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

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#601

Post by alan-hn » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:42 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #132

roenxi wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt they are happy as much as disinterested. The economy has been heavily financialised, interest rates have been at 0% [0] and a big chunk of economic activity is government spending. Shareholders don't appear to be worried about how the company actually runs in the details. What matters is that the CEO is positioning them to tap in to the money printing and borrowing game. IE, the wages suggest workers don't re…

More to the point, Boeing's revenue is over $16 billion. Some tens of millions are a rounding error when it's only being paid to one person, and that is the real source of the disparity. Paying one CEO $32 million is two tenths of a percent of their revenue. If they tried to pay each of their 170,000 employees even 1% of that, it wouldn't be 0.2% of their revenue, it would be >300% of their revenue and they'd be out…

Why on earth would you pay each person 16 million per year? That's 1%

You can still make everyone's wages better without paying millions to each person and definitely not to the CEO

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#602

Post by fuzzfactor » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:42 PM UTC

lynx23 wrote: post #266

lennixm wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need to stop using this stat. It's completely useless. There are literally people making top percentile incomes saying they're living paycheck to paycheck in these surveys because they interpret the survey questions wildly different than other people. A tiny, tiny percentage of Americans would literally go hungry if they didn't get their next month's paycheck the rest would have to cash out some small percenta…

In genera, "self reporting" needs to be viewed as the untrustworthy statistics it is. I hear it a lot recently in the social siences. And media happily parrotting the results, as proof of whatever they are currently trying to push. I wonder how much of these self-reported issues would be seen in a completely different lens if those asked were forced to discuss their answers within a certain peer group. "What, you say…

Also consider that some of the respondents are actually "bragging" about living paycheck-to-paycheck so they don't seem any poorer than anybody else, when they are actually not even sustainable and deeply know they are heading downward toward bankruptcy or something like that unless things look up.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#603

Post by layer8overhere » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:43 PM UTC

Nifty3929 wrote: post #594

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 st…

This.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#604

Post by randomdata » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:43 PM UTC

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?

Typically[1], but both are unions. Had the previous commenter been talking about labour unions then you might have something, but it clearly says "union" and "union" alone.

[1] Although definitely not necessarily. A group of labour unions in these parts collectively own one of the largest hedge funds out there.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#605

Post by vhiremath4 » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:44 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #498

zby wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet people overwhelmingly prefer to work for these non-employees owned companies instead of working in cooperatives - how do you explain that? They could take those humongous profits for themselves but they don't do that. My answer to that question is that organizing people is much more difficult than everybody thinks and politics is the biggest source of inefficiencies on any human organisation bigger than a few…

Risk. Risk is the reason people aren't constantly demanding equity. Equity is great when your base salary covers your comfortable life. Equity is not great when your salary or hourly doesn't afford you much, and having inaccessible capital that very well may be worthless in the future is not desirable. When people talk about this topic they hyper focus on success cases. But HN should be intimately familiar with how w…

Totally agree. And this is why companies should really profile when hiring to attract the right people with the right risk profile given the stage of the company.

Early on when we were just starting out (context as a founder), I used to think that the only types of people who would take on this kind of risk were young 20-something’s who had time and space and no significant other. Then we hired 2 early engineers in succession who were older.

One was just made for startups. He could never work for a large company, and he was ok with the risk and lower pay because it was still quite high relative to his cost of living in Europe.

The other already had kids who were older and independent. He always wanted to take a swing at a “Silicon Valley” startup, and he just cared deeply about that experience and could do so without having to worry about his kids financially relying on him.

They were 2 of the best engineers we had ever hired and stuck with us through thick and thin from a team of I started the journey starry-eyed/overly-optimistic in both directions. Hiring people early on who obviously did not have the risk tolerance or an understanding of how much work was needed early. Holding on to people for too long who weren’t enjoying the new environment. Now I’m much more even about this - there is a right place and time based on what the individual wants, and being open and honest and kind about it is always the best path. Equity is simply a lever to compensate risk, but the appetite to take on the right amount of risk is the most important thing given the company’s scale.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#606

Post by jjmarr » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:44 PM UTC

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #467

jjmarr wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the purpose of the mixed economy in which most of us live. The government changes the rules of the game to try to align the profit motive with social good, because they are naturally not aligned. You haven't said why worker cooperatives optimizing the benefit of their own workers wouldn't add up to more welfare if the entire economy was based around worker cooperatives. in my opinion worker ownership of the m…

> 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.

I'm more interested in hearing why the above post and the examples you've cited fixed the problems that others have encountered in the socialism space.

If this was a startup trying to make worker owned co-ops more attractive I'd see a blog post explaining how they fixed the problems everyone else was having. That, and explanations of how this scales to an entire society.

That's the standard of discussion for everything else on this site and it shouldn't disappear because the subject is socialism.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#607

Post by WalterBright » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:45 PM UTC

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…

> we should be optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better

In the US, you are free to set up a company any way you like.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#608

Post by imgabe » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:48 PM UTC

sqeaky wrote: post #587

imgabe wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

> 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.

Nobody is saying you need to be an expert in all of these things to switch jobs. Consider the fact that very few people, if any, are actually experts in all of these things and yet people do in fact switch jobs all the time. Empirically, it is not required.

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

Better in some ways. Many of those countries are significantly less productive and have moribund, declining economies and low pay compared to the US.

> 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.

non-compete clauses: don't sign them. I've never encountered one. Negotiate terms that you feel are adequate to compensate you for not competing. If you don't have sufficient leverage to negotiate, work on that.

IP transfers: again, don't sign it, or negotiate. Most workers will never generate any significant IP so this is rarely an issue. If you are going to generate valuable IP that is 100% due to you, then start your own company.

Minimum wage: less than 1% of workers make minimum wage. Anyone with a pulse and half a brain can quickly become more valuable and qualify for higher paying jobs. Just be organized and responsible enough to be an assistant manager at a fast food place and you're already making more than minimum wage. There are store managers at Wal-Mart and Buc-ees making $250k.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#609

Post by conradev » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:50 PM UTC

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…

How do you make decisions where firing 10% of the workforce is good for 90% of the company’s happiness?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#610

Post by s1artibartfast » Thu, Jul 25, 2024, 3:53 PM UTC

hkt wrote: post #588

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…

yeah, It is really fascinating to learn about the historic and academic study of these challenges.

Most of them have been explored, mapped, and debated by economists in a very robust manner for 100+ years.

One interesting perspective that I gained from a recent Econtalk podcast[1] is that neither profit driven corporations or democratically governed worker collaboratives are perfectly efficient. It is rather a question of when and how the two perform or fail in contrast. It is easy to build criticisms of each when comparing it to an idealized alternative, where all of the challenges have been hand waved away, but that is a meaningless comparison.

https://www.econtalk.org/does-market-failure-justify-governm...