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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

#761

Post by WalterBright »

unbalancedevh wrote: post #747
WalterBright wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you buy things you don't want?

People get convinced in the heat of the moment that they want something, when if they had time to reflect/research/etc. they might very well conclude that their money is better spent elsewhere. Marketing in a capitalist system is highly motivated to make you think you want or need something more than you actually do. One tactic that some people find helpful when they want to buy a discretionary item is to wait a few…

Watch TV commercials over the years. The older ones are laughable. They steadily get more sophisticated as the years go by. That's because the customers get more sophisticated, too. You might call it evolution in action :-/

Political campaigns also get more sophisticated. Scott Adams has an interesting podcast where he breaks down the latest manipulative persuasion techniques used.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#762

Post by yibg »

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 model also puts a lot of risk on the employees. It’s basically forcing investment in the same company that pays your salary. An investment that has less liquidity than standard investments. It’s like putting all your retirement fund into your company’s stock.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#763

Post by jonas21 »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #677
nostrademons wrote: post #633

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…

Getting some of your salary in stock options isn't really an employee owned company. How many % of total Google shares are owned by employees (excluding the founding employees)? 0,0000000001%? At least 50% would be required for it to be viewed as an employee owned company.

Google spent $22 billion on stock-based compensation in 2023 [1]. That's over 1% of the stock of the company transferred to employees in one year.

Now, many people probably sell that stock as soon as they can, so the employee ownership isn't cumulative over the years. But it would be quite hostile to employees to stop them from doing this in an effort to make the company more employee-owned.

[1] https://abc.xyz/assets/52/88/5de1d06943cebc569ee3aa3a6ded/go...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#764

Post by sotix »

astura wrote: post #719
sotix wrote: 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…

Well in this case, the company has more than quadrupled its profits since he sold the company. The new employee owners have done a phenomenal job running it.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#765

Post by panick21_ »

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…

Having service workers that are invested in the company and provide great service is essential to any service buissness. Sure any individul isnt single handet gone make your stock go up, but collectivly they do. The same as most engineers.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#766

Post by EasyMark »

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…

Does this mean Greek Culture is better or simply different? I think that’s the real question. And also better for whom? It’s a judgement call. You can find communities (small towns) that are much closer to this style of thinking than in cities like LA or NYC.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#767

Post by keybored »

WalterBright wrote: post #754
keybored wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legend has it that Walter can smell anti-Americanism in the water, in fact all the way to Germany.

My family did two tours in Germany (tour as in being stationed there by the military). If you're a military family, the military will move you all around the world.

Yes I guessed that AF meant Air Force.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#768

Post by cmpalmer52 »

I’ve worked for two companies that had ESOPs while they were privately traded. In both cases, the companies were sold to larger corporate entities that promptly got rid of the ESOP.

Not that it is all that bad. One sale happened after I left the company. The sale of the company included the shares owned by employees through the ESOP. So for one sale, I got several tens of thousands of dollars (hadn’t been part of the ESOP that long) and the other company’s sale gave me about 150% of my current salary. Both went right into retirement accounts to defer taxes.

The mood or “culture” was better, I think, during the ESOP period. Certainly cost saving was more on everyone’s mind, because every company dollar unspent was part of the profit and increased the valuation.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#769

Post by shkkmo »

photonthug wrote: post #639
shkkmo wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an assumption and one that I believe is faulty. Humans' caring is often related to the degree of connection. Employees at a company are more closely connected to their customers than investors and are thus more likely to care more about those customers. Monopolies are still bad either way, but I doubt that the failure modes at employee owned monoploes is the same as at outside investor owned monopolies.

Yeah. Saying "COOPs don't fundamentally change human behavior which has doses of greed" is like saying that a kingdom works the same way as a democracy since hey, it's all just humans. Simply involving more decision makers is a meaningful change. Certainly involving more decision makers that are outside of the business/legal/accounting class is a meaningful change.

Technically a worker owned Co-op is different from a company with an ESOP as described in this article. The article it links to has more details: https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-by-the-numb...

There are a multitude of ways that employee ownership can be encouraged, required, or ownership can be limited to employees.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#770

Post by vundercind »

chasd00 wrote: post #660
vundercind wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assure you that being allowed to teach well would greatly increase the pleasantness of life for a hell of a lot of teachers. Nobody gets into teaching for the money—and, for that matter, there’s not a clear connection between doing it well and any kind of rewards at all, as it stands.

Teaching is a good example. When you teach in public schools which is basically where the "people own the means of production" since the school is paid for by the taxes collected by an elected government, you're absolutely right. No rewards for quality teaching basically at all. However, if you're really good at teaching you can teach at a private school and reap a lot more rewards. Better pay, better recognition, a…

Yeah. Depends—fancy upper-middle-class and higher private schools are like that. The majority aren’t that sort, and both pay and perform on a similar level to public schools, if not worse. But the good ones, the ones people really think of when they say “private school” (but not the actual majority of such schools) do pay better and often have really good perks (the PTA-equivalent Christmas and end-of-year gifts you get at some private schools—damn!)

As a bonus, private schools are usually way more willing that public schools to tell annoying parents to get bent. Which is a pretty big perk on its own.

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