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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

#851

Post by WalterBright »

bccdee wrote: post #844
WalterBright wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I already addressed this: > Billionaires tend to steer the economy toward vanity projects. Musk's only meaningful contribution to SpaceX was money. We could just have raised NASA's budget instead, but we didn't. There are lots of things that we need to spend money on. Space is not our top priority. Musk, however, is independently wealthy and can spend his money on whatever he wants. So he spent it on rockets, as a va…

> Musk's only meaningful contribution to SpaceX was money.

It was a heck of a lot more than that. See "Elon Musk" by Vance.

> We could just have raised NASA's budget instead

He did it for a tiny fraction of NASA's budget.

> So he spent it on rockets, as a vanity project

He's reached cash flow positive.

> Was this where the money was best spent? I have no reason to believe so.

Becoming the richest man in the world through his investing is a whopper of a reason that it was well spent.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#853

Post by egberts1 »

jonas21 wrote: post #763
victorbjorklund wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/asset…

Nearly all of it went to the CxO and board members.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#855

Post by refurb »

yibg wrote: post #762
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.

Precisely.

Seems to me the best option would be to offer employees ownership. You could have two compensation structures:

- 100% cash compensation - 50% cash/50% equity

See which ones employees prefer. I'll bet it's overwhelmingly the first.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#857

Post by dools »

t-writescode wrote: post #176
dools wrote: post #68

Worker co-ops and ESOPs are already available as business structures. If they’re better, they will be more common, it’s as simple as that. Mandating employee ownership is ridiculous. In terms of policy I think a cap on revenue per employee for a privately held company and a cap on individual ownership is a better solution to reducing income inequality. That and eliminating involuntary unemployment so that companies h…

> If they’re better, they will be more common Unfortunately, the word "better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Better for the employees is a world of difference compared to "better at getting funding to start a business", "better at getting Venture Capitalists or Angel Investors or Banks" interested. It takes working two jobs, being independently wealthy or getting outside help to start a company, and most of t…

Well, if you ask me, when it comes to a for profit company there is only one "better", and that's "more profitable".

"Better for workers" only shows up in for profit companies if doing things that are better for workers is also better for the profitability of the company.

Trying to make for profit companies have a social conscious is, IMHO, pretty dumb. They're for profit.

Making things better is what governments are for. A guaranteed job at a socially inclusive minimum wage and set of conditions that the private sector needs to exceed in order to hire people would go a hell of a long way towards resolving many of the problematic workplace tactics used by for profit companies (and is a LOT easier than the patchwork of industrial relations regulations the governemnt currently plays whack-a-mole with).

I think that governments are really good at setting boundary conditions and for delivering things that are too important to be left to the whimsy of the private sector (and for natural monopolies like aiports and roads and fiber optic networks and so on), and that most importantly includes the floor price/conditions for labour.

> It takes working two jobs, being independently wealthy or getting outside help to start a company, and most of that outside help very likely doesn't want employee owned.

Hell I'm working 2 jobs to start a company and I sure as shit don't want to be obliged to give a chunk of my company to everyone that comes and goes along the way. If ESOPs or co-ops or whatever make sense it'll be because they help me attract and retain the best talent who are the most profitable. If that's not the case, then why should I share the returns with people who have taken none of the risks?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#858

Post by eru »

dools wrote: post #838
eru wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That and eliminating involuntary unemployment so that companies have to compete with a guaranteed job that is not exploitative. You don't need to have job guarantees for that. A strong economy in general helps for this, and a basic income would also help.

A strong economy helps certainly but a JG eliminates involuntary unemployment, provides a basic income, ensures price stability and sets the minimum work standard the private sector must exceed in order to hire. If you’re waving a magic wand anyway why not choose the best policy?

See https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#859

Post by geodel »

aiilns wrote: post #824
sotix wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) crisi…

Thanks for giving perspective from an unprivileged position. I have similar stories where people with money create national traditions of being together to celebrate festivals, family events together with friends and families and in general prioritize family over jobs. Poor people seems to have no such traditions they will stay put in whichever town/city they are stuck in their low paying jobs.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#860

Post by eru »

consteval wrote: post #795
robertlagrant wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They don't need to be better. In fact they just need to be 1/5th as good, and then it's worth it.

Usain Bolt can run 100m in around 9.58s, and gets paid a lot for that ability (indirectly via sponsors etc). Assume I can run half as fast, say 100m in 19s; do I 'deserve' half of Bolt's fame and half of his sponsorships?

Similarly, you can't hire five 20% generals to put in charge of your army, and expect the same result as hiring one 100% general.

Or try hiring five 20% novelists or film makers or artists or actors etc.

> That's the whole point here - CEOs aren't paid proportionately like you or me.

Yes, and pay _not_ being proportional to ability is common and normal in all kinds of fields. It's nothing specific to CEOs.

If anything, pay being (even approximately) proportional to ability is probably the exception.

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