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Every company should be owned by its employees

elysian.press

791–800 of 1001 posts

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 union…

As I've said, we don't really because union busting is not only allowed but expected.

The reality is that employers should not have such autonomy. What you're arguing is the right for an employer to necessarily hold more leverage in negotiation as opposed to workers. Which... isn't a right. It's an anti-right. As in, you want less rights for workers.

Unions only work if they're enforced. Just like a right to life implies an anti-right to kill, a right to fair negotiations implies an anti-right for employers to choose not to negotiate with unions.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so bizarre, considering that the modern CEO's only job is to issue meaningless positive statements to shareholders. If you look at many top CEOs resumes, they are almost always devoid of any real experience. People talk about replacing various jobs by AI, but I'm pretty sure an LLM could replace most CEOs and no one would notice.

I don't want to be rude but you have no idea what you are talking about and clearly have 0 insight into the day-to-day of an actual CEO. It's fine to argue that a particular CEO is underperforming, it's often true, but very few of them are "underworking" by any reasonable definition.

I would wager you could replace the CEO with a cardboard cutout and none of the employees, who actually produce the product which makes the company money, would notice.

You could probably get away with it for months, honestly.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#793
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet people overwhelmingly prefer to work for these non-employees owned companies instead of working in cooperatives - how do you explain that? They could take those humongous profits for themselves but they don't do that. My answer to that question is that organizing people is much more difficult than everybody thinks and politics is the biggest source of inefficiencies on any human organisation bigger than a few…

Risk. Risk is the reason people aren't constantly demanding equity. Equity is great when your base salary covers your comfortable life. Equity is not great when your salary or hourly doesn't afford you much, and having inaccessible capital that very well may be worthless in the future is not desirable. When people talk about this topic they hyper focus on success cases. But HN should be intimately familiar with how w…

On this same note:

Employment is already a pretty bullish position on the employer. Adding equity is doubling down. If the company goes under, you lose your future wages and the investment in the equity.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So how are new ones minted?

By luck and status. Right place right time. They have some experience, and they just so happen to know X, Y, Z (probably because their dad knew X-1, Y-1, Z-1 and so on) so they get in. Maybe they went to harvard or something.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#795
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because whoever takes the job is signing up for some miserable work I'm ready to do it for a mere 5 mill/year (less than a sixth of the incumbent), and I'll happily take all the blame for all my predecessor's failings, and more. Will I do a worse job than the incumbent? Maybe, maybe not, how the hell will anyone know?

I disagree that everyone is equally suitable for every job. Why should someone pay you £5m? What would you do better than anyone else?

They don't need to be better. In fact they just need to be 1/5th as good, and then it's worth it. That's the whole point here - CEOs aren't paid proportionately like you or me.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The private company case is worse because now it's completely illiquid. This all strikes me as a rich person's idea of what poor people want. Someone making $15/hour wants the $15 not $10 + equity in a private company worth $5 which they cannot sell but gives them 1/1000 voting rights and maybe sometimes a 7 cent a quarter dividend subject to board approval and market whims. Most workers are not sophisticated investo…

how does equity in privately held companies work? I get that some share provide voting rights, but that's not generally what to employees. when the people in the article cash out their ESOP shares to buy a house... who's on the other end of that deal to buy those shares? is it some other employee? Wouldn't that mean that money is just switching hands between your employees rather than helping all your employees get r…

The vast majority of small businesses have no "exit" in sight. Instead they want to rely on solid business fundamentals. Sell a product/service for a profit. Typically the owners of the business get access to the profits proportional to their ownership stake.

By enabling employees to be owners you grant them access to those profits and to participate in discussions around how to spend/re-invest profits.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#798

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.

This seems extremely good for late employees and extremely bad for early employees / founders? Late employees have no risk and the same reward.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#799
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Customers are paramount, owners are less important, workers are what make the business move. No, no one is more important or less important than anyone else. Every role has to be played order for anyone to benefit. Someone has to bear the risk and pay the upfront costs; someone has to do the operational work in order to deliver value to the market and someone has to be willing to pay for the resulting product in or…

Sorry, I don't agree. Owners are less important. They don't need to be there for most businesses to continue to operate just fine. The same is simply not true when workers decide to down tools. Don't conflate ownership with steering and management. I don't think any owner should have some inalienable right to profit in perpetuity at the expense of everyone else including the customer. I think this is a very popular v…

> Sorry, I don't agree. Owners are less important. They don't need to be there for most businesses to continue to operate just fine.

I'm afraid that this is not true. Owners are not just the ones who enable the business to be initiated in the first place, but are the ones who bear risk on an ongoing basis in order to keep the business up and running. Firms that need ongoing capital infusions to expand operations, or that incur debt in order to get past short-term financial bottlenecks, absolutely need someone to be responsible for the inherent risks associated with doing so.

Eliminating the business owner as the risk-bearer, and setting up a business in which "workers" are the responsible parties makes workers themselves bear all the risk. In the status quo, the worst risk exposure that workers face if the firm faces financial difficulty is that they will just lose their jobs -- i.e. that the customer that has to that point been purchasing their services will simply cease making further purchases. But in a situation in which these service providers were the owners, and therefore responsible for the firm's obligations, they would not only lose their jobs but would also be on the hook to repay its debts and/or will suffer the loss of whatever funds they put into it to ensure it had sufficient capital to operate.

Workers generally don't want to do this, and usually prefer to just receive an agreed upon rate for services rendered for as long as the relationship persists.

You may note that the industries in which worker-owned co-ops are relatively common are the ones that have low risk inherent in the business model -- markets with predictable demand, long product life cycles, and relatively inelastic price sensitivity, e.g. grocery stores. Industries with high volatility, rapid technological change, short product life cycles, high need for capital, and elastic demand simply don't work well under a co-op model.

> Organisations which are in the last stages of an exit do not act in the interests of the workers or the customer - they act in the interest of the party that is set to buy them and the major stakeholders set to profit the most.

Ultimately, everything is just a proxy for consumer utility. A business that is acting in the interest of a potential buyer needs to ensure that the firm is performing viably, since the buyer usually aims to operate it (or, if they aim to liquidate it, the current operators need to maximize the liquidation value).

In either case, the only way to do that is still to satisfy market demand -- we may frown at the tactics they use to do so, but ultimately, they will only use tactics that are effective in terms of encouraging customers to actually purchase their goods or services. At the end of the day, it's still customers assigning more value to the product than to the money they are exchanging for it that enables the form to earn a profit.

> Studies show that cooperatives produce more stable, sustainable businesses which are not designed for short-term speculation.

Per my point above, I believe you have the causality inverted. Co-ops are only suitable for stable, sustainable businesses that have low risk exposure and low capital requirements. The correlation you are seeing is because co-ops generally don't participate in more volatile markets in the first place.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#800
post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always, no, but as the general case, they are. At the end of the day, people need to be willing to pay a business in exchange for its goods and services, and if they don't feel like they are obtaining net positive value from the transaction, they won't be.

I think key word here is "feel". The reality is that modern products are absurdly complex, and consumers truly don't know what is (and isn't) worth their money. Which is why marketing, making people "feel" a certain way, is SO important. Maybe even more important than the product itself. I mean, do you know how any of your food is produced? If you wanted to verify that the ingredients are what they say they are, can…

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