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

611–620 of 1001 posts

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#611

Post by trinsic2 »

jjmarr wrote: post #599
trinsic2 wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't give a fuck with the definition is. Its not helpful to this discussion, move on.

Our world is being destroyed by capitalism, maybe its time to try something else.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#612

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #578

The tragedy of the commons applies here. Any time you have something that’s commonly owned by many people (the more people, the more the tragedy applies) you have incentives that become misaligned.

>The tragedy of the commons applies here.

Agreed. More specifically it's a tragedy of commons of people who are of average iq + maturity.

Overall cohesive group size is directly proportional to the iq + wisdom of participating individuals.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#613

Post by marklubi »

I'm all for giving equity in a company to incentivize employees.

The problem I have with this blanket statement, and the article itself, is that most of those employees didn't take on any of the risk. The risk/reward system is askew at that point.

When you're ready to put everything on the line, let me know. Been there. Took three attempts where I went broke and had to find employment before finally getting one to stick.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#616

Post by bialpio »

zby wrote: post #380
peepee1982 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so many cooperatives to apply for, are there? Otherwise I would definitely prefer worker owned.

But you can create one? If many people wanted to join a cooperative - then it should be easy to do?

Good idea, I'm gonna quit my job today and start my own coop with all the earnings my current employer shared with me! Oh, wait...

Seriously though, most people cannot afford to just quit. You at least need savings for that, and you need to be fine with burning through them and still failing, cause that's a very real possibility.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#617

Post by hemantv »

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…

Individuals have visions not committee. We build monuments for individuals not for committee.

Having said that no man is island of itself. Current incentive structure works great to motivate individuals to start companies

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#618

Post by mbrumlow »

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…

Happiness. What hell is it even? It means nothing.

Why? Because I am the most happy when working at a high paying job with loots of interesting problems to solve.

I would be the least happy working at a high paying job with nothing to do.

Happiness is a comparator, not a number. Money on the other hand can be counted, and thus can be measured. I am 100% sure every Greek ever would be more happy with more money given nothing else changed. Only somebody who found happiness through suffering would ask for less, and be more happy with less.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#619

Post by negus »

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…

> (ignorant of the history that led to 2008)

can you share your version please?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#620

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

defrost wrote: post #35
oleg_antonyan wrote: post #3

It's insane how socialism is growing in the west after defeat of soviet union

Did the Soviet Union ever actually practice effective social policy and embrace control from the lowest working level or did they just run with epilet backed dull grey committees with a promise they'd eventually get to actual socialism and communism post Stalin and all that not socialism stuff? I'm no fan of the USSR but they're arguably no more socialist than the National Socialism of the Nazis.

>actual socialism

And what is actual socialism? Perhaps more importantly how will you enforce it?

Post reply on HN