Everything has side-effects. First, shareholders (and their interests) are a side effect of raising money. Anything you’d do to reduce the importance of shareh

Everything has side-effects. First, shareholders (and their interests) are a side effect of raising money. Anything you’d do to reduce the importance of shareholder interests would impact the amount of money companies could raise. There have been some examples of industries where employee interests played a big role. Public sector companies, employee cooperatives or just private businesses with highly empowered unions. In Israel for example, during the 50s-80s there were a lot of worker-cooperative companies. The biggest bus company, bank & health care provider were co-ops. These were generally started by large multi-industry union organisations. Where unions are this powerful, union-run & state-run tend blend into each other. The bus company is still technically a cooperative, owned by members. Anyway… Here incentives can play weird roles too. One thing that happens at a successful worker co-op (famously at Egged, the bus company mentioned above) is that member-workers want to avoid dilution, so no new member-workers. This either leads to hiring workers sans-membership or avoiding hiring altogether. In both cases, the owners have a much reduced interest in growth. Shareholders are hyper-interested in growth. Shareholders can portfolio away volatility, so they're more risk tolerant. I’m not opposed to redefining the concept of a “company,” (joint stock or otherwise), it’s legal rights and such. I don’t think they should inherit the rights people have by default. I also don’t think infinitely cascading parent-child “structures” should be allowed. But, I don’t think you can make anything perfect.