Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lindy Fiorentina fucking up HP. Boeing all over. I'd hope to see employee-owners counteract short-termism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carly_Fiorina ?
Oops. Thank you.
Every company should be owned by its employees
991–1000 of 1001 posts
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#992Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why should the employee with the CEO title get a raise for increasing company profits, while the employees without the CEO title do not get a raise for increasing company profits?
> the company would make less money and it would be the CEO's fault.
It would be the CEO's fault, and the workers who were not at fault would be fired when the company needs to tighten the belt.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#993Earlier quoted context omitted.
So "Greek are lazy" is condescending but everyone in US prioritized making money is just fact? BTW there must be some interesting story that your Greek teacher had to move to US and deprioritize happiness.
I'm an American currently living in greece for the past month. Both are more or less factual statements.
Ah yes, the famous “more or less factual statements”, a useful contribution to any serious thought process
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#994Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 work…
My belief stats simply that the employees that want to wear hard hats seek employment elsewhere. Combined with much higher private insurance rates, it's unlikely that the business without hardhats would remain competitively priced.
Edit: OSHA would truly be a third party here. A union is a first party. Also: I believe OSHA is unconstitutional.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#995Earlier quoted context omitted.
Efficiency is measured exactly by people maximizing their utility subject to their preferences and constraints. What you see as vanity, such as hair extensions, may be a high utility item for others. Consider the hair extensions make them a more attractive mate and provide them the opportunity to breed with a better stock, for example. Similarly, consider that 20k ft sq mansion in context: all the prior owner(s) of t…
> That is maximally efficient, economically speaking. It is not. The resources which went towards that mansion would be (by your definition) much more efficiently spent elsewhere. The utility which one wealthy person gets from a 20k sqft mansion is much smaller than the total utility which 20 homeless people would get from a 1k sqft apartment.
What utility is the person from whom you stole wealth getting from homeless people being housed vs their mansion?
My answer is economically efficient. Yours is utilitarian. I believe in private property.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#996Earlier quoted context omitted.
Happiness. What hell is it even? It means nothing. Why? Because I am the most happy when working at a high paying job with loots of interesting problems to solve. I would be the least happy working at a high paying job with nothing to do. Happiness is a comparator, not a number. Money on the other hand can be counted, and thus can be measured. I am 100% sure every Greek ever would be more happy with more money given…
> Happiness. What hell is it even? It means nothing Money means even less. > Why? Because I am the most happy when working at a high paying job with loots of interesting problems to solve. Yes, people have been conditioned to be working.
I feel like your comment proves my point. On one hand I am saying what the hell is it even? And on the other hand you are telling ME my happiness is just "because I have been conditioned to work". You did zero to address what happiness is.
Money is a way to transfer resources. Resources make people happy. Somebody with no food for 3 days is happy when they finally get food. Money buys food, therefor money can buy happiness. People like to say the opposite, but they forget money can also buy unhappiness, or when talking bout the extreme cases where somebody has 20 billion, would 1 more billion have any affect on their happiness? Oh shit, we are back to WTF is even happiness. For all we know 1B more to the 20B guy might make them more happy because they are now richer than their enemy or some other happiness driven from the count of money.
We can break this down in other ways too. Some people say family is what makes them happy. I can tell you that a family of 12 with no money is less happy than a family of 12 with enough money. Its the difference between having shoes, or eating in may cases. Its clear that happiness is a compactor, and money can change the outcome.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#997I think it's easy to look at this with an existing, successful business in mind - but things don't always work out that way. How would a business like this get started? Usually the owner is the one who invests a lot of their own time and/or money into the business to get it off the ground in the first place. Would we be asking workers to pony up in those early years when failure is likely? With Central States, the st…
Usually businesses become an ESOP because the founder sells it to the employees. To even qualify to become an ESOP, the company has to be successful, so by default most ESOPS are. I advocate for incentivizing the model, not requiring it. But I have a follow up piece coming out soon with more detail.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#998Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting some of your salary in stock options isn't really an employee owned company. How many % of total Google shares are owned by employees (excluding the founding employees)? 0,0000000001%? At least 50% would be required for it to be viewed as an employee owned company.
Also it's generally unwise to hold onto your employer's stocks that you were granted as single stock ownership is inherently risky. There's no reason to believe your employer's shares are going to beat the market. Also, the majority of employees in a company other than small startups do not have the ability to shift their company's success materially to make it a worthy incentive to own and hold employer issued stock…
90% of employee owners also have a 401k or retirement account. An ESOP account is in addition to their retirement account, not instead of it. So it's actually more of an upside without any downside.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#999I think it's easy to look at this with an existing, successful business in mind - but things don't always work out that way. How would a business like this get started? Usually the owner is the one who invests a lot of their own time and/or money into the business to get it off the ground in the first place. Would we be asking workers to pony up in those early years when failure is likely? With Central States, the st…
This model also puts a lot of risk on the employees. It’s basically forcing investment in the same company that pays your salary. An investment that has less liquidity than standard investments. It’s like putting all your retirement fund into your company’s stock.
Not true, 90% of employees with an ESOP account also have a 401k or other retirement account. The ESOP account is not instead of a retirement account, it's in addition to it.
Re: Every company should be owned by its employees
#1000I’ve worked for two companies that had ESOPs while they were privately traded. In both cases, the companies were sold to larger corporate entities that promptly got rid of the ESOP. Not that it is all that bad. One sale happened after I left the company. The sale of the company included the shares owned by employees through the ESOP. So for one sale, I got several tens of thousands of dollars (hadn’t been part of the…
Thanks for sharing your experiences. Very curious to ask a few questions: How was your experience being an employee-owner at either one of these companies? Did you receive any transparency of the ESOP plan (distributions, allocations, etc.)? For both companies, how did you receive the funds once the companies were sold to the larger corp companies (cheques, direct, etc.)?
Sorry for the late response.
It may have been culture brainwashing, but we definitely felt more of an ownership vibe. We awaited the periodic valuations that the ESOP share price was based on and the process seemed relatively transparent.
An accounting and legal firm handled the dismantling of the ESOPs. We received a letter itemizing our shares and the value based on the company sales price. Then a few months later, we got a check (which you could have made out to your IRA management or whoever or to yourself if you were ready to pay taxes on it.
In the case of the company I’d left, I had to wait 6 years to get paid out (turned out to be about 4.5 because of their sale).