5 ms·

I think employees want control of their own life, more share in decision-making. Essentially, they want democracy, even if they can't articulate it. But in capi

by js8 11y ago

I think employees want control of their own life, more share in decision-making. Essentially, they want democracy, even if they can't articulate it. But in capitalist society, where the ownership of capital decides, this cannot happen. There are attempts to tiptoe around this problem with holacracies and Agile methodologies and similar concepts, but the main problem still remains.

toyg 11y ago
> where the ownership of capital decides Well, "the ownership of capital", in a lot of public companies, is basically an absentee landlord. So it's not entirely about ownership, but rather about management. You can have cooperatives that are de-facto feudal/tyrannical structures, and private companies that are de-facto democracies.
- js8 11y ago
  I was talking about democracy with respect to employees. Even then, an important aspect of democracy is one person one vote (equality of access to power), which is untrue in public companies.
  - distracted828 11y ago
    Having been part of a technical organization that was a democracy: no. I'll take a monarchy over 5-hour meetings where nothing is decided and the room hates each other any day.
    - jahaja 11y ago
      So you believe a dysfunctional, albeit democratic, company is the goal?
danieltillett 11y ago
In theory workers co-operatives are this, but they have a habit of not doing so well in the real world. It is a really interesting question why this is the case. Why should a business owned by a capitalist for their own benefit be able to outcompete a workers co-operative?
- tehbeard 11y ago
  Too many cooks spoil the broth? A single /small group of owners is more likely to reach a consensus quicker (no guarentee it'll be a good one, just quicker) than a larger group whose ideas/goals will be more diverse between each member, and more likely to be a compromise.
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    Most workers even in coops don't want to engage with the political (small p ) side of it. And you do get into silly arguments over exactly which version of STV you use ;-)
- jasode 11y ago
  >It is a really interesting question why this is the case. Why should a business owned by a capitalist for their own benefit be able to outcompete a workers co-operative? Because 99.9% of typical workers don't have the money to build the business. Take for example, Google Inc. origins in 1998. Both L Page and S Brin came from upper middle class families but neither of their bank accounts nor their parents' bank accounts had $25 million to spend on a business. It's also doubtful if either family could have been approved for a $25m unsecured business loan from a bank. Likewise, Google's first 100 employeees also didn't collectively have $25 million. On the other hand, VCs like Sequioa and KPCB did have $25 million to invest. Later on, more investors bought IPO shares totaling $1.9 billion. There is no union of workers that can pool together that kind of cash. Since a co-op by definition must be owned by the workers, the question is no longer "interesting" with a mysterious answer. Instead, it's tautological. If you look at the typical workers' modest savings as the ceiling for funding a business, it's obvious why they can't compete with businesses built by investors/capitalists money. While WorkersOwnedSearchEngine Inc scrapes together $30,000 from their owners-workers' savings accounts to buy a 5th rack server from dell.com, Google Inc. can use a fraction of its $2 billion war chest to buy an entire data center and also break ground on a brand new one.
  - spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
    That (access to capital) is the big issue for coops. I used to be a member of a UK coop in the technical space (poptel) and we did do some work with VC funding. As long as the coop members have 50% +1 that ok but it can go wrong (thank you very much ICANN) as we found at poptel. The other problem is the coop movement in general is very old fashioned and isn't really embracing technical changes. Which is a pity as if poptel had been brought out by the main uk coop we woudl have all had a very nice 6 figure payday.
jdmichal 11y ago
Actually, as an employee I want a strong vision with clear, achievable goals. It makes it easy to tell what I should be doing to be successful, and that is what lets me control my career. Interestingly enough, these properties are usually enhanced with smaller decision making groups, because values are less spread across the spectrum. If I have 50 decision makers, I have 50 different value functions to attempt to meet. [0] If I have one decision maker, I only have one value function to meet. [0] In reality, I would have to spend some time trimming down the list of 50 based on influence. Which is not always an easy signal to find.
- drdeadringer 11y ago
  > I want a strong vision with clear, achievable goals I cannot stress enough how awful the opposite of this is. Coming into work every day and wondering why any of this is going on as if we're in some WWI mindless-war hell, why we are even doing this in the first place after all of the legitimate and serious objections were flat out trashed, "process du jour" being a very real thing for extended periods of time. ... and all this at not a startup but at established top-tier companies. Clear decisions, common direction, and stated intentions are wonderful.
- js8 11y ago
  Why can't you vote on the strong vision? Voting will aggregate the value functions and solve your problem. Democratic cooperative doesn't mean that everything has to be voted on. It can have hierarchy, if employees find such arrangement useful; the point is that you have a (collective) right to overrule it.
  - jdmichal 11y ago
    Strong visions can be arrived at collectively -- but it requires trust, not voting. If I have 10 people, and 7 vote A and 3 vote B, then A should be the collective "strong vision". The thing is, those three people that voted for B still think that B was the best approach, because nothing has worked to change their mind post-vote. It's exactly equivalent to your boss coming and telling you to take out the trash, when you hate taking out the trash. You do it anyway, but you definitely don't put your full effort into it, and you might even implement small sabotages. If the trash bag is leaking, maybe you just let it leak as you take it out, instead of rewrapping it to prevent the leak. So now you have an ideological split that will manifest itself throughout implementation of the vision. The way to fix this is to have honest, open discussion to collectively arrive at a vision. That way, there is no cognitive dissonance between the vision and the team members. The problem is, this is hard and requires a lot of trust. I'd recommend reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team [0] if you really want to dig into this philosophy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...
yummyfajitas 11y ago
How does democracy give employees "control of their own life"? In any organization of appreciable size, your vote doesn't matter. Capitalism gives employees control; your life has changed immediately after you exercise your option to exit. Voting simply doesn't. It's also potentially very harmful, due to the principal/agent problem. Every agent (employee) has the incentive to loot the company, build empires, and protect their job. But such things are of course very bad for organizations. This is made worse by democracy, because not only do voters have no incentive to do what's best for the organization, they can do whatever makes them feel good (since their vote doesn't matter). (As an example of the principal/agent problem, witness Marisa Mayer vs Starboard. She wants to keep her job and build her empire at Yahoo. Shareholders want to avoid paying taxes on Alibaba, which will destroy far more value than the Yahoo empire could ever plausibly be worth.)
- jahaja 11y ago
  > But such things are of course very bad for organizations. I'd say the ideals of a worker cooperative is that the workers _are_ the organization. The organization is a means to an end for all workers benefit. Not the other way around as is usually the case in a totalitarian capitalistic one. And yes you're right, Capitalism gives you as much control giving as any totalitarian system, quitting/exile. As the goal of worker cooperatives is usually not to become multi-nationals I'm not sure how low your bar is for when ones vote become absolutely futile.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    When P(vote affects outcome) x (Value of outcome A - value of outcome B) < emotional_benefit_of_doing_whatever_you_want. You observe this effect in national politics all the time - for instance, the emotional benefit of voting for a cool guy like Trump drastically exceeds P(vote effects outcome) x (Delta in outcomes). Last time I checked, I had to approximate P(vote effects outcome) by hand because it was too small to represent with double precision floating point numbers.
- js8 11y ago
  Democracy is not just voting, it also gives you possibly to put forward proposals and candidate for leading roles. As other commenter said, you can always exit. But democracy gives you explicit right to change things (albeit no bigger than to other people in the organization), which is actually a more efficient method of introducing change than fatalistically wait until the dysfunctional organization dies.
hencq 11y ago
One of my professors in college stated (perhaps wishfully) that one day we'll look back at today as a time where employees had the strange habit of coming into work in the morning and first thing they did was remove their brain and leave it with their jackets on the coat rack because they wouldn't need it the rest of the day.

by js8 11y ago

toyg 11y ago

> where the ownership of capital decides Well, "the ownership of capital", in a lot of public companies, is basically an absentee landlord. So it's not entirely about ownership, but rather about management. You can have cooperatives that are de-facto feudal/tyrannical structures, and private companies that are de-facto democracies.

js8 11y ago
I was talking about democracy with respect to employees. Even then, an important aspect of democracy is one person one vote (equality of access to power), which is untrue in public companies.
- distracted828 11y ago
  Having been part of a technical organization that was a democracy: no. I'll take a monarchy over 5-hour meetings where nothing is decided and the room hates each other any day.
  - jahaja 11y ago
    So you believe a dysfunctional, albeit democratic, company is the goal?

danieltillett 11y ago

In theory workers co-operatives are this, but they have a habit of not doing so well in the real world. It is a really interesting question why this is the case. Why should a business owned by a capitalist for their own benefit be able to outcompete a workers co-operative?

tehbeard 11y ago
Too many cooks spoil the broth? A single /small group of owners is more likely to reach a consensus quicker (no guarentee it'll be a good one, just quicker) than a larger group whose ideas/goals will be more diverse between each member, and more likely to be a compromise.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  Most workers even in coops don't want to engage with the political (small p ) side of it. And you do get into silly arguments over exactly which version of STV you use ;-)
jasode 11y ago
>It is a really interesting question why this is the case. Why should a business owned by a capitalist for their own benefit be able to outcompete a workers co-operative? Because 99.9% of typical workers don't have the money to build the business. Take for example, Google Inc. origins in 1998. Both L Page and S Brin came from upper middle class families but neither of their bank accounts nor their parents' bank accounts had $25 million to spend on a business. It's also doubtful if either family could have been approved for a $25m unsecured business loan from a bank. Likewise, Google's first 100 employeees also didn't collectively have $25 million. On the other hand, VCs like Sequioa and KPCB did have $25 million to invest. Later on, more investors bought IPO shares totaling $1.9 billion. There is no union of workers that can pool together that kind of cash. Since a co-op by definition must be owned by the workers, the question is no longer "interesting" with a mysterious answer. Instead, it's tautological. If you look at the typical workers' modest savings as the ceiling for funding a business, it's obvious why they can't compete with businesses built by investors/capitalists money. While WorkersOwnedSearchEngine Inc scrapes together $30,000 from their owners-workers' savings accounts to buy a 5th rack server from dell.com, Google Inc. can use a fraction of its $2 billion war chest to buy an entire data center and also break ground on a brand new one.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y ago
  That (access to capital) is the big issue for coops. I used to be a member of a UK coop in the technical space (poptel) and we did do some work with VC funding. As long as the coop members have 50% +1 that ok but it can go wrong (thank you very much ICANN) as we found at poptel. The other problem is the coop movement in general is very old fashioned and isn't really embracing technical changes. Which is a pity as if poptel had been brought out by the main uk coop we woudl have all had a very nice 6 figure payday.

jdmichal 11y ago

Actually, as an employee I want a strong vision with clear, achievable goals. It makes it easy to tell what I should be doing to be successful, and that is what lets me control my career. Interestingly enough, these properties are usually enhanced with smaller decision making groups, because values are less spread across the spectrum. If I have 50 decision makers, I have 50 different value functions to attempt to meet. [0] If I have one decision maker, I only have one value function to meet. [0] In reality, I would have to spend some time trimming down the list of 50 based on influence. Which is not always an easy signal to find.

drdeadringer 11y ago
> I want a strong vision with clear, achievable goals I cannot stress enough how awful the opposite of this is. Coming into work every day and wondering why any of this is going on as if we're in some WWI mindless-war hell, why we are even doing this in the first place after all of the legitimate and serious objections were flat out trashed, "process du jour" being a very real thing for extended periods of time. ... and all this at not a startup but at established top-tier companies. Clear decisions, common direction, and stated intentions are wonderful.
js8 11y ago
Why can't you vote on the strong vision? Voting will aggregate the value functions and solve your problem. Democratic cooperative doesn't mean that everything has to be voted on. It can have hierarchy, if employees find such arrangement useful; the point is that you have a (collective) right to overrule it.
- jdmichal 11y ago
  Strong visions can be arrived at collectively -- but it requires trust, not voting. If I have 10 people, and 7 vote A and 3 vote B, then A should be the collective "strong vision". The thing is, those three people that voted for B still think that B was the best approach, because nothing has worked to change their mind post-vote. It's exactly equivalent to your boss coming and telling you to take out the trash, when you hate taking out the trash. You do it anyway, but you definitely don't put your full effort into it, and you might even implement small sabotages. If the trash bag is leaking, maybe you just let it leak as you take it out, instead of rewrapping it to prevent the leak. So now you have an ideological split that will manifest itself throughout implementation of the vision. The way to fix this is to have honest, open discussion to collectively arrive at a vision. That way, there is no cognitive dissonance between the vision and the team members. The problem is, this is hard and requires a lot of trust. I'd recommend reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team [0] if you really want to dig into this philosophy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...

yummyfajitas 11y ago

How does democracy give employees "control of their own life"? In any organization of appreciable size, your vote doesn't matter. Capitalism gives employees control; your life has changed immediately after you exercise your option to exit. Voting simply doesn't. It's also potentially very harmful, due to the principal/agent problem. Every agent (employee) has the incentive to loot the company, build empires, and protect their job. But such things are of course very bad for organizations. This is made worse by democracy, because not only do voters have no incentive to do what's best for the organization, they can do whatever makes them feel good (since their vote doesn't matter). (As an example of the principal/agent problem, witness Marisa Mayer vs Starboard. She wants to keep her job and build her empire at Yahoo. Shareholders want to avoid paying taxes on Alibaba, which will destroy far more value than the Yahoo empire could ever plausibly be worth.)

jahaja 11y ago
> But such things are of course very bad for organizations. I'd say the ideals of a worker cooperative is that the workers _are_ the organization. The organization is a means to an end for all workers benefit. Not the other way around as is usually the case in a totalitarian capitalistic one. And yes you're right, Capitalism gives you as much control giving as any totalitarian system, quitting/exile. As the goal of worker cooperatives is usually not to become multi-nationals I'm not sure how low your bar is for when ones vote become absolutely futile.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  When P(vote affects outcome) x (Value of outcome A - value of outcome B) < emotional_benefit_of_doing_whatever_you_want. You observe this effect in national politics all the time - for instance, the emotional benefit of voting for a cool guy like Trump drastically exceeds P(vote effects outcome) x (Delta in outcomes). Last time I checked, I had to approximate P(vote effects outcome) by hand because it was too small to represent with double precision floating point numbers.
js8 11y ago
Democracy is not just voting, it also gives you possibly to put forward proposals and candidate for leading roles. As other commenter said, you can always exit. But democracy gives you explicit right to change things (albeit no bigger than to other people in the organization), which is actually a more efficient method of introducing change than fatalistically wait until the dysfunctional organization dies.

hencq 11y ago

One of my professors in college stated (perhaps wishfully) that one day we'll look back at today as a time where employees had the strange habit of coming into work in the morning and first thing they did was remove their brain and leave it with their jackets on the coat rack because they wouldn't need it the rest of the day.