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Just make the employees shareholders
by stevholt 8y ago
Just make the employees shareholders
- _Codemonkeyism 8y agoIf they are not majority shareholders, losing their job will probably have more impact than the share gains.
- sam_lowry_ 8y agoWell, that's the idea of Lenin.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoRochdale Pioneers Actually :-) Yes I do know there where precursors to worker coops in Italy prior to that.
- _Codemonkeyism 8y agoI've followed the up and downs of Mondragon for the last decades. Raiffeisen is known in Germany.
- C1sc0cat 8y agoMondragon has a bit of a rep amongst other coops
- fmajid 8y agoCould you elaborate?
- C1sc0cat 8y agoHave taken over other coops and made some members redundant - this is from when I worked in coop in the early 2000's
- _Codemonkeyism 8y agoThey also have the problem of rising non-coop employees I think.
- coldtea 8y agoWell, that's the idea of Marx.
- roenxi 8y agoMarx had a lot of ideas; some of them were probably good. Involving workers in the ownership of companies seems like a good idea even if Marx supported it. Marxism as practiced in places like, eg, Russia fell down because they disrupted the ability of the market to send and receive accurate price signals and over time that led to catastrophically misallocated resources. Many of the people who want socialism seem to support disabling said price signals, because they are unfair, which is why socialism is so dangerous - those price signals are very important. However, as long as they face the same risk of bankruptcy as everyone else, workers co-ops with the ability for outsiders to invest are probably a superior model of ownership.
- coldtea 8y ago>Marx had a lot of ideas; some of them were probably good. Involving workers in the ownership of companies seems like a good idea even if Marx supported it. I'm not saying otherwise. In fact, a lot of Marx ideas were good. He also famously said "I'm not a marxist".
- Frost1x 8y agoAs implemented in the current US economy, those price signals are also suppressed through collusion, cronyism, and near monopolies so it's not an exclusive issue of socialism implementations. Many markets are stagnant and do not offer healthy competition. There's a fair share of markets that still offer healthy competition, but from my perspective, it seems like the end goal of market optimization almost inevitably leads to monopolization which always leads to stagnation. True competition and an informed/economically conscious consumer market are key requirements to this signaling process. We don't have a lot of either in many markets.
- RA_Fisher 8y agoOne of the great things about capitalism is that it has some redundancy and resiliency. Competition may also lead to new features (markets), etc. On the other hand, this is duplicative and wasteful. Contrast the duplication (redundancy) of the capitalist system to the one producer model of communism. Less duplication but less resiliency and less ability to find new features (market). I think when a market is young and returns are high that it makes sense for many producers. However as a market matures, we can shed some of the duplication and allocate it to other new markets. If the monopolist restricts quantity sold? Easy, it increases the tears for a new entrant. The system manages itself in this way (in reality no system at all, it's decentralized coordination).
- WhiteSource1 8y agoMost public companies offer employee stock benefits. That matters for short-term stock price, as much as possible. But ultimately the employees are only minority shareholders, so don't have enough to actually increase value. (The main shareholders are institutional investors, who have a lot of clout.) For private companies, of course, it's a different story and the founders/board/investors often have more clout. Private companies are also less likely to grant (non-liquid) equity, but rather offer it as options, which is more like a lotto ticket.