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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

#981

Post by valval »

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…

I love reading long, matter-of-fact toned messages like this where obviously no serious thinking was done prior.

It’s a silly statement that the efforts of Starbucks baristas wouldn’t have a massive impact on the company’s business.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#982

Post by nox101 »

lelanthran wrote: post #893
nox101 wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zuckerberg doesn't get to do what he wants. He's in meetings constantly and rarely has a free moment

> Zuckerberg doesn't get to do what he wants. He's in meetings constantly and rarely has a free moment This argument of Conclusion: $RichPerson doesn't get to do what they want. Premise: They're under constant obligation to $MoneyMachine is both unsound and invalid. The premise is wrong: at that levels of wealth, the obligation is not real, it's opt-in and you can opt-out at any time. The conclusion is wrong too: At…

Disagree. To me this is like saying parents can always just abandon their children. Zuckerberg likely feels an overwhelming responsibility to show up as the CEO. Could he technically not show up? Sure. And any parent can technically not show up for their children. Both of them feel overwhelming responsibility to show up. In fact often the draw to work is stronger than children, hence so many stories of parents putting work first, not because they need the money, but, because they feel responsible for things at work.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#983

Post by jack_pp »

cen4 wrote: post #978
jack_pp wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What construct? Having a job is also a construct and it seems it's the dominant one. 26% of women are housewives [1]. The status quo is working mothers, are you a chatbot that thinks this is the fifties? I'd say you are being too imaginative. You are framing a traditional family as this abusive thing, master and slave except it's 2024. Marriage, at least in the US is extremely dangerous to men, if their wives divorce…

Women have been framing marriage as a work contract from the 60s, world wide, since they don't get paid anywhere close to what men get paid, just like the barista and the ceo. As more of them have paths to exit this contract, they will do so. Alimony laws are temporary reactions to the problem. There is no great benefit to sitting and spending your whole life dependent financially on someone else especially if you do…

> Women have been framing marriage as a work contract

Not all women. It is there job of men to figure out this kind of woman and not marry them

> There is no great benefit to sitting and spending your whole life dependent financially on someone else especially if you don't have anything in common.

Sure, why the hell would you marry someone that you have nothing in common with though?

> people who hang out on HN is they don't know any sociology

I actually went to university to try and study sociology and lasted about a month. My opinion of it is that it is more a propaganda and indoctrination tool than a science. Sociology school is just a woke factory. When I got into an argument with a professor and was winning with logic and science on my side I got told to be careful what I say because I hold "dangerous beliefs" which might stop me from being someone important one day, so warning me I might get canceled in the future for those "beliefs" which were merely common sense facts. That's when I decided I got better things to do with my time

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#984

Post by Gormo »

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.

Can you explain what you mean? How are vendors selling services to an organization also "vendees" within the same capacity?

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#985

Post by lelanthran »

nox101 wrote: post #982
lelanthran wrote: post #893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Zuckerberg doesn't get to do what he wants. He's in meetings constantly and rarely has a free moment This argument of Conclusion: $RichPerson doesn't get to do what they want. Premise: They're under constant obligation to $MoneyMachine is both unsound and invalid. The premise is wrong: at that levels of wealth, the obligation is not real, it's opt-in and you can opt-out at any time. The conclusion is wrong too: At…

Disagree. To me this is like saying parents can always just abandon their children. Zuckerberg likely feels an overwhelming responsibility to show up as the CEO. Could he technically not show up? Sure. And any parent can technically not show up for their children. Both of them feel overwhelming responsibility to show up. In fact often the draw to work is stronger than children, hence so many stories of parents puttin…

> To me this is like saying parents can always just abandon their children. Zuckerberg likely feels an overwhelming responsibility to show up as the CEO. Could he technically not show up? Sure. And any parent can technically not show up for their children.

I strongly disagree[1]; I think it is incorrect to equivocate a non-living thing that needs no care from a particular person to a child's objective need for their parent.

If we reduce all arguments to "well, of course that person cares about $FOO, because parents care about their kids", then any $FOO is then as equally valid to kill oneself over[2].

You created a well-loved piece of art? Well then it's okay to jump in front of a n oncoming train to save it because that's what parents do for their kids!

You wrote a research paper on good UI guidelines? Well then it's okay to jump into a burning building to get the only copy because that's what a parent would do for a child.

I guess I'm just trying to demonstrate that there are few, maybe even none, "I created this thing" comparisons with the parent->child and child->parent relationships.

[1] But I see your point, so upvoted you anyway. I just think that your point is not at all comparable to a parent/child relationship.

[2] Parents will not hesitate to put their life in danger to save their child.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#986

Post by EnigmaFlare »

carlosjobim wrote: post #681
EnigmaFlare wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have 350 employees, then they double the company's profit, I suppose they just generated 350x times the value of an average employee. If they have more employees, they only need to increase it a smaller proportion to be generating 350x as much value.

Yes, if the 350 employees kept working the same as usual, and the only thing that changed was something the CEO did, not anything he ordered the employees to do.

Why that restriction? Deciding the direction employees work in is part of the CEO's job. If he directed them badly (say, to work on a project that fails because he misjudged the market), the company would make less money and it would be the CEO's fault.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#987

Post by bccdee »

blackhawkC17 wrote: post #894
bccdee wrote: post #850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of government funds have also been looted by CCP honchos. Yeah, because they're corrupt and undemocratic. I certainly don't endorse China. But they do put to rest the idea that the freer the market, the stronger the economy.

No they don’t. China got richer when they implemented free market reforms, proving the idea. Unfortunately Xi is now focused on saber-rattling about national security and bullying neighbors. He has cracked down on free markets, and China’s economy is suffering due to his incompetence.

It's not a binary. If we say market freedom is a spectrum with the USSR at 0 and the US at 10 (reductive, but let's pretend) then China moved from 0 to 5 and became a global power within a couple decades. This is a strong argument in favour of a level-5 economy, not a level-10 economy..

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#988

Post by bccdee »

Aerroon wrote: post #966
bccdee wrote: post #848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You assume pharmaceutical profits are all funnelled to R&D, rather than to shareholders. I see no reason why we shouldn't slash profit margins on medicine and offer the money back in earmarked grants. So you see, I'm actually radically in favour of R&D.

No, I'm not assuming that. The profit motive is why they get the capital to do the R&D. I'm not just talking about developing an entirely novel drug but also manufacturing and testing it. Without the possibility of this outrageous profit we would just get less drug research done. That money would then be invested in something else. Drug prices wouldn't be so outrageous (probably), but we probably also wouldn't have a…

> The profit motive is why they get the capital to do the R&D.

A massive amount of research is funded by public grants. iPhones are a famous example of a private-sector product almost entirely created off the back of public research. It is absolutely not true that private investment is required for pharmaceutical R&D.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#989

Post by wordpad25 »

mikrl wrote: post #947
hobs wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being poor fosters comradery and social connections

Everyone knows everyone in a ghetto. Gated communities often don't know their next door neighbors.

Re: Every company should be owned by its employees

#990

Post by psd1 »

coderatlarge wrote: post #905
psd1 wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, the outcome is not guaranteed. But the possibility of a confidence vote might surface in a psycho CEO's brain from time to time.
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