costs-for-detroit-auto....
"Labor costs, at roughly 5%, remain a small percentage of annual costs for the Detroit automakers, according to Dziczek."
Just to point out a demonstrated, viable, successful reality achieved under different values and assumptions, the Mondragon Corporation/cooperative produces car parts, among many other things, and has pre-agreed ratios for wages for executives relative to the lowest wages paid to workers, and this tops out at 9:1. Studies have found that worker-owned coops have a greater survival rate than conventional businesses, an…
The paradox of worker-coops is that workers capable of successfully running businesses together are also capable of running businesses independently, so why create more failure points?
It's a little weird that tech-folk are generally ok with the idea that groups can yield good predictions in the context of a non-owner community that is harnessed to improve a product, or in the context of a prediction-market, where people placing bets in disagreement can lead to a more accurate outcome than the participants taken separately would produce -- but somehow think this mechanism will fall apart if workers who have an interest in a firm's ongoing revenue are able to vote.
This is great. Add this to SAG-AFTRA, Waffle House workers and Starbucks walkouts and we have real movement toward a general strike If both Wal-Mart and Amazon drivers strike we might actually have a shot a taking a bite out of capital finally.
serious question: say everyone you described gets a 20% raise what do you think will happen to the cost of goods? what companies do you think are operating with enough margin that they can just afford a 20% rise in their payroll costs?
Companies are profitable, by definition. If they aren't profitable, they die (eventually). As long as there is a profit, worker pay raises does not need to be completely covered by an increase in price. Where does profit go? Into the hands of the rich.
Thus, workers demanding raises is simply a progressive wealth redistribution, from lining the wallets of fatcats, to rewarding the people who actually created that wealth.
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Serious question: if every company was working with razor thin margins, and every worker made make minimum wage while investors reap profits from speculation, would that be good?
in the case of the GM stock particularly, is their profit that could/should be redistributed to workers (they had $10b in profit last year): yes in the case of the GM stock particularly, are shareholders/investors reaping profits and benefit? go look up the GM stock, it's flat/down over 5 years
You failed to take into account that GM issues real stock (unlike most tech companies) and thus pays dividends. If you take dividend payouts into account, the value of an investment in GM has been indisputably positive (though probably not more positive than inflation).