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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

#941

Post by consteval »

hellojesus wrote: post #819
consteval wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've said, we don't really because union busting is not only allowed but expected. The reality is that employers should not have such autonomy. What you're arguing is the right for an employer to necessarily hold more leverage in negotiation as opposed to workers. Which... isn't a right. It's an anti-right. As in, you want less rights for workers. Unions only work if they're enforced. Just like a right to life imp…

> What you're arguing is the right for an employer to necessarily hold more leverage in negotiation as opposed to workers. Which... isn't a right. It's an anti-right. As in, you want less rights for workers. No. My argument is that forcing companies to only negotiate with unions if that isn't want the company wants to do is an anti-right. It violates free trade. You disallow entity A from negotiating with entity B be…

Unions aren't an external third party, that's where this idea falls apart.

If an employee wants to work without a hard hat, and the employer also wants the employee to work without a hard hat, but OSHA says no, is that more or less rights?

The naive answer is less rights - well the employee wants to! In practice, this manifests as pressure. Soon no employees wear hard hats. And they're denied the right to a safe working environment.

I argue its MORE rights. Because we give the employee, and employer, the right to a safe working environment.

Meaning, if we want employees to have the right to fair negotiations, we have to restrict employers.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#942

Post by carlosjobim »

WJW wrote: post #695
standardUser wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> once that piece of ownership has been attained it's also rational to want to preserve and maximize the value of that investment By that logic, the idea of workers having part ownership of the companies they work for has a lot of upside.

Focusing on the possible upsides tends to ignore the possible downsides. Worker ownership is only great when the company does well. If the company does not do well, the workers don't just lose their job but their nest egg at the same time. Let's not pretend that you can always influence whether your company will grow or not, sometimes you just work at Altavista and Google just launched. The average worker has enough…

To eliminate that risk, the worker ownerships shouldn't be in direct stock with the company they work for, but instead be part ownership of a large industry specific fund who in turn takes ownership in the companies. That way, the individual worker will not be punished if the company he or she works for performs bad or has to close down. This large funds could also use their ownership as a tool to steer companies into more climate friendly operations and make sure the companies hire people from groups who need special protection. The boards of these funds should consist of elected politicians, bank executives, union leaders and prominent Arch Linux contributors. Yes, yes! Excellent!

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#944

Post by imtringued »

emporas wrote: post #935
4gotunameagain wrote: post #906

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Greeks ... working towards creating powerful nuclear weapons" Source ? I highly, highly doubt that this is true.

Every smart person on the planet works towards nuclear weapons. It's self evident, it doesn't need source. I am talking very about small nukes, cheap, minimal and for personal use as a self defense. Two grams of gold cheap, 1 km evaporation range and 5 km blast. Very minimal, but as soon as millions of people have one, gather a lot of them in one place and you do some serious damage. This lady seriously suggests that…

Ok, now let's assume this is correct and a deranged person in my neighborhood threatens to use their nuke, how is the police supposed to react to that? Are they supposed to detonate their personal nuke and destroy the neighbourhood?

You haven't thought through any of this.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#946

Post by brnt »

fragmede wrote: post #716
kerkeslager wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is obviously not the case for a majority of companies and anecdotes don't help. That isn't obvious at all. The US has the one of the highest pay gaps of any developed nation. Our largest companies with the richest executives have employees on food stamps. I'm not being cynical, I'm talking about reality, and I'm not going to shut up about it just so you can maintain your comfortable naivete on this issue. > Ev…

> The US has the highest pay gap of any nation. This doesn't contradict your point, but fwiw the pay gap of quite a few other nations come before the US. In terms of RP, the US ranks about 35th, behind many African and Asian nations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

You left a key word out in the quote. Nobody wants to compete with Saudi Arabia when it comes to equality.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#947

Post by mikrl »

hobs wrote: post #491
bayareateg wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that people often put on rose colored glasses when talking about the "old country," myself included. It is a little ridiculous to think that Greeks don't prioritize making money over some nebulous "community happiness"' You should have asked her why she came to the US

Pretty much every Greek that I have met (my father included) did it for a better future (money, no future with the military junta, american base left later.) Plenty of Greeks have no interest in going back because they want the "American" life, but there's no question you ate better in the village, had more community, or had a sense of history - what you didn't have was more than ~35k euros a year, if you were lucky.

A philosophical question is whether one could have it all?

Maybe the relative poverty fosters that kind of culture, and a high earning society necessarily becomes atomized, or perhaps atomized societies fosters high earning.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#948

Post by dleink »

victorbjorklund wrote: post #679
nanomonkey wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume that is because they take on jobs that they'll be happy with, instead of what ever job makes the most money. If you're content with what you do, you can do it sustainably for the rest of your life, if your only motivation to do your job is the money, then you'll burn out and retire early.

Not the case. People working in say fast food in Greece have 6 workday weeks (their weekends are just 1 day per week). Doubt people are more happy cleaning restaurant toilets in Greece vs the same toilets in US.

Having worked service industry jobs (US) I think there would be a dramatic increase in my quality of life had the customers been happier.

Not to mention the unrelenting psychic toll of working low wage jobs in a country with a weak social safety net.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#949

Post by charles_f »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #863
charles_f wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is so backwards! Workers are always at the mercy of shareholders (for whom apparently it's not bad to own a share?), and whom again and again will do a little layoff here and there because we need a percent or two more this quarter. Profit sharing will be the first thing to stop if results are temporarily worse. On the other hand, if the company is owned by its workers, nothing prevents them from redistributing…

What do you do when 51% of the workers vote to not redistribute profits and to lay off 10% of the other workers so the shares they own can grow by a percent or two next quarter? edit: spelling

Comparatively to people who don't work here, they're incentivized against that.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#950

Post by fuzzfactor »

piva00 wrote: post #430
Gormo wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2. A business-first, citizens-second approach to society. This is meaningless. Businesses are activities undertaken by people. Everything resolves back to the people -- the same aggregation of the same individual people in all cases. Reifying the abstraction of "business" to treat it like some separate entity that's at odds with the very people who are engaging in the actual activity that term describes is a monumen…

No, it's not meaningless. Businesses are activities undertaken by people but they are also legal entities which have no need to abide by ethical or moral standards, shielding the underlying people from liabilities incurred by such entity. People can't do that. Citizens need to abide to cultural norms, societal expectations, etc. Of course everything resolves back to people, in a reductive sense, but those entities (c…

>the nosedive of Boeing, etc.

Mission-critical companies were not supposed to degenerate to having any outstanding leadership risks that can leave room for such tragic nosedives :/

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