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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

#921

Post by ossobuco »

its_ethan wrote: post #760
ossobuco wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the alternative is owning no chunk of any company? Yes, still orders of magnitude better. Nothing prevents people from investing also in other companies if they feel like. Or are you implying they are "too dumb" to consider the possibility? Shared ownership also protects employees from speculative decisions like mass layoffs made only to give more value to shareholders. It also prevents the alienation of working…

> Nothing prevents people from investing also in other companies if they feel like I thought you just said that this isn't a viable option for most people? Now it is on the table? > are you implying they are "too dumb" to consider the possibility For what it's worth, reading through this thread, it seems like you were the one who claimed most people don't have "market knowledge"...

Oh please, you don't even know anymore what's your argument, do you? You just hate to be reminded that the bubble you live in is in now way accurately reflective of the reality most people live in.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#922

Post by Nevermark »

robertlagrant wrote: post #779
Gormo wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would be nice to have a legal framework for companies to increase employee ownership, but be able to do it incrementally with no requirement to go straight to 100%. Or ever. But this framework exists, and is used by a huge number of firms.

"Legal framework" is a euphemism for "mandate by force". Of course companies do this today, as you say. The commenter wants to force them.

Nowhere did I mention or apply mandates. “Framework” is not a work that means mandated.

There seems to be a lot of sour grapes that pro employee arrangements are inherently scammy. For no good reason. None of the ESOP companies were mandated!

Thee is a legal framework for those.

There is a legal framework for changing an S-corp to C-core

There is a legal framework for going public

There is a legal framework for declaring bancruptcy

They have NOTHING to do with mandates.

Frameworks are developed over time to handle complex and not always obvious issues in a rational way.

The benefit of a legal framework is its accumulated wisdom developed by law and courts. And the fact that it becomes a recognizable thing for all parties to consider, and makes that path easier to take if that is the decision.

But any transition would (by any reasonable process) be at the agreement of current shareholders. So issues of compensation, and other issues should be dealt with sensibly.

The most sensible way for this to be an easier option, that works out well, is to develop a well thought out framework.

—-

Open source is a very valuable recognized legal framework. Between evolved OS licenses, supportive court cases and the general law, we are better for this framework.

It makes it easy for small actors to take advantage of that approach to publishing software with little legal risk (if they handle known issues, such as not including non-OS work, etc.)

Nobody is forced to be open source.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#923

Post by DrScientist »

dash2 wrote: post #94

Employee stock options are not a new idea, obviously. If the story is "every company should offer stock options to its employees", then sure, that's often a good business plan. The reason not every company does it to all its employees is probably that for those employees, it wouldn't affect incentives much and it would make payment subject to the vagaries of the stock market. Your barista at Starbucks is not going to…

Isn't the problem of adapting to change universal across all companies - and the key success factor there is leadership - rather than the structure of ownership?

Perhaps capital owned companies have the distance to be a bit more ruthless in driving change - however while that may mean you get better short term allocation of capital, it doesn't take into account the other costs.

Everytime a company lays off workers it relies on the state to ensure that those people and their dependents don't starve, potentially retrained and available to be successfully deployed elsewhere. Or to stop them, in their desperation, to gain the materials to live, start breaking the law.

ie there is an element of free-riding of private capital on the State to ensure a stable society that private enterprise existence relies on, while they employ 'creative destruction'.

Good companies - whether employee owned or not, don't free-load, they invest in their own staff through training, they pay good redundancy etc.

You could argue the above is more likely in employee owned companies.

However as I said at the start, in the end it's the leadership that matters.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#924

Post by eru »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #880
eru wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's not nearly as simple as that.

Look up eg a 'poison pill' for an example where you don't "either own or stock or you don't". (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_rights_plan)

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#925

Post by Demonoculus »

pembrook wrote: post #395
piva00 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But actually to have any employees companies need to optimize for workers lives anyway. And it seems that cooperatives are not any better in this area - otherwise everybody would work for cooperatives. There's much more at play than just "cooperatives are not any better". Cooperatives don't get as much funding from investors because investors won't be owning a larger share of them, and taking their returns, they in…

But what are you suggesting? We forcibly allocate capital less efficiently; make markets less efficient and less responsive to innovation; with the sole aim of achieving a utopian worker-cooperative owned world? Hrmmm, where have I heard that before...

Turns out the only thing we are doing is making more and more monopolies, there are no free markets and no choice for buyers. Your 88 brands of toothpaste are owned by two corporations. But yeah.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#926

Post by jltsiren »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #888
jltsiren wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The government" is a fictional entity. In reality, it's just a bunch of people. I think the real issue is that free markets and free speech are not really compatible. If people are allowed to express political opinions, some opinions will inevitably become popular. Sometimes that happens because people don't like the outcomes of the market. Then they try to change things by regulating the market. Repeat that often e…

> If people are allowed to express political opinions, some opinions will inevitably become popular. Sometimes that happens because people don't like the outcomes of the market. Then they try to change things by regulating the market. Repeat that often enough, and you get more and more regulations over time. This is not caused by free speech, it's caused by an error in the way our system was designed. The premise was…

You are missing the point.

Free speech is also the freedom to change the rules. If something becomes popular in the marketplace for ideas, there is always a way of turning it into a law. The exact procedures and thresholds may vary, but the possibility always exists. Because laws and constitutions don't enforce themselves. People enforce them, and those people (or their replacements) may choose to enforce them in a different way.

You say that repealing laws should be easier than passing them. But maybe the opposite idea wins in the market. Then it will be easier to pass a new law than to repeal an existing law. Under free speech, all laws, constitutions, and rights are ultimately temporary opinions subject to the whims of the market.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#927

Post by welzel »

The article has a clickbait title. It is also wrong.

NOT every company should give stock options to its employees, because ... it only makes sense if long term success of the company can be significant influenced by its employees. Also, those stock options can be a barrier to growth and become a liability if needed adjustments are blocked in order to protect "stockholder"

NOT all employees should get stock options, specially not the ones who contribute very little to the value generated.

NOT all employees want stock options, as people just want to take the actual money and be free to switch companies. The stock options are a way to control employees.

employee stock options are interesting when the allow to vote on the board. THIS is amazing - and almost nobody does it, because it would actually shift power to the employees.

In most companies, giving stock options is almost a scam; you save actual money for salaries, pretend to share revenues (you don´t) and lock-in high value employees. Also you spread your stocks so you are more protected against hostile takeovers.

Stock options are a great way for the actual owners to save money and actually become more powerful.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#928

Post by Draiken »

Alupis wrote: post #803
Draiken wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this holds to scrutiny. This breaks down as soon as you get out of the idea phase. Everyone has visions, and most great achievements today are the results of an amalgamation of them. The really big achievements are almost always the result of groups, not individuals. People that idolize others have to turn a blind eye to everything surrounding that individual's achievement. It's simply easier to simplif…

> This breaks down as soon as you get out of the idea phase. No, it does not. Most ideas fail, and a significant amount of "off the ground" projects fail. To be successful long term, it requires vision and commitment. You can find people to grind on your vision, but you cannot make them see what you see. The overwhelming majority of massive successful projects and companies have a key figure that drove them to succes…

> You can find people to grind on your vision, but you cannot make them see what you see.

I call bullshit. If you can't explain your vision you're a shitty leader. Good leaders can share their vision and get people to buy into them, adding their visions on top of it.

This is an oversimplification of very complex human interactions. Humans seek the simple explanation, even when there isn't one.

>The overwhelming majority of massive successful projects and companies have a key figure that drove them to success.

  s/a key figure/key figures/g
Every project that is big enough has multiple people driving them to success. This idea that the person at the top is the only one driving it is insane. It's individualistic propaganda. No, you did not build your company/product/achievement alone. It's self-serving bias being projected onto someone else.

>I'd wager there are very few examples (if any) of a massive and successful companies that began life as a startup with a 30+ person board, for example.

That's moving the goalpost. Nobody's saying you need 30 people for things to happen. Anything greater than 1 is, by definition, no longer an individual effort.

Take one of the most known examples: Apple. It took both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to make it happen. After their initial success, it wouldn't have grown to today's behemoth without the thousands of others that came after and worked on each and every product to make them successful. It's always a group effort. We can simplify and say "Jobs did it" but it's absolutely inaccurate.

I don't understand why smart people need idols. I get why the masses need their figures, but once you think about it for 5 seconds it's obvious they are mostly myths.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#929

Post by vidarh »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #425
Jensson wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> just like how communism There is some kind of derangement in the English speaking West, any attempt to reign in power of capital must be communist. If free public libraries didn't exist and were proposed today, they'd be accused of communism. If free public legal deference did not exist today, anyone proposing it would be accused of being a communist. Also notice that using public money to hurt a person, i.e. prose…

The funny thing is that Marx wanted the working class to be armed, and in Critique of the Gotha Programme, he called out the US school system as far preferable to the state-controlled school system proposed by what is now SPD (he argued the Prussian state was in need of an education by the people and shouldn't be put in a position of providing an education to the people). A lot of the people who call everything communism would be very uncomfortable with how many things they agreed with him on if they read any Marx (not because they are left wing, but because a lot of what was radical policy at the time is settled now, but also because already then a schism was developing between those on the left who favoured the state as a tool to transform society, and those who feared it as a potential oppressor, and Marx got increasingly critical of the state with age; where in 1848 he argued for state monopolies, by 1872, after the Paris Commune he criticised them for not having gone far enough in smashing state institutions, and by 1875 he criticised the now-SPD for trusting the reform potential of the Prussian state too much, such as with respect to education as above)

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#930

Post by vidarh »

edm0nd wrote: post #584
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just like how communism There is some kind of derangement in the English speaking West, any attempt to reign in power of capital must be communist. If free public libraries didn't exist and were proposed today, they'd be accused of communism. If free public legal deference did not exist today, anyone proposing it would be accused of being a communist. Also notice that using public money to hurt a person, i.e. prose…

I'm just being pedantic but "free public libraries" don't really exist though. They are paid for by property owners via tax millages rates on their homes. Most people support this but none are free since the public pays for em.

It is pedantic, in as much as when people use "free", we are very aware that it means "free at the point of use", and so pointing out that they are paid for is unnecessary.
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