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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

#821

Post by [deleted] »

greycol wrote: post #820
Gormo wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on how shareholders having a say in governance relates to worker compensation? Why shouldn't shareholders have control over governance?

They shouldn't have complete control over governence because, especially in larger businesses, the shareholders are less invested in what a business does than the stakeholders. A classic example would be an employee forced to work in an unhealthy manner. If the cost of replacing the employee when they're worn out is less than the extra profit made by causing the employee to work in that manner it might be the right f…

[deleted]

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#822

Post by sqeaky »

dalmo3 wrote: post #785
sqeaky wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

Then sell immediately, no one here is proposing forcing ownership onto employees. For nearly all Americans owning something significant that is likely to grow in value distinct from the output of their labor is an exceptional opportunity.

Just like how when children were given the opportunity to leave the mines for good there wasn't a massive popular resurgence to make abusive child labor legal again. Most people wanted kids out of mines and into other opportunities.

Most people want wealth. Most people want better opportunity than coal mines. If you want to sell your ownership you can. If you want to mine coal you can when you reach the age of majority.

Rather than view de-facto employee ownership as a burden it is an opportunity to leave a metaphorical coal mine, if you want. You could choose either way if society made de-facto ownership for labor a thing. Right most of us don't have choice.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#823

Post by WalterBright »

andrepd wrote: post #780
WalterBright wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without American billionaires, there would be no SpaceX. YCombinator is billionaires investing in startups.

This is literally like a peasant in the middle ages saying "without your Lord you wouldn't have a mill".

Mills flourished in colonial America without lords. They're not that hard to construct.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#824

Post by aiilns »

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…

As a Greek, a) lots of people lost their jobs during the crisis, could barely make ends meet or even committed suicide; those people certainly didn't fill the taverns. B) It is true that Greeks won't cut on food/going out as readily as others.

People in Greece certainly don't prioritize happiness instead of making money. There was a clear shift where Greeks became more and more unhappy after the (still ongoing) crisis. No1 problem is financial insecurity; as a resident (MD) I work 70-80hrs/week, for less than 7€/hour. Prices are comparable with rich EU countries.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#825

Post by Nifty3929 »

DaoVeles wrote: post #811
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…

> IOW, they're being underpaid relative to market, in exchange for ownership, expecting to get more later when they sell the shares. Alas this would be a big issue. It is the deferred payment test writ large. Do you want $20 now or $30 next week. For a lot of humanity when times get difficult we will tend towards the immediate payoff rather than the long term. To eat the seed corn.

It's more like, do you want $20 now, or a chance at $30 later, as long as you don't leave the company? That's a critical difference. If you pay me what I'm worth in cash, right now, I can do with that cash what I like - which includes investing it into the business. If you pay me with future promises that impose additional constraints, then my money is held hostage to those constraints.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#826

Post by sub7 »

For private startups, all common stock should be given proportional participation rights in all secondary sales.

All too often founders can and do derisk/cash out in funding rounds and then the common stock winds up at 0. Employees = fucked

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#828

Post by keybored »

mbrumlow wrote: post #618
randomdata wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is a little ridiculous to think that Greeks don't prioritize making money over some nebulous "community happiness"' She said that the people of her community prioritized happiness, not that the people prioritized community happiness. That might, for example, mean working less to enjoy more free time at the cost of maximizing profit. And, indeed, we can see in the data that the average worker in Greece takes 9 mo…

Happiness. What hell is it even? It means nothing. Why? Because I am the most happy when working at a high paying job with loots of interesting problems to solve. I would be the least happy working at a high paying job with nothing to do. Happiness is a comparator, not a number. Money on the other hand can be counted, and thus can be measured. I am 100% sure every Greek ever would be more happy with more money given…

Fascinating.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#829

Post by deepfriedchokes »

marsten wrote: post #66

My favorite pizza place in Sunnyvale became employee-owned, and shortly after decided they only wanted to stay open 3 days a week. I'm happy for those employees but man, I also wish I could get pizza on Monday.

A Slice of New York?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#830

Post by kazinator »

How does this work? Every new hire has to buy a share of the company? Or they get it for free? Are they forced to sell or return it when they no longer work there?

Not everyone wants to be forced to buy a risky investment as a condition of employment, or just the hassle.

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