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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

#951

Post by phyzix5761 »

charles_f wrote: post #949
phyzix5761 wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're not. If they let go of 10% of the staff the value of their shares (or number of shares) increases. This means that the next time there's a dividend they'll get more money. They're incentivized to decrease the number of workers and not hire any more until it starts hurting their returns. Same exact thing that happens when shares are owned by external shareholders.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#952

Post by munificent »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #738
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…

How about this scenario: Houses go up in price exactly in keeping with inflation. I buy a house with 10% down[1] as a way of locking in the current price, to avoid my rent going up every six months, even if the initial payment is more than my rent[2]. Time passes. The price of everything doubles. If I had kept my down payment instead of buying the house, it would have grown into twice as many dollars, and still be wo…

> If I had kept my down payment instead of buying the house, it would have grown into twice as many dollars,

Yes, but you can't live in a Vanguard account.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#953

Post by its_ethan »

ossobuco wrote: post #921
its_ethan wrote: post #760

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I am not the person you were arguing with, so sure maybe I don't know what the other guys argument is lol

I was just commenting on what I was seeing in your comments - sorry that I struck a nerve..

I'm not sure what bubble you think I'm living in, given how little you know about me. But in "your bubble" it doesn't seem like there's a way to reconcile two very antithetical propositions: 1- people don't have the resources/knowledge to invest, but also 2- they can use their excess resources to diversify away from having significant investment with solely their employer. How does that work?

And just to re-iterate, no one besides you has brought up the intelligence of "most people" when it comes to the ability to invest. So...?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#954

Post by Shawnj2 »

renewiltord wrote: post #723
pjc50 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The limit case is of course https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/06/13/tes... It's difficult to understand pay of that size on a rational level. That represents individual shareholders voting for a significant dilution just to retain an extremely controversial celebrity CEO at a time when sales are falling. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/02/t... I see this kind of thing more as…

Worked out for me. I bought a bunch on the last time everyone claimed Tesla was dead and then voted to keep Elon. Up 28%. Everyone’s got theories. I prefer money. What use are your theories if they don’t predict the outcome.

Tesla stock is basically Monopoly money and has no real relationship with how Tesla as a car company as actually doing

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#955

Post by npoc »

nostrademons wrote: post #717
xivzgrev wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Homes shouldn't be an investment. They've accidentally become that in the past few decades, and as a result, affordability is getting worse. The better it does as an investment class, the worse it will become. It's a self perpetuating spiral. I don't see the market solving this. I only see some regulation helping here - ie any tax filer can at most own 1 SFH (this includes married couples). So no second, third, tenth…

Having homes be investments is a good thing, in the original sense of "investment": something that you own which you put effort into in the hopes of making it better later. Incentives change dramatically as a homeowner in ways that are generally beneficial to the community: you are incentivized to improve the property, to maintain the property, to put effort into the local community in ways that make the land and loc…

> because people aren't actually using crypto, they're just hodling and hoping $$$ go up.

This is such a common mistake. By HODLing, you are using it - to store your wealth. This is what the bitcoin network is optimised for - storing large amounts of value for large periods of time. Nothing else has fundamental properties that come close for this use case.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#956

Post by randomdata »

triceratops wrote: post #864
randomdata wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unions aren't structured for investing, and that's not their reason to exist. Depends on the union. A credit union is structured for investing and is literally their reason to exist.

Most marriages - a kind of union - also don't invest in cooperatives. Even if they meet the accredited investor standard. Neither does the Union of European Football Associations, otherwise known as UEFA. They make up for it with a dope anthem. Neither the Kalmar Union, nor any other personal union of monarchs, ever invested in a cooperative. Although some may have invested in joint stock companies, such as the vario…

> Most marriages - a kind of union - also don't invest in cooperatives.

Is that because most marriages exist in urban centres where cooperatives are uncommon to non-existent? Out here in rural country, where cooperatives are the norm, most married people invest in cooperatives as most of the cooperatives are customer owned. You don't have much choice but to invest, assuming you want to be a customer – and no doubt you want to be, given that they provide basic services for the region.

I'm certainly an investor in several co-ops, and not because I went out of my way to do so. That is, with the exception of one co-op, which I provided additional investment to. That particular co-op runs a very successful operation and provides healthy returns in what is a comparatively stable environment to those who provide an over-and-above investment. They attract quite a lot of investment dollars as a result.

Which says something about unions that aren't investing. Why aren't they investing? Simple: The companies they see in front of them aren't worth investing in.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#957

Post by RhodesianHunter »

overrun11 wrote: post #730
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have missed an absolutely critical element of what drives human behavior. We call it "incentive".

Yes both the money and the stock are incentives and they are of equal value. You've still failed to explain why one is better than the other.

Stock vests over time. By providing stock instead of cash the company incentivizes the employee to do their best, because that will ostensibly help the stock to be worth more than the cash by the time it vests. Hence, incentive.

Does that make more sense?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#958

Post by fuzzfactor »

Gormo wrote: post #802
piva00 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I don't understand the concept of assigning moral agency to a pattern of activity. The legal entity is itself just a conceptual framework under which actual people operate, and not a…

This makes sense along with piva, probably because there is enough inconsistency in the familiar system as it has developed, that it's less possible all the time to make black & white judgments.

>Unscrupulous

>-- they will find ways to benefit at the expense of others no mater what system you cook up.

A more sophisticated chef with a dish completely unfamiliar but irresistible can still be disruptive. Whether or not it's a brand new concoction or a rehash of something so out-of-style that it's simply long forgotten.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#959

Post by charles_f »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #951
charles_f wrote: post #949

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're not. If they let go of 10% of the staff the value of their shares (or number of shares) increases. This means that the next time there's a dividend they'll get more money. They're incentivized to decrease the number of workers and not hire any more until it starts hurting their returns. Same exact thing that happens when shares are owned by external shareholders.

That's an interesting proposition, and honestly I can't tell if you're right or not.

If it's worker owned, what happens to the shares when a worker leaves? Do they have to sell? In which case, is the company buying back, or the remaining workers (or is that the same thing?). If that's so, the share behaves less like a regular share, and more like a vested interest that doubles as a layoff package.

Also, is the value of a share that's owned by someone expecting a salary going up when there's a layoff? Since the only people who can buy are internal to the company (which is a very small pool), do you apply the same rules when it comes to valuation? I wouldn't presume its value behaves in the same way as an externally owned shareholder.

The incentive to keep the number of workers low is certainly there, though ; I'm wondering if that's more of an incentive against hiring (which you can see as a healthy thing).

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#960

Post by AbstractH24 »

This

My wife is in an industry that’s quickly getting unionized by 20-something who think unions are a paneca and are about to learn unions just create a different set of problems and add misaligned incentives.

What is really needed is something more like Germany where employees are significant steakholders

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