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

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#581

Post by andrepd » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:23 PM UTC

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…

> worker-owned cooperatives have not taken over the market, although they are an available institutional form, because (a) they find it hard to raise capital

Isn't this just a circular argument then? The economic system based on tradable joint-stock companies is not conducive to other forms of economic organisation. Huge surprise! :)

Of course they can't raise money in an economic system where money creation is privatised, that's exactly the problem!

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#582

Post by germandiago » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:23 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #100

ffgjgf1 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free markets almost never can survive longterm without (sometimes extensive) regulation. Historically there might have been a few exceptions to that, but basically always you have a few good years and then the winner(s) who emerges starts abusing their position (even without any regulation that might make it easier for them to do that). Unregulated markets tend to be inherently unstable. And it’s not so much less vs…

> Free markets almost never can survive longterm without (sometimes extensive) regulation. There is no such thing as "without regulation". Nobody is suggesting a system in which murder is legal and the most powerful warlord gets a monopoly. But there is a difference between "the government enforces contracts and anti-trust laws and prices major externalities" and "the government micromanages the economy and is captur…

> So for example, a free market doesn't need zoning density restrictions. Their absence has no apparent mechanism that would lead to a monopoly. Therefore, a freer market in which the government has no power to impose zoning density restrictions is better than the current one in which that is possible and is consequently making housing unaffordable. Depriving the government of the authority to do that is a viable mechanism by which that form of corruption/inefficiency is avoided.

This is so well expressed. I take it for the future. Concise and clear. This is exactly the kind of things that come to my mind.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#583

Post by Jensson » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:24 PM UTC

tempfile wrote: post #404

pembrook wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cuba still exists today and is ostensibly being run for the benefit of all workers. Why don’t you go visit a Cuban state-run grocery store and tell me how much you’d enjoy living there?

Mentioning Cuba as a failed example while omitting that they have been embargoed by the biggest economy in the world for over 60 years seems willfully dishonest.

That argument worked 10 years ago, but not today that Cuba actually started to move towards capitalism and we really see that the embargo isn't such a hinderance as you argue it is.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#584

Post by edm0nd » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:24 PM UTC

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…

I'm just being pedantic but "free public libraries" don't really exist though.

They are paid for by property owners via tax millages rates on their homes.

Most people support this but none are free since the public pays for em.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#585

Post by ETH_start » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:25 PM UTC

"Why are worker’s cooperatives so rare? This is not a trivial question — because they can pay “dividends” in the form of wages, they can entirely avoid corporate income tax. They must be so inefficient by nature of their structure to outweigh their advantages."

https://x.com/captgouda24/status/1780345152885641350

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#586

Post by mkbosmans » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:28 PM UTC

enoch_r wrote: post #442

phkahler wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> So if one of those millionaire employees retires and the company goes bankrupt one year later, the million is worthless all of a sudden. Right, so everyone is interested in the long term health of the company. It's a different model, one that may well be better than what most are doing. Of course most CEOs, private equity, and folks on Wall Street want you to think otherwise.

Everyone is certainly interested in the long term health of the company. But exogenous shifts like technological change, trade, COVID, etc. might cause the company to go under - or maybe you're just outnumbered by people who make poor decisions. If this happens, people who have worked at the company for 15 years and have most of their "retirement" in the form of ESOP shares will a) lose their jobs and b) lose most of…

Nothing requires an ESOP to skip on a separate retirement fund for employees and expect them to retire from their share of the investment.

In the contrary, I expect the owners of an ESOP are very much in favor of having a well managed separate employee retirement fund. More so than in a publicly owned company.

But of course you are right that the risks factors of losing your income and losing your investment are pretty much 100% correlated for an ESOP. Some investment diversification is always a good idea.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#587

Post by sqeaky » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:28 PM UTC

imgabe wrote: post #565

sqeaky wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

No need to be so absolute no one is "assign[ing] responsibility for your well-being to others", there are grey areas and gradients and employment is fundamentally full of those.

No one person can be an expert in everything, we live in a society and should act like it. Needing to be an expert in healthcare, hiring processes, finances, and a dozen other topics just to switch jobs is a major barrier to the just switch mentality you are presenting. And I know first hand, I am just switching constantly because it is what I wanted. We should have reasonable baselines and minimums for treatment, and those should shift and get better as we improve society.

> Every time you try and demand that someone else do it for you, you are going to end up disappointed.

Yet there are countries that have better situations for labor than the US?!

Even something as simple as universal healthcare would fix a ton for millions of US people. It would empower worker to switch jobs and employers to lure top talent held by it. Only a hundred or so other countries figured it out, there is no way we could do it here we would only end up disappointed, right?

I pick that as an example, but we could go over many possible topics that aren't blanket assignments of "responsibility for your well-being to others". Consider non-compete clauses, IP transfers, minimum wage and tons of other topics that if they had a minimum floor of decency could allow more freedom the the worker and employer.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#588

Post by hkt » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:28 PM UTC

vladms wrote: post #577

Some ideas were in fact already tried, but whomever does not history might suffer reliving it. For example check: https://www.familistere.com/uploads/media/5a9c4bd061fce/fami... To quote: "the association’s economic and social model fell victim to its users and competitors. The hierarchy of association members, originally intended to reflect ability, led to opposition between Associates (whose status had finished by…

Some other examples:

* Yugoslavian worker self management (arguably successful: the place had some other problems that hampered them, shall we say) * Mondragon (the world's largest worker cooperative) * John Lewis Partnership/Waitrose (an employee trust with some workplace democracy) * Rehn–Meidner model (which is more about mass ownership across the wider economy and was tried in Sweden if memory serves)

There are a _lot_ of variations of this kind of thing and only some have been tried. Most haven't seen much action at all, just a few sui generis examples - most of the more specific examples above, really.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#589

Post by talldatethrow » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:29 PM UTC

superb_dev wrote: post #23

talldatethrow wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can absolutely afford houses. They can so easily afford houses that they buy them quickly, often for over asking. If people couldn't afford houses, they would sit unsold until sellers lowered the price to a price someone could afford. Luckily so many people can afford houses in most areas they don't have to do that.

Some people , and a lot of private investment.

Apparently there are more people with money than there are houses. So don't tell me people cant afford houses. Tell me that there are so few houses that they are overpriced or something, and only the top 25% can buy them.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#590

Post by randomdata » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:33 PM UTC

em500 wrote: post #564

randomdata wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Or, perhaps, it isn't the happiness the person was referring to. After all, it was explicitly marked as an example, not what the person said. It could be that workers in Greece choose fun, but low paying, jobs to maximize happiness. Or maybe it is something else entirely.