Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Every company should be owned by its employees

elysian.press

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 1001 posts

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#591

Post by bialpio »

tomp wrote: post #323
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…

I think this is just your anti-capitalist bias showing. “Market” is meant in purely game-theoretic terms. > The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing for worker happiness instead. All these workers could set up cooperatives and work for / own them instead. The fact that this hasn’t happened suggests that in reality, the for-profit companies are b…

> All these workers could set up cooperatives and work for / own them instead.

And some people do that (modulo creating coops), just not middle-class people. No-one without a decent cushion would be able to risk it. Especially with health care being tied to employment.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#592

Post by germandiago »

defrost wrote: post #319
jltsiren wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The government" is a fictional entity. In reality, it's just a bunch of people. I think the real issue is that free markets and free speech are not really compatible. If people are allowed to express political opinions, some opinions will inevitably become popular. Sometimes that happens because people don't like the outcomes of the market. Then they try to change things by regulating the market. Repeat that often e…

Some would argue that the freest markets are regulated to prevent collusion, to ensure free and equal access to all relevant infomation, to penalise deliberate falsehoods, etc. Certainly the OG Free Markets that inspired the first order Invisible Hand model were. 'free market' is such a nebulous term, bandied about en masse in forums where rarely is it questioned what specific type of free market a specific person mi…

It is not nebulous actually. We are just playing with ideas, and ideas lead to simplification. The idea of free market, in principle is lasseiz faire.

Of course most people do not propose that. My idea is that, as one spanish philosopher said (taken from Hume), that all law (derecho in spanish, not sure if it is exactly equivalent for the meaning in english, since the law tradition in Spain comes from Roman law), so take my translation with a warning. All law can be summarized in two premises:

    1. "property is not acquired or lost by violence or fraud"
    2. "Deals must be fullfilled. Whoever does not fullfill their deals shall compensate to the side fullfilling it."
The rest is not "law" as such. It is ruling, administration, and other things, but not "law". It is arbitrary in many ways, and I agree this is true for a lot of what we see. For example: there are regulations for safety that will make people die waiting a medication or someone not able to get some transport vehicle for short distances, just because it is forbidden. But you can always find a reason to regulate. OTOH, you regulate the choices and lives of others, do we really have the right to decide for others? I think that is a very paternalistic view of things. But not only that, it often promotes irresponsibility in action: since they regulate, they can be blamed, I do not need to decide. I have seen lots of that attitude at least in my country.

It also promotes more scarcity and leads towards oligopolistic setups. It is a complex topic, but I favor freedom and responsibility over regulation clearly, as long as you do not damage others. In fact, regulations do damage others but people often take them for their intentions and not for their results ... something that is a big shocking to me. It is like it gives them peace of mind even if the reality has nothing to do with the effect they are expecting or imagining.

The translation could be pretty bad, so I apologize for that. I just hope it is understandable.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#593

Post by piva00 »

pembrook wrote: post #395
piva00 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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...

Capital allocation under capitalism is also not efficient, it's pretty damn wasteful when you consider the resources used to find its "efficiency".

Innovation is also becoming a meaningless word to defend the system, the innovations have their foundations fostered with public money, through funding of scientific research which is then later captured by the industries to develop products. The innovation is productionalising another innovation, the foundation is built mostly on public funding. Very few companies actually do ground-breaking research that innovates, they're pretty risk-averse in this sense, the productionalisation of those discoveries has its own value, not questionign that, but it only gets traction afterwards when the brunt of the work of discovery was done.

Efficiency of markets is a hypothesis of financial economics with much better written criticism than I can write here, Warren Buffet doesn't believe in it, for example. It's not a given whatsoever, nor proven empirically.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#594

Post by Nifty3929 »

I think it's easy to look at this with an existing, successful business in mind - but things don't always work out that way.

How would a business like this get started? Usually the owner is the one who invests a lot of their own time and/or money into the business to get it off the ground in the first place. Would we be asking workers to pony up in those early years when failure is likely? With Central States, the story picks up AFTER all that, when the business is already large and successful, and the owner just wants to retire.

And what happens when the business struggles or fails later? In the case of Central States, the workers were asked to buy shares from the owner, probably using a portion of the salary they'd otherwise get. IOW, they're being underpaid relative to market, in exchange for ownership, expecting to get more later when they sell the shares. So far so good, but how does this look when the business has a rough patch, even one that's not their fault?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#595

Post by WalterBright »

Back in the 90s, the Seattle Times reported that there were 10,000 Microsoft millionaires in the Seattle area, not including home equity.

Microsoft has made a heluva lot of people rich. So has Amazon.

I also know employees who rejected getting part of their compensation as stock, wanting a higher salary instead, and then got mad when their coworkers made bank on the stock.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#596

Post by overrun11 »

lesuorac wrote: post #438
EnigmaFlare wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have 350 employees, then they double the company's profit, I suppose they just generated 350x times the value of an average employee. If they have more employees, they only need to increase it a smaller proportion to be generating 350x as much value.

Doubling profit is relatively easy. If you have 10M of revenue and 9.5M of expenses then an increase of 500k in sales doubles your profit. Given that everybody in the company is needed (for sake of argument) to produce the initial 10M I wouldn't say that the CEO inking a new sale for 500k is worth the entirety of the original company.

Your example assumes 100% gross profit margins which is unlike any company I've ever heard of.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#597

Post by Nifty3929 »

xmprt wrote: post #18

I think the most surprising thing about trends in modern executive class pay is just how steep it is compared to the median employee. It makes me wonder why shareholders outside the company are happy with it. For example, the Boeing CEO made 22M in 2022 and 32M in 2023. I'd argue that he did a much worse job in 2023 than in 2022 but somehow got paid almost 50% more. Even Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is "only" being p…

Higher corporate taxes create a discount on worker pay, including executive pay. Basically if I pay a worker $100, that reduces my taxable income by $100, which saves me $35 in taxes, so my net profit goes down only $65.

There was also a law passed in the '90s that forced executives to have more skin in the game in the form of stock - which caused companies to give executives a lot more stock.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#598

Post by randomdata »

mkbosmans wrote: post #570
randomdata wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> It is not an unconstrained optimization problem.

Of course not. The constraints are exactly what you optimizing against. Choosing to operate in a market that is not capable of supporting profitability is not optimizing for profitability, though. One may claim to be optimizing for profitability, but actions speak louder than words.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#599

Post by jjmarr »

trinsic2 wrote: post #539
malcolmgreaves wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"Every company should be owned by its employees" is the definition of socialism, which is social ownership of the means of production.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism

Specifically this is market socialism.

Post reply on HN