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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

#901

Post by eru »

alan-hn wrote: post #601
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More to the point, Boeing's revenue is over $16 billion. Some tens of millions are a rounding error when it's only being paid to one person, and that is the real source of the disparity. Paying one CEO $32 million is two tenths of a percent of their revenue. If they tried to pay each of their 170,000 employees even 1% of that, it wouldn't be 0.2% of their revenue, it would be >300% of their revenue and they'd be out…

Why on earth would you pay each person 16 million per year? That's 1% You can still make everyone's wages better without paying millions to each person and definitely not to the CEO

Though I don't really see the moral imperative here?

People who have a job at Boeing are already well off by global standards (and probably even by developed world standards). If you want to take from the rich and give to the poor, how about we give to the actual poor?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#902

Post by panarky »

ozim wrote: post #843
panarky wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a company's shareholders are employees, their wages don't stop just because the company loses money two years. Just like a company whose shareholders are pension funds and index funds doesn't stop paying its employees when they have a couple down years.

Most of companies in the world are not pension funds or F500 or that company in the article - my take is that it is misguided also to label "one single company owner takes all" because that is not true. Most of companies in the world are mid to small size companies that cannot survive 2 years continuous loses without taking a loan to pay their employees. Those loans are not "mortgage rate" like 2% but more like 20% a…

So for the companies you're talking about, the ones that can't or won't retain profits from good years to ride out bad years, it doesn't really matter whether the shareholders are employees or not, the employees are still out of work with zero income.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#903

Post by hgomersall »

hellojesus wrote: post #751
hgomersall wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big range between living in a dictatorship and having only private entities allowed to invest in things.

Is take the American system every day. What is the moral justification for a state stealing private property? Billionaires get to invest however they want because it's their property. What you see as a vanity project actually employs workers, feds families, and generates tax revenue. They are massively contributing to the economy.

As a matter of accounting, all the net money in the system was first created by the state before the private sector could accumulate it. You're welcome.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#904

Post by coderatlarge »

stavros wrote: post #186
coderatlarge wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some corporate votes that you feel wider employee ownership would have improved?

Laying off 10% of the workforce because the company isn't growing fast enough and then giving the CEO a bigger bonus.

Was that actually put to a shareholder vote though?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#905

Post by coderatlarge »

psd1 wrote: post #528
coderatlarge wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some corporate votes that you feel wider employee ownership would have improved?

Lindy Fiorentina fucking up HP. Boeing all over. I'd hope to see employee-owners counteract short-termism

As I’m saying to Stavros above, I think many of these decisions don’t get put to a shareholder vote. The voting mechanism is generally extremely coarse afaik.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#906

Post by 4gotunameagain »

emporas wrote: post #861
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…

If Greeks were lazy, they would not be working towards creating powerful nuclear weapons. Based on my calculations, by 2030, maximum 2035, we will have personal nuclear weapons. By we, i mean millions and billions of people on the planet, including of course Greeks. In general, what an individual is doing with his free time, is no one's business.

"Greeks ... working towards creating powerful nuclear weapons"

Source ?

I highly, highly doubt that this is true.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#907

Post by stale2002 »

andrepd wrote: post #788
stale2002 wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"...

If you can't give the best product to consumers for the best price then get out of the market.

Consumers are the judge of what's best. And they vote with their wallet and feet.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#908

Post by shalmanese »

Gormo wrote: post #804
YokoZar wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, employees often effectively sell their stock to existing owners via share buybacks. This seems entirely rational to me - I've bet a significant part of my career on the success of the company I work for, why should I also bet my savings? Diversification has real value, and going all-in on one company is just a bad bet.

At the end of the day, an employee is just a special class of vendor -- scrape away all of the normative cruft that gets injected into these discussions, and you have a fee-for-service relationship between a customer and a supplier. And lots of people would rather just be that supplier, who gets paid a specified amount of money for a specified provision of service, and not be forced to bear short-term risk or to hold…

Well, they're different in that they're vendors and also vendees. The theory behind employee ownership is that it makes them better vendees on top of maybe making them better vendors.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#909

Post by rrnechmech »

shalmanese wrote: post #908
Gormo wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day, an employee is just a special class of vendor -- scrape away all of the normative cruft that gets injected into these discussions, and you have a fee-for-service relationship between a customer and a supplier. And lots of people would rather just be that supplier, who gets paid a specified amount of money for a specified provision of service, and not be forced to bear short-term risk or to hold…

Well, they're different in that they're vendors and also vendees. The theory behind employee ownership is that it makes them better vendees on top of maybe making them better vendors.

> vendees

"Customers"?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#910

Post by ornornor »

I wonder how different this is to buying stocks with your savings, in terms of wealth redistribution. Of course it’s a different mindset then, owning a bunch of random shares vs the place you work at, but I’m wondering about wealth only as the article establishes that owners of stock are better off than wage-only people.
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