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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

#871

Post by tacocataco »

lynx23 wrote: post #80
xmprt wrote: post #18

I think the most surprising thing about trends in modern executive class pay is just how steep it is compared to the median employee. It makes me wonder why shareholders outside the company are happy with it. For example, the Boeing CEO made 22M in 2022 and 32M in 2023. I'd argue that he did a much worse job in 2023 than in 2022 but somehow got paid almost 50% more. Even Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is "only" being p…

"Who watches the watchers" is what it comes down to. Politicians, Executives... I once heard politicians need to earn a lot because otherwise they wouldn't be politicians but executives, who earn even more.

The voters, who elect the representatives who regulate the executives.

Unfortunately the voters are handcuffed to the two party system by First Past the Post voting and the spoiler effect that comes with it.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#872

Post by dools »

eru wrote: post #858
dools wrote: post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I looked at the first 2 subheadings and they’re already off base. Whoever wrote that article has read nothing that’s been written about job guarantees by the actual economists who specialise in it.

There are already too many clear and well rounded refutations of the UBI bingo card talking points to count, there’s no point in my spilling pixels here to go over them again.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#873

Post by nostrademons »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #869
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.

wow. Off by millions of orders of magnitude, impressive!

Technically off by 6 orders of magnitude, or a factor of a million. Orders of magnitude are exponential - each order of magnitude is a factor of 10 more than the last, so you take the log10 of the factor of increase.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#874

Post by eszed »

baggy_trough wrote: post #773
eszed wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already do this in lots of areas. It would be "cheaper" - and doubtless more profitable; lots of people would choose them! - to produce / buy, say, bicycle helmets that are made out of cardboard and nails, but we collectively recognize that would be counter-productive and require that only the "expensive" types be offered for sale. I'm sure there are some people who are upset by this.

It would be hard to sell bicycle helmets made out of cardboard and nails, so no collective recognition is necessary.

I made a more-substantive reply to a sister post, but... Have you seen what people buy? The front page of HN on any given day teems with posts about tech-sector equivalents to cardboard helmets. The buyers usually supply their own nails.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#875

Post by bruce511 »

shric wrote: post #868
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.

Also it's generally unwise to hold onto your employer's stocks that you were granted as single stock ownership is inherently risky. There's no reason to believe your employer's shares are going to beat the market. Also, the majority of employees in a company other than small startups do not have the ability to shift their company's success materially to make it a worthy incentive to own and hold employer issued stock…

Agreed.

Plus it's bad to have your investments and job in the same place. If the company fails you lose you job and savings at the same time.

Yes, there are non-financial reasons to have "shares in the place where I work". But financially it's a bad investment.

(If the shares come with management rights, responsibilities, obligations, decision making, that's different.)

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#876

Post by whoknowsidont »

missedthecue wrote: post #834
whoknowsidont wrote: post #812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s like putting all your retirement fund into your company’s stock. As opposed to putting your retirement fund into other company's stocks, which everyone does at the same time, making those companies too big too fail without unraveling several threads of social fabric. I think your statement actually proves why employees should have stock in the company. If we really were worried about issues such as this we'd ha…

If I'm employed by Acme Corp, and have a 401k in index funds, but get laid off after the company goes bankrupt, I lose my income, but not my wealth. On the other hand, if my wealth is in Acme Corp and they go bankrupt, I lose my wealth and my income. The first model is less risky, yet profitable enough to be worth it. And everyone can still own the means of production.

You've not only missed the point, but additionally nothing is stopping you from investing your wealth elsewhere.

I don't understand how your scenario is applicable; it's definitely constructed.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#877

Post by fuzzfactor »

eru wrote: post #99
ossobuco wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that work when 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? When you're not sure if you'll manage to pay the electricity bills to keep your fridge turned on, is your first thought going to be "let's invest in the market!"?

Interpreted charitably, you are making an argument that people's comp should be higher. But I don't see any argument that paying that higher comp in the form of shares instead of in the form of cash is any better? (Unless you want to imply that people are too dumb and need to be protected from themselves, and that why we need to give them more stocks instead of more cash? Or something else?)

>you are making an argument that people's comp should be higher.

That's a good argument to make.

Among the entire workforce of a successful employee-owned org, I would think there would be no disagreement, IOW nothing to argue about.

It surely depends how successful, but all you need is to do the math to know for sure.

Beyond a certain threshold, companies where most of the workers are living paycheck-to-paycheck can end up paying them more and that bugaboo can go away completely. Whether or not they are actually awarded or entitled to any shares in their employer yet. Even during a time when it's just the rest of the employees owning the company.

What good are shares if you're never going to sell? I mean never sell your shares nor (vote to) sell the company.

The only thing shares like that entitle you to is dividends. And you only get dividends when the company makes enough money to declare a dividend. Over and above any shortcomings that might need to be overcome.

The net difference is that distributions that go to outside investors under the more-familiar arrangement, are instead returned only to employees when they are the only shareholders.

And sometimes that could be a very life-changing difference for doing the exact same work. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

That's why you do the math.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#878

Post by Struyck363 »

munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

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Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#879

Post by Struyck363 »

munificent wrote: post #656

> “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little…

[dead]

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#880

Post by seanmcdirmid »

eru wrote: post #93
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are lazy. You can always sell your grant as you get it, they can’t make holding stock mandatory, but a lot of people (including me) just hold the stock in a really undiversified portfolio.

> You can always sell your grant as you get it, they can’t make holding stock mandatory, [...] They can. It's easy in private companies to limit what an employee can do with their stock, and in public companies they can insert a clause in the contract to that effect just fine. Or just have very long vesting periods. (Of course, as a would-be employee I would take these restrictions into account when deciding where to…

You either own the stock or you don’t. If you paid federal income taxes on it, they have to let you sell it as you get it if you want, otherwise it isn’t real income. They can restrict when you sell it afterwards, but only in the cause of avoiding insider trading, and you can set up a plan to sell it blindly if you’d like.
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