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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

#781

Post by neutronicus »

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…

If we're sharing anecdotes from Greek-Americans, a research advisor of mine said the biggest change he experienced was getting a driver's license without bribing anyone

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#782

Post by Scarblac »

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…

> How would a business like this get started?

The one I know, it just started out with some people who were all equal co-owners. When a new employee joins, they get the same share as everyone else. When someone leaves, they lose their share. Shares can't be sold, everyone has the same amount. It's a cooperative.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#783

Post by renewiltord »

pavlov wrote: post #519
stavros wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is spot on. It's just that the priorities are different (even unemployed Greeks scrape enough money to have coffee with their friends), which can seem to Americans like we're lazy.

I was recently in Lisbon and was surprised that an espresso still costs 70 cents despite the influx of tourists and expats. If it's the same in Greece, I can easily see how an unemployed person can afford to hang out.

Yeah, one of the most notable thing about the HCOL US areas is that service employees are paid very well. By comparison, in India, 15 minute delivery at 3 AM costs relatively nothing.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#784

Post by hellojesus »

consteval wrote: post #714
tomp wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> we want the labor market to not be skewed like this, we will need to allow (and even force) laborers to unionize.

We already allow workers to unionize; a practice with which I don't agree. If we were to force workers to unionize, then we take away worker atonomy. I fail to see that as a benefit.

I don't have anything against unions generally and am happy for companies to decide they will exclusively deal with unions to reduce their costs of negotiations, but I absolutely do have a problem with laws saying employees can decide to take away atonomy from their employer and force their employer to negotiate only with a union.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#785

Post by dalmo3 »

sqeaky wrote: post #573
charles_f wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why so many people want to find issues with giving more to employees.

To be maximally charitable, some people don't want to trade one freedom for another (lots of people are just assholes, but let's ignore them for a moment). There are some fundamental compromises in freedom. If I have a right not to be stabbed you have a lost a right to stab me. Clearly, there are some things where this is an obviously good trade, like in not being stabbed. I suspect this person fears they will lose s…

> To be maximally charitable

Yet you proceed to build a strawman.

I want the freedom to exchange my services for money without having to care about all the bullshit ownership ensues.

It takes a sociopath to conclude that idea is somehow equivalent to being stabbed or sending children to mines.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#786

Post by andrepd »

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.

"Free markets" and "planned economies" don't encompass the breadth of possibilities of organisation of politics and economics. Case in point: TFA...

This post is precisely about a free market economy where the (imo unnatural) disconnect between working in an enterprise and owning the products of that enterprise doesn't exist. That's all.

Not sure what "command economy" has to do with it.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#787

Post by renewiltord »

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…

Coops work where they work and don't where they don't. Mutual insurance coops also have to fight traditional banks and single-owner insurers and they do just fine. State Farm is huge. Co-ops are just not good at some kinds of markets and so they lose there.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#788

Post by andrepd »

stale2002 wrote: post #545
forgetfreeman wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market has spent the GDP of Madagascar to fuck over cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US. Meanwhile "efficiency" in the ISP market has lead to regional near-monopolies and some of the worst residential bandwidth on the planet. Let's not with "efficiency and innovation" yeah? The emperor is clearly buck-ass naked.

> cabbies in a handful of metro areas in the US. The ones that were overcharging consumers? Yeah it is great for customers when prices go down. That's a benefit, not a drawback. Those cabbies should have offer better service at a lower price if they wanted to compete.

Compared to dumping I guess everybody is "overcharging"...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#790

Post by t-writescode »

etothepii wrote: post #208
t-writescode wrote: post #163

I was speaking to an employment lawyer about how to structure the business I'm trying to start. I wanted partial ownership from all employees and, more importantly, aggressive profit sharing. The particular models that I wanted to look at - the partial ownership - turns out to be incredibly expensive when hiring on new employees - from what I've understood - and so I'm leaning in to the profit sharing model, hard, an…

I'm interested in why you want to do this? What is the goal you are trying to achieve? Why would you not do this with salaries? Will there be some people paid more than others that do different roles? If so, why would their profit shares be the same? Who decides on war chest size? Ownership is an interesting word, because as you say if it was ownership then when an employee leaves they still get a share of profits an…

These are some great questions! I'll work through them one-by-one.

> (edit: sorry, I missed this one!) why you want to do this?

I believe in pay transparency and paying people for the value they bring to a company. I don't like it when there's a call center with everyone making a dollar above minimum wage, when they take the pain of all the poor decisions people who make 5-10x what they do made.

> What is the goal you are trying to achieve?

A greater alignment to the earnings someone makes for the company and their earnings out of the company.

> Why would you not do this with salaries?

I believe a salary is a promise, something that can be consistently relied upon. Profit sharing is above and beyond that.

> Will there be some people paid more than others that do different roles?

Since a salary is a promise, yes. It also allows for more tenured and skilled employees to "grow" in the company. Generally a more senior person has more responsibilities and my promise to them should correlate well with that.

> If so, why would their profit shares be the same?

Undecided

> Who decides on war chest size?

Probably a collection of employees, including the CEO, and it would be the sum of company expenses for a certain number of years, including cost of living adjustments.

> but what I really mean is an alternate reporting line to hear about problems

I hadn't considered that as a use of a union and I think I like it. I should think on this more.

> My suspicion is that there's a lot of what founders think of as profit that isn't really profit. (and the added part about you underpaying yourself)

Probably! In my context regarding profit sharing, I am thinking that everyone is making an appropriate salary already - before that, it's not really profit. Admittedly, given the structure, the official salary would probably be a little below market rate; but again, that's just the promise of minimum payment and when profit sharing went into full swing, I would like to think it would increase those numbers.

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