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Every company should be owned by its employees

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Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#681

Post by carlosjobim »

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #370
roughly wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How’s this for a definition: the average CEO gets paid 350x what the average worker gets paid, so unless they’re generating 350x the value of the average employee, they’re underworking.

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.

Yes, if the 350 employees kept working the same as usual, and the only thing that changed was something the CEO did, not anything he ordered the employees to do.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#682

Post by Analemma_ »

munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

> Is there a middle ground balance where we respect that ownership of property is an important, attainable kind of wealth building for middle-class people while also accepting that a city must also develop in ways that benefit people that aren't homeowners, or aren't homeowners yet?

No. I like finding middle grounds where possible, but you're asking for something which is inherently contradictory: for something to be a good source of "wealth-building", it to increase in value (i.e. price to the next buyer) forever, or at least most of the time. When that happens to housing, it fucks over the next generation.

There is no fix here that doesn't involve terminating housing as an investment opportunity. It will be a painful transition, but the end state is actually fine. Plenty of countries (e.g. Japan) don't treat housing as a middle-class investment and they function fine.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#683

Post by officeplant »

apwell23 wrote: post #664
munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

> One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little plot of real estate most attainable is buying stock through IRA account.

As someone who had their first stock based savings account gutted by the 2008 economy we really shouldn't rely on stocks. I was in college and my college fund vanished very quickly. It was a fund set up for me as a kid, managed by my petrodollar worshipping uncle. We're all just a collapse away from nothing while being desperate for line goes up behavior to save us. But this is just my point of view from someone on the poorer side of things.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#684

Post by underbiding »

pembrook wrote: post #389
underbiding wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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?

Crazy, who would've thought that a country being fully embargoed for 50+ years by the world's biggest economy might have difficulty obtaining goods?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#685

Post by skybrian »

standardUser wrote: post #669
munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

> once that piece of ownership has been attained it's also rational to want to preserve and maximize the value of that investment By that logic, the idea of workers having part ownership of the companies they work for has a lot of upside.

It does, and Silicon Valley is built on that, but for startups it’s more of a lottery ticket, and for a tech giant, what you do as a worker doesn’t make much of a difference for financial results. And even in between, how the investment does is pretty risky and partly determined by unpredictable outside events, so you’ll want to hedge.

And then for shared ownership, governance is often messy.

Individual ownership of a stable asset that you can improve by making your own decisions (deciding what fixes to pay for, at least), is a different thing.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#686

Post by janpieterz »

xivzgrev wrote: post #678
munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

Homes shouldn't be an investment. They've accidentally become that in the past few decades, and as a result, affordability is getting worse. The better it does as an investment class, the worse it will become. It's a self perpetuating spiral. I don't see the market solving this. I only see some regulation helping here - ie any tax filer can at most own 1 SFH (this includes married couples). So no second, third, tenth…

How do you suggest we handle the rental market?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#687

Post by khuey »

munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

Home ownership in the immediate post-war era functioned as a form of forced savings. To the extent it was an investment it was more akin to a reverse bond than a stock bought on margin: you pay a fixed payment on a loan for 30 years and at the end you own a substantial asset. The focus on price appreciation is relatively new.

In California specifically this was driven by Prop 13 gutting the property tax system and removing the natural check that higher property taxes impose on homeowners engaging in the sort of anti-development cartelism that has run rampant in California in the last half-century.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#688

Post by carom »

piva00 wrote: post #378
zby wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To take over the market companies need to attract customers - i.e. make their lives better. Usually there are more consumers than employees - so I think that measure works quite well with optimising for humans. Profit is a side effect of taking over the market. 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 - other…

> 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…

There are plenty of successful companies that did not take outside investment, why are none of them cooperatives?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#689

Post by piva00 »

WalterBright wrote: post #649
piva00 wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 productiona…

It's way more efficient than any other system that has been tried. Free markets bury command economies.

It doesn't mean it's the end all system, if it's wasteful it can be improved.

At no point I advocated for a command economy, once more you reply to a strawman to one of my comments, Walter.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#690

Post by loa_in_ »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #34
talldatethrow wrote: post #8

The company I work for sucks. I rather take more cash and just by stocks in companies I believe in more.

Why not work for a company that sucks less?

Ultimately I don't decide what company I work for, but others do
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