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Every company should be owned by its employees

elysian.press

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Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#711
post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I'd assume that is because they take on jobs that they'll be happy with, instead of what ever job makes the most money. If you're content with what you do, you can do it sustainably for the rest of your life, if your only motivation to do your job is the money, then you'll burn out and retire early.

So if they work less hours than others it's because they prioritize happiness (grandparent's post), and if they work more hours than others it's alsmo because they prioritize happiness (your post)?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#712

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

I don't think this holds to scrutiny. This breaks down as soon as you get out of the idea phase.

Everyone has visions, and most great achievements today are the results of an amalgamation of them. The really big achievements are almost always the result of groups, not individuals.

People that idolize others have to turn a blind eye to everything surrounding that individual's achievement. It's simply easier to simplify big achievements as "this person was great". In reality though, it's a culmination of everything that came before that individual, the support around them, some of their decisions and much more.

In other words: monuments are a bad argument to evaluate if something is good or not. Especially in today's individualistic society.

It's a shallow Instagram motivational phrase.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#713

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…

The article is arguing for ESOPs, basically stock options for employees. The examples cited are actually quite tame by tech industry standards: "During Central States’ worst year, employees earned the equivalent of 6 percent of their pay in stock, during their best they earned 26 percent." By contrast, FANG employees routinely make >50% of their compensation in stock, and it can be up to 80% in good years. As for how…

There's no reason why this is beneficial. Money and stocks are fungible you can freely exchange one for the other as much as your heart desires. There's no difference between which one you receive.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#714
post #323

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…

This only works if you assume we are in a free market. We are not, and no such market has ever existed.

Setting up a coop versus setting up a company aren't on equal ground. One has clear legal roads, and the other is perceived as communism by 50% of Americans. Sorry, it just doesn't work that way.

It's a similar argument I hear against unions - "well go work somewhere else!" The problem is that it's just not equal. Companies have infinitely more power and leverage than laborers. The labor market is EXTREMELY skewed in favor of companies.

If we want the labor market to not be skewed like this, we will need to allow (and even force) laborers to unionize. That's just not gonna happen. In practice union busting is not only allowed, its perceived as a good thing.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#715
post #24

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

Individual companies being owned by their employees isn't socialism. For that matter, the Soviet Union wasn't socialist either - the workers owned nothing, the state owned everything. All the land, all the factories, all the manufactured goods.

> Individual companies being owned by their employees isn't socialism.

Actually, yes, this is the literal definition of socialism. It's workers owning the means of production.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All companies have to do is present a united front on keeping pay low and benefits nonexistent to prevent workers from having better options. I.e. USA 2024. Can we leave the cynical antiwork comments out? They aren't helpful. This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help. Everyone is for the highest pay possible until they run their own company and have to provide payroll.

> This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help. That isn't obvious at all. The US has the one of the highest pay gaps of any developed nation. Our largest companies with the richest executives have employees on food stamps. I'm not being cynical, I'm talking about reality, and I'm not going to shut up about it just so you can maintain your comfortable naivete on this issue. > Ev…

> The US has the highest pay gap of any nation.

This doesn't contradict your point, but fwiw the pay gap of quite a few other nations come before the US. In terms of RP, the US ranks about 35th, behind many African and Asian nations.

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

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#717

> “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…

Having homes be investments is a good thing, in the original sense of "investment": something that you own which you put effort into in the hopes of making it better later. Incentives change dramatically as a homeowner in ways that are generally beneficial to the community: you are incentivized to improve the property, to maintain the property, to put effort into the local community in ways that make the land and location more valuable, and so on.

I think that what you're complaining about is the financialization of investments, where every investment has an associated dollar value and that dollar value must always go up. This affects more than just homes. The need for monotonically-rising corporate earnings makes corporations pull all sorts of accounting shenanigans, it makes them cut costs and push sales until the product quality is the bare minimum people will buy, and it results in all sorts of pain for workers in the resulting reorgs and layoffs. The usage of Bitcoin as a token whose value just goes up has negatively hurt the development of the crypto economy, because people aren't actually using crypto, they're just hodling and hoping $$$ go up.

The elephant in the room here is fiat currency, positive inflation targeting, and negative real interest rates. If you know that the dollar's value is eventually going to zero (which follows mathematically from inflation being an exponential curve), then the sum of the cash flows from any productive asset becomes infinite, and the only check on its value is that investors can't really reason about infinite time horizons. If inflation were targeted at zero (or at least some value that gave positive real interest rates), then that sum converges and you can speak about properly valuing assets and allocating capital efficiently.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is arguing for ESOPs, basically stock options for employees. The examples cited are actually quite tame by tech industry standards: "During Central States’ worst year, employees earned the equivalent of 6 percent of their pay in stock, during their best they earned 26 percent." By contrast, FANG employees routinely make >50% of their compensation in stock, and it can be up to 80% in good years. As for how…

There's no reason why this is beneficial. Money and stocks are fungible you can freely exchange one for the other as much as your heart desires. There's no difference between which one you receive.

You seem to have missed an absolutely critical element of what drives human behavior. We call it "incentive".

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#719
post #424

My grandfather founded a construction company by himself many decades ago. He built it up over many years to a behemoth in the region and created a culture where people worked there for life. When he retired, he sold the entire company to the employees with everyone getting a cut. His funeral was full of so many faces I had never seen before. Somebody pointed out to me that these were the dozens of people that he mad…

>My family could have been a lot wealthier if he had kept a cut of the company.

Unlikely... He probably made just as much or more with the ESOP than he would have selling in a private sale. When a business owner creates an ESOP for their business they sell their shares of to the company to the company itself TAX FREE for a fair independent valuation. It's just another way for a founder to cash out. It absolutely does benefit the employees, but it's not an act of charity, the owner still cashes out and realizes the full valuation of the company they built.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/darrendahl/2016/07/07/if-you-di...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's so easy, why aren't you doing it? Presumably it requires some amount of investment to break into, but with such a high upside it's still massively +EV.

The job being easy to do and the job being easy to get are two completely different things.

So how are new ones minted?
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