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Every company should be owned by its employees

• heckerhut 2y ago
  We’re thinking along the same lines with Common Ground, a social app for communities. We’re leveraging a coop but also combine it with tokenized ownership. https://www.commonground.cg/blog/about-us https://www.commonground.cg/blog/about-us
• oleg_antonyan 2y ago
  It's insane how socialism is growing in the west after defeat of soviet union
  • heckerhut 2y ago
    more nuance wouldn’t hurt
    • throwaway4pp24 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • oleg_antonyan 2y ago
      The headline itself literally repeats Marxists theory: the means of production belong to workers aka proletartiat. Inside the article they oppose this working class to "evil rich CEOs" aka bourgeoisie. I won't even go deeper to unrelated to the article topics like "evil imperialism" and other nowadays popular in the west ideas used by Lenin&co hundred years ago. This crap cannibalizes the very foundation of the success of the western civilization and many people fall into this - that's insane to me
      • Apocryphon 2y ago
        Recent article on Spain's Mondragon Corporation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40143814 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40143814 > No one bats an eyelid at the co-operative model in countries such as Germany, “but with these ideas in Texas or Kansas, you’re basically a communist,” says Mendieta, only half jokingly.
  • kanbara 2y ago
    is it so insane, in a world of disparity and outsized influence of CEOs and billionaires, where people cannot afford houses? maybe the insane thing was how for hundreds of years we let the rich dictate the rules as if they knew better for having taken advantage of others.
    • talldatethrow 2y ago
      People can absolutely afford houses. They can so easily afford houses that they buy them quickly, often for over asking. If people couldn't afford houses, they would sit unsold until sellers lowered the price to a price someone could afford. Luckily so many people can afford houses in most areas they don't have to do that.
      • sofixa 2y ago
        You're confusing some entities, often private equity or similar corporations buying assets, often to rent, sometimes just to park, being able to buy, and the general public being able to afford to buy. In many desirable metro areas, you need two high incomes (two people in tech or lawyers or finance) to be able to afford to buy anything. What about everyone else?
        • throwaway4pp24 2y ago
          Why does everyone else need to live in a desirable metro area? That sounds infeasible with so few of them. If there was more desirable metro areas, the prices of those few wouldn't be so high.
          • timschmidt 2y ago
            > Why does everyone else need to live in a desirable metro area? Jobs, mostly. Along with increased access to all the things people like, like food, other people, activities, etc.
          • sofixa 2y ago
            > Why does everyone else need to live in a desirable metro area Because if nothing else (and there is a lot of else) the tech/lawyer/finance folks want to have restaurants, shops, cinemas, street cleaners, utilities etc etc etc etc
  • ffgjgf1 2y ago
    It’s the opposite. In the 60s and 70s many western countries were semi-socialist. Just look at Britain, the state owned a significant proportion of the industry, housing etc. the unions were extremely powerful (by modern standards). Same in other European countries. Arguably the US was generally much more left leaning than now, even somebody like Nixon might struggle passing off as a moderate/rightwing Democrat let alone a Republican just based on his domestic economic policies…
  • sofixa 2y ago
    Individual companies being owned by their employees isn't socialism. For that matter, the Soviet Union wasn't socialist either - the workers owned nothing, the state owned everything. All the land, all the factories, all the manufactured goods.
    • oleg_antonyan 2y ago
      Yep, that's what it leads to. But it all began with "good" intentions. They destroyed well-developed empire, took the land from the rich and see where it all now. Trust me, you don't want "to take money from the rich and spread them across poor" in USA, it sucks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization. Pleas, keep being a place where anyone can build a unucorn company and become rich af
      • sofixa 2y ago
        > But it all began with "good" intentions. They destroyed well-developed empire The Russian empire wasn't well developed by any stretch of the imagination.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • Miner49er 2y ago
      > Individual companies being owned by their employees isn't socialism. Actually, yes, this is the literal definition of socialism. It's workers owning the means of production.
      • sofixa 2y ago
        Not individual companies, but at the wider scale. Socialism is an economic system, not the specific act of one group of employees owning where they work. In the same way that China having private companies doesn't make it capitalistic.
  • TomK32 2y ago
    The Soviet Union was just the same old russian feudalism with a new name tag and leadership. In a sense even modern-day russians are still not emancipated citizens like we are in the West.
    • b800h 2y ago
      Absolute rubbish. This is a classic trope of the fully-brainwashed. The bread queues that resulted from collectivised agriculture that couldn't respond to market conditions had nothing to do with feudalism. The mass-murder of the middle-classes in Cambodia had nothing to do with feudalism. Communism is a brutal, oppressive system that has to erase individual liberty in order to force people to comply with its absurd, unfair rules. If it was so great, why didn't the Russians just vote it back in again?
      • croisillon 2y ago
        they wrote "same old russian feudalism" and "still not emancipated citizens" and you non-sequitur it with "if it was so great"..?
        • b800h 2y ago
          Fair point - my argument is that it added a load of additional garbage on top. It clearly didn't achieve anything substantially positive, and it hasn't done anywhere it's been tried.
          • croisillon 2y ago
            i agree with that and i believe the person you answered to agrees as well
            • b800h 2y ago
              I'm not so sure. Sounded like apologism to me, which is dangerous, frankly.
    • 2y ago
  • defrost 2y ago
    Did the Soviet Union ever actually practice effective social policy and embrace control from the lowest working level or did they just run with epilet backed dull grey committees with a promise they'd eventually get to actual socialism and communism post Stalin and all that not socialism stuff? I'm no fan of the USSR but they're arguably no more socialist than the National Socialism of the Nazis.
    • Shihan 2y ago
      Yeah, communism hasn't been really tried yet - let's try it again, I believe this time it will just work out. On a sidenote, please read "The Gulag Archipelago".
    • dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
      >actual socialism And what is actual socialism? Perhaps more importantly how will you enforce it?
  • uxcolumbo 2y ago
    How do you define socialism? I think it’s one of those terms that people define differently for themselves.
    • jltsiren 2y ago
      This sounds like actual socialism. The kind of socialism that seeks to abolish private property and the concept of ownership. Only personal property remains, and workers controlling the companies they work in as a natural extension. It may not be intended to be socialism, but it would lead to socialism if universally adopted. On the average, when someone says "socialism", it's intended to be an insult. It also serves as an indicator that the person is not interested in having a real discussion. But this is not it. This is real socialism. The kind of socialism that died as a mainstream option in Europe with the USSR, but which is still somewhat popular in the US.
      • uxcolumbo 2y ago
        That sounds like concentrated power in a hands of a few people, government officials who decide what's what. This leads to oppression. And central planning for everything is definitely bad. Plenty of examples from China and former Soviet block. Our current system (which is not true capitalism in my view) also has concentrated power in the hands of a few people. So what do you call a system where the majority of people can't be exploited by the 1%? I like Carl Sagan's answer to this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDK2chgNPZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDK2chgNPZM
  • DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
    A finely balanced, thought-through commentary if I've read one /s
• Murky3515 2y ago
  >Every year, those employees get a percentage of their salaries in company stock. Ok? Anybody can choose to do this if they work at a public company. But what happen if it's mandatory and the stock goes down? Now your labor was stolen at below market rate! Then we will hear "employees compensation should be resilient to market fluctuations."
  • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    People are lazy. You can always sell your grant as you get it, they can’t make holding stock mandatory, but a lot of people (including me) just hold the stock in a really undiversified portfolio.
    • Murky3515 2y ago
      So they're too lazy to buy stock when they get paid, but not too lazy to sell stock when they get paid?
      • seanmcdirmid 2y ago
        Huh? The opposite, they don’t sell the stock they are granted to buy other stock instead to diversify their portfolio.
    • oneshtein 2y ago
      This will tank price of shares.
      • eru 2y ago
        Huh, why, how?
        • HelloNurse 2y ago
          Of not traded shares that don't really have a price?
• talldatethrow 2y ago
  The company I work for sucks. I rather take more cash and just by stocks in companies I believe in more.
  • teaearlgraycold 2y ago
    Why not work for a company that sucks less?
    • twelve40 2y ago
      That's beside the point: the idea of hedging your bets has its place. You already sink 8 hours every day into one company, it makes sense to invest parts or all your compensation into other things instead of dumping it all into the same company. Unless you are balls-to-the-wall bullish on this one business.
    • eru 2y ago
      Perhaps talldatethrow believes that his employer sucks as a business, because they are overpaying workers? Or when I was working for Google in the mid-2010, I thought Google was a great company and I liked working there; but I also thought that their stocks were probably overpriced. (These days, I guess Tesla or Nvidia might fill that role for some? These are just examples, I have no opinion on them.) In the other direction, one can love Amazon as both a customer and a shareholder, while simultaneously not wanting to work there.
    • knifie_spoonie 2y ago
      Not everyone has that luxury
    • morning-coffee 2y ago
      That ignores the costs (time spent) of finding another company and assumes one has information to conclude that it does indeed suck less without actually having the experience of working there to know.
    • loa_in_ 2y ago
      Ultimately I don't decide what company I work for, but others do
• germandiago 2y ago
  I disagree. This is a matter of contract between sides.
• Terr_ 2y ago
  > After they leave the company or retire, the complete balance of their accounts will be paid out to them over a six-year period. Hmmm, so that line is a little misleading since they don't really "own" the stock in a conventional sense. They can't sell it to anybody else and they can't hold on to it indefinitely. To the extent they "own" it they are are forced to only ever "sell" it back to the same company at some market-defined rate. (Arguably a form of stock-buybacks by the company.) However that does sidestep the other tricky problems of taking money from retired employees (via diluting their stock) to award an ever-growing pool of shares to current employees every month.
  • phkahler 2y ago
    It's tricky. It wouldn't be employee owned if you could sell your shares to the public or keep them indefinitely after you leave. That's why you have to sell them back to the company/employees. Doing that over a period of time makes you value longer term company performance vs short term.
    • Gormo 2y ago
      What do you get out of "owning" shares that you can't sell and that have no market price? Why would someone want this instead of just being paid cash for services rendered by someone else who's bearing all the risk?
      • jaystraw 2y ago
        time preference slash discounting. so not sure what you mean by "have no market price" bezos is worth XX billion, but not if he tries to sell it all at once
        • Gormo 2y ago
          If the shares can't be sold, there's no market for them, hence no market price.
• hgyjnbdet 2y ago
  I suppose a side effect might be employee loyality, which might be a good thing. And the wealth disparity we have now is obscene. But all this is predicated on the company doing well, where's the story about the companies set up like this that struggle or fail? Are the employees worse off than those in a traditional company?
  • eru 2y ago
    Wealth disparity is a function of overall worker comp, but it doesn't matter whether you force companies to pay part of that comp in shares instead of cash.
    • chii 2y ago
      what the proposal for employee ownership _actually_ want to achieve is for the existing owners to have part of their ownership reliquished (without much, if any, compensation), and given to the workers. AKA, the workers do not take on the prior capital risk that the owners have, but reap the rewards of success. Obviously, a failed company means no such shares given to the workers (by definition). Therefore, under this imagined scenario, the workers only gain. of course, reality cannot work like this.
      • eru 2y ago
        Yes, that sounds closer to what the proposal seem to amount to. But it doesn't make much sense: just because I work at Google (which is worth a lot per employee) I don't deserve more re-distribution than someone manning the cashier at eg WalMart. If you want to re-distribute, I would suggest to tax the owners and hand money to the people, regardless of where they work.
• xmprt 2y ago
  I think the most surprising thing about trends in modern executive class pay is just how steep it is compared to the median employee. It makes me wonder why shareholders outside the company are happy with it. For example, the Boeing CEO made 22M in 2022 and 32M in 2023. I'd argue that he did a much worse job in 2023 than in 2022 but somehow got paid almost 50% more. Even Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, is "only" being paid $34M in 2024.
  • infotainment 2y ago
    It's so bizarre, considering that the modern CEO's only job is to issue meaningless positive statements to shareholders. If you look at many top CEOs resumes, they are almost always devoid of any real experience. People talk about replacing various jobs by AI, but I'm pretty sure an LLM could replace most CEOs and no one would notice.
    • cess11 2y ago
      It's someone who can take blame to protect branding and is easily replaced.
      • infotainment 2y ago
        Exactly; is someone who is essentially a replaceable scapegoat really worth millions per year in salary?
        • cess11 2y ago
          Sure, if it allows owners to stay in control and keep profiting from the people that perform the labour in the organisation. It's someone you can pin board and shareholder decisions on, as well as changes in market and accidents, that just goes away and lets some other people keep their power and profits instead of being accountable for their mistakes or lack of strategic performance.
          • klipt 2y ago
• thriftwy 2y ago
  This means you will need to invest capital when joining. Imagine a bus drivers cooperative. The pay will be nice but the downside that you have to show up with your own bus to join. And then probably be indebted to a bank. If a company is owned by employees, where does the capital come from?
• maximilianroos 2y ago
  How are you going to finance a capital-intensive business from employees? Are you going to build a nuclear reactor with sweat equity?
• konschubert 2y ago
  How about every employee instead gets money every month, and then can go out an buy shares in any company they want, their own or others?
  • ossobuco 2y ago
    How does that work when 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck? When you're not sure if you'll manage to pay the electricity bills to keep your fridge turned on, is your first thought going to be "let's invest in the market!"?
    • TechDebtDevin 2y ago
      Peasent brain, they think they too can be rich like their corporate owners one day so they will support them and justify this brain rotted thinking until they die poor.
    • eru 2y ago
      Interpreted charitably, you are making an argument that people's comp should be higher. But I don't see any argument that paying that higher comp in the form of shares instead of in the form of cash is any better? (Unless you want to imply that people are too dumb and need to be protected from themselves, and that why we need to give them more stocks instead of more cash? Or something else?)
      • ossobuco 2y ago
        > Interpreted charitably No need for your charity, thanks. I'm simply making the argument that you must live in a bubble if you think that enough people have the excess liquidity and market knowledge for this to be an applicable solution to the general population. > Unless you want to imply that people are too dumb and need to be protected from themselves Not being wise in the markets != being dumb. Protected from themselves? No, protected from speculators and exploiters.
        • eru 2y ago
• yamumsahoe 2y ago
  it's a no for me. it's like the idea of taxing the rich. it sounds great until you become one of those rich people. this idea sounds great until you become a founder or an investor yourself. these are laws, systems, and regulations that sets the first movers and real builders apart from the average laymen. all comes down to risk/reward incentives. it's poor people telling the rich how to spend and allocate their money. the rich people will just say "the fuck do you know about it?"
• daedrdev 2y ago
  If you have every company owned by its employees, it can cause big problems for society. There are many arguments to make, such as how investment and hiring would decrease but an interesting one is that it prevents people from de risking their savings. Normally, if your company goes under your savings which are invested in a wide range of companies will be fjne. But since we cant invest in other companies your savings are the ownership of your company. When when it goes under your life is ruined enron style. Its fine to do this if you want, but if this compnay in the article goes under, those people will have lost millions. And dont force me to be an owner, I really dont want to be one and resent people who want to force me to own part of the company I work for.
  • sgu999 2y ago
    Your savings don't need to be tied to the stock market, it's actually not the case for most people outside of the US afaik. Your retirement pension even more so. How we choose to redistribute the extra wealth generated by others is mostly political.
    • Nasrudith 2y ago
      Isn't the case for most people outside the US government funded pensions essentially just "the Stock Market but with extra steps"? If the market crashes pensioners are going to have a bad time.
      • sgu999 2y ago
        It's apparently called "pay as you go" in the english jargon. Here we call it "répartition" in opposition to "capitalisation" [0]: active workforce directly pays for the inactive population, in exchange for a future right to a pension. Which is roughly what you do with capital-based pensions, but with less variability. [0] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlageverfahren https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umlageverfahren
• benced 2y ago
  Maybe we should create some sort of super-stock that can be any company and give employees that. We could also make that super-stock valid tender for burritos or houses or bulldozers. Oh wait, it's money. Fungibility is great!
• gorgoiler 2y ago
  I haven’t heard of an ESOP before. As I understand it, this is an (additional?) pension fund where the value of your pension is tied to the company valuation in the form of a promise to sell you stock units when you either retire or leave the company. Sounds like a nice perk to have but one would obviously be unwise to rely on that for retirement.
  • eru 2y ago
    You are better of taking the value of that entitlement, and investing it in an index fund or annuity. Diversification is the one free lunch we have in finance.
• shswkna 2y ago
  There are many advantages to having employees own shares in a company. However, I would add that it depends on the industry, type of company and other circumstances. These are factors that play a role and should add to a more nuanced discussion: - Ownership also implies responsibilities and risk. There might be capital risks or surety needed for certain industries. Not all people want this in their lives. - For any chance of high reward, there is a also a risk of failure/loss. This side is often forgotten and a one-sided view of ownership is often romanticised. - Thus I think a popular discussion of this topic needs to be infused with a more realistic view of reality.
  • Guthur 2y ago
    What capital risks? Private equity many times purchases a company, loads it up with debt, strips it off assets, pay themselves fat dividends and then walks away when it all falls apart.
    • rabite 2y ago
      A fracking rig costs 900k and many of them sit idle for years at a time: https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2022/0415/Demand-for-oil-is-spiking.-So-why-are-North-Dakota-rigs-lying-idle https://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2022/0415/Demand-for-o... You are essentially saying that the roughnecks that work the rig for $30-40 an hour should be owning it. They don't have the capital to own it and pay for the oil rights to use it, or the risk tolerance that it will sit idle and still have to be maintained, stored in a rented warehouse, and guarded when regulation does not allow them to be used. Nor is there any evidence they would be able to successfully run an oil company even if they were given it for free -- compliance issues surrounding commodities deals typically require a different skillset than the guy working the rig. The vast majority of businesses are not software. Virtually all industry has capital outlay requirements and capital risks equal to or greater to this.
      • Guthur 2y ago
        This has been debated for 100s of years and the era of funny money that is created at the stroke of a key i don't see how we can maintain the view that it should be so skewed towards capital.
• peacechance 2y ago
  Can someone please share the National ESOP Database?
• marsten 2y ago
  My favorite pizza place in Sunnyvale became employee-owned, and shortly after decided they only wanted to stay open 3 days a week. I'm happy for those employees but man, I also wish I could get pizza on Monday.
  • perryizgr8 2y ago
    > I also wish I could get pizza on Monday In a functional market there would be others willing to send you a pizza on Monday.
    • KolmogorovComp 2y ago
      A neighborhood is not a functional market, because location is key and not fungible.
  • relaxing 2y ago
    Order in advance, keep it in your fridge?
  • deepfriedchokes 2y ago
    A Slice of New York?
• dools 2y ago
  Worker co-ops and ESOPs are already available as business structures. If they’re better, they will be more common, it’s as simple as that. Mandating employee ownership is ridiculous. In terms of policy I think a cap on revenue per employee for a privately held company and a cap on individual ownership is a better solution to reducing income inequality. That and eliminating involuntary unemployment so that companies have to compete with a guaranteed job that is not exploitative. Let the private sector figure out the details within those boundary conditions, that’s what it’s there for.
  • hurril 2y ago
    What is gained by preventing the company from accepting more money than your revenue cap? It would be bad for everyone. What are you trying to optimise?
    • dools 2y ago
      They can have more revenue than the cap I’m just saying they should be publicly listed.
      • chii 2y ago
        what makes public listing a good criteria for which the revenue cap be removed? in fact, i dont get the rationale for revenue caps at all. It doesn't produce less inequality, and only produces inefficiencies.
        • dools 2y ago
          Cap on revenue per employee for a company before it must be publicly listed so that a cap on ownership percentage can be more simply enforced.
      • hurril 2y ago
        Oh, misunderstood. You still need to think about what it is you wish to optimise for. I am not a regulation hater but naive regulations tend to cause rather than mitigate pathological economic incentives. It is very very hard to get these kinds of things right. Another thing, one related to your original post: it is, of course, good imho to have a working hand-out system so that you don't starve when you are out of a job, or are forced to have to work for really shitty conditions. This causes another problem, however. It is very easy to get dependant on these hand-outs because the difference in pay between the jobs you are able to do and the size of the hand-out can be very small. Even negative. We have (had) this problem in Sweden for a long time. And it is a problem because when people are less poor, then things cost more money because of it. Cynical, I know. Economics is very very hard.
• sgammon 2y ago
  Equity is zero-sum. Once you hand it out, it's gone. You can create more, but it will dilute everyone else. Not a very good arrangement for something that should create value over a long period of time.
  • eru 2y ago
    You know that stock buybacks are a thing? In any case, things are a bit more complicated. If the company manages to sell equity at a premium to current market prices, existing shareholders benefit, they don't get diluted in any absolute sense. Conversely, if the company does stock buybacks at a premium, continuing shareholders suffer.
    • sgammon 2y ago
      Yes, a thing predicated on cooperation between humans.
• est 2y ago
  [flagged]
• eru 2y ago
  Owning their employer is a rough deal for employees. My career is already tied up to my industry and to my employer. I don't need to increase that exposure even more. I'd rather invest in an index fund, than hold more stocks of my employer than I need to. (If anything, I should probably short my industry, so that my overall exposure is neutral.)
• amadeuspagel 2y ago
  Production, Information Costs, and Economic Organization[1] is classic economics paper that explains how different firms are structured to align incentives, rather then making claims about how every company should be structured. [1]: https://www.aeaweb.org/aer/top20/62.5.777-795.pdf https://www.aeaweb.org/aer/top20/62.5.777-795.pdf
• dash2 2y ago
  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 increase the stock price no matter how well he fills your order; at the same time, maybe he wants to know how much he takes home every day. If the story is "it should be the law that every company offers stock options", then that would be a dumb law for the reasons above. If the story is "all companies must be fully employee-owned workers' cooperatives", then first, note that you are calling for a restriction on workers' rights: they have to be given part of their pay as stocks, and they can't sell them freely. Second, that will probably make markets work worse. There's a large economics literature on this: worker-owned cooperatives have not taken over the market, although they are an available institutional form, because (a) they find it hard to raise capital (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit, e.g. they won't sack underperforming divisions or expand in ways that dilute existing workers' stake.
  • instagraham 2y ago
    For people living cheque to cheque, pre-IPO ESOPS are not really a great incentive either. If ESOPS come at the cost of actual salary increases, it feels more like a corporate smokescreen than an actual value-add (not everyone can afford to think long-term with their sole source of income).
  • Aissen 2y ago
    > Your barista at Starbucks is not going to increase the stock price no matter how well he fills your order But 400k barista all doing it well might.
    • vsuperpower2021 2y ago
      This is not tenable. 400k people aren't going to all individually work extra hard for starbucks if their own work doesn't individually benefit them.
• atmosx 2y ago
  Reminds of Varoufakis proposal which is way more radical tl;dr: —————— To imagine what transcending capitalism might mean in practice requires rethinking the ownership of corporations. Imagine that shares resemble electoral votes, which can be neither bought nor sold. Like students who receive a library card upon registration, new staff receive a single share granting a single vote to be cast in all-shareholder ballots deciding every matter of the corporation — from management and planning issues to the distribution of net revenues and bonuses. Suddenly, the profit-wage distinction makes no sense and corporations are cut down to size, so boosting market competition. When a baby is born, the central bank automatically grants them a trust fund (or personal capital account) that is periodically topped up with a universal basic dividend. When the child becomes a teenager, the central bank throws in a free checking account. Workers move freely from company to company, carrying with them their trust-fund capital, which they may lend to the company they work in or to others. Because there are no equities to turbocharge with massive fictitious capital, finance becomes delightfully boring — and stable. States drop all personal and sales taxes, instead taxing only corporate revenues, land, and activities detrimental to the commons. ————— Excerpt from https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-30972828.html https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/commentanalysis/arid-3...
  • eru 2y ago
    > To imagine what transcending capitalism might mean in practice requires rethinking the ownership of corporations. > Imagine that shares resemble electoral votes, which can be neither bought nor sold. Interesting idea. Perhaps the take-away is that we should allow trading in electoral votes.
    • Nasrudith 2y ago
      I thought the main reason we didn't allow for vote buying directly (advertising is doing the same thing but less reloably) was because it encouraged "corporate raiders" too much, one for whom a sufficient amount of capital would be encouraged to leave a mess by stripping out the copper wiring and selling it for a profit. Combined with the other issues of non-secret ballots like (political) bosses extorting votes.
• lynx23 2y ago
  Just pay a decent salary, and the rest is moot. I dont really want stock from the company I wor for. Because if it is doing well... Yes, but that pendulum can also swing in the other direction, and experience has it that just because my company is doing badly, it mustn't be my fault. Everything between bad luck and co-workers slacking off for some reason can define my outcome. Thats pretty communist in my book. But well. Anyway, stock is a risk-taking behaviour, now force onto you because you're trying to fix your bad salary. Nope, thanks. Also, this smells of "we are a family" because "if the company is well, everyone is well". No, thanks.
• djokkataja 2y ago
  Are there any companies that are hybrids of this, where they have some fixed structure in terms of voting power that's, say, 60% employee-owned, and 40% which is publicly traded and has a board? So the employee-owned side of things maintains the primacy of their skin in the game because the 60% control that they have is not something which can be amended, but they can also receive outside investment to some degree? As someone who's definitely not an expert on these things, the idea seems intriguing to me, but I have no idea if there are some reasons why this obviously cannot logically or practically work (as opposed to simply being something which people don't presently do--or something which I just haven't heard of people doing).
  • raybb 2y ago
    I'd guess Wawa or Publix might be. They're both ESOP but from the people I know who work there it doesn't end up being much cash difference. There is a whole book about Wawa that talks about the ESOP decision and such. It's called the Wawa Way. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19986572W/The_Wawa_way?edition=key%3A/books/OL36727578M https://openlibrary.org/works/OL19986572W/The_Wawa_way?editi...
  • eru 2y ago
    German companies come pretty close. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany Also see how many cooperatives are run. You can definitely make these kinds of things work and eg worker cooperatives are generally legal to set up around the world, but they don't necessarily work any better than vanilla companies (and that includes not necessarily being better for the employees).
    • nutrie 2y ago
      > German companies come pretty close. Worked for one with this setup. It was all great until the stock price fell to ~20 % of its original value and has stayed that way since. Employees didn't like it, which was kinda funny (it's a risk they signed up for).
      • 2y ago
• flanked-evergl 2y ago
  The only cooperative I ever worked for was also the most corporate and toxic company I have ever worked for, and the company was run so poorly that they would not be able to pay someone to take their shares if they were publicly traded.
• nnbvvklduwiw282 2y ago
  whaat, is this anarcho-syndicalism?
  • aloisdg 2y ago
    It should be.
• nutrie 2y ago
  This is a rabbit hole miles deep, and don't get me wrong, I sort of support the idea, but: > Just like Jeff Bezos can sell a portion of his Amazon stock to buy a new house, employees at ESOPs can pull money out of their stock accounts to pay for tuition, medical bills, or as a downpayment on a primary residence. Maybe I'm missing sth, but, erm... what happens with the stock after? Because that portion of the company is no longer in the hands of its employees, and it's unlikely that it's a closed circuit. I get that your stock need not be publicly traded. But that brings a variety of other issues to the table.
• openrisk 2y ago
  Ownership is such an empowering concept it is a bit of puzzle why there aren't larger numbers of employeed-owned companies. There is definitely a historical / cultural aspect to this: Exhibit 1: In agricultural societies land ownership was highly concentrated for the longest time (feudal society) before there were land reform movements [1]. Exhibit 2: Owner-occupancy is celebrated in many cultures but less so in others. E.g., it ranges from 10% to near 100%. [2] Given that modern corporate organization and culture is typically endured (pays the bills) rather than loved and given that legal frameworks to establish alternatives do exist, there must be various fundamental reasons for the ESOP paucity (beyond the obvious resistance of vested interests). One explanation might be that if judged purely on financial returns (i.e., ignoring the externalities of bullshit jobs, burned-out, disillusioned employees etc.) - the advantage of employee ownership in securing financial returns (especially short term) is not dramatically higher than a conventional external shareholder entity. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reform [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owner-occupancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owner-occupancy
  • itake 2y ago
    The problem with employee wholely owned organizations is the employees at the primary location aren’t typically incentived to grow the business beyond their area. The primary location would need to set aside profits to fund new locations and their money would go towards new employees. Most employees, especially ones living pay check to pay check would much rather take the check than use that money to pay someone else.
• irusensei 2y ago
  If I lived in the authors socialist lalaland and had a good marketable idea the first thing I would do is to and start my company in another country. Maybe that’s why they’ve build a wall to keep people in.
  • jblezo 2y ago
    Moving to another country is a good idea as an individual. However, for a nation as a whole, nothing is easier but building rich people: Leave, and somebody else will take your place.
• foreigner 2y ago
  Does nobody remember Enron? They encouraged their employees to invest in company stock, and when the company collapsed those employees were doubly screwed: no more job and no more savings. Too many eggs in one basket IMO. Investing in your own company is only for people who can tolerate very high risk.
• varispeed 2y ago
  Funny that in the UK, small business owned by employees is typically associated with tax dodging (basically there is strong anti small business agenda in the government). So we have this legislation called IR35 that very much stops employee owned company from generating profit. This applies to b2b only, but I wouldn't be surprised if strong lobbying from big corporations will get its scope expanded. After all why someone should run their own shop if they could work at a supermarket? Big corporations are worried that the most skilled people engage in running their own business rather than being available in the employee market, so there is strong push to stop it.
• t-writescode 2y ago
  I was speaking to an employment lawyer about how to structure the business I'm trying to start. I wanted partial ownership from all employees and, more importantly, aggressive profit sharing. The particular models that I wanted to look at - the partial ownership - turns out to be incredibly expensive when hiring on new employees - from what I've understood - and so I'm leaning in to the profit sharing model, hard, and perhaps the company design will be one that enforces that aggressively. I didn't understand everything the employment lawyer was discussing and it was just a preliminary discussion. I think it's worth it for every person interested in starting a business to work with and speak with a lawyer. I'm not really much of a fan of everyone owning stock, though, myself - especially everyone gaining stock over time. There's a million ways to build a company, of course. Giving employees stock over time seems like it could be a good plan if there is real intent to become publicly traded at some point. I personally wouldn't want the profit sharing to be tied to a stock amount. It would reward seniority or tenure a bit too much (in my opinion). A system I would prefer would be one where: * all employees regular salaries and all business costs are paid * a reserve 'warchest' is kept or grown where the goal 'size' of the 'warchest' is relative size to keep the company afloat for x years of low or zero income (to survive bad years). * profit share "the rest" (or most of the rest). Exact specifics of the profit-sharing could be unclear. Could be: * a flat "every employee gets 1/(# employees) the rest". * each division gets a percentage and then each employee in that division gets 1/(# employees in division) * a point system where tenure gives you more points and you get Xi/(sum X) portion. Lots of options. I prefer profit-sharing myself because it doesn't lean in the direction of becoming public and everyone experiences the fruit of their and their coworkers' labors. I've been warned a bit against partial ownership because "what if the existing employees don't want to be profit sharing anymore", etc? I dunno. Lots of thoughts.
  • etothepii 2y ago
    I'm interested in why you want to do this? What is the goal you are trying to achieve? Why would you not do this with salaries? Will there be some people paid more than others that do different roles? If so, why would their profit shares be the same? Who decides on war chest size? Ownership is an interesting word, because as you say if it was ownership then when an employee leaves they still get a share of profits and surely they could sell (otherwise it's not ownership). I've wondered myself about whether I should have some sort of union but what I really mean is an alternate reporting line to hear about problems. My suspicion is that there's a lot of what founders think of as profit that isn't really profit. My founder salary is probably around 25% of what I'd need to be willing a job. I'd everyone at the company did this we'd have a lot of extra "profit" to share out but it isn't real profit.
• fairdistribute 2y ago
  Ok then we get rid of employees It's surprising how unnecessary they are.
• kryptiskt 2y ago
  So you make all the employees equal partners, what will happen? If the company is a money-making machine like Google, the employees will not be sad if the employee base is kept small and most stuff is outsourced to other (likewise worker-owned) companies that gets a slim margin above their cost. So I predict that this world will have very small, very profitable companies which have some secret sauce but hands off most of the work to big companies making much less money.
  • vineyardmike 2y ago
    > If the company is a money-making machine like Google, the employees will not be sad if the employee base is kept small and most stuff is outsourced to other (likewise worker-owned) companies that gets a slim margin above their cost. Google does this already, even not being a co-op. They have a huge contractor army, and their core employees are handsomely rewarded with massive salaries. > So I predict that this world will have a have very small, very profitable companies which have some secret sauce but hands off most of the work to big companies making much less money. This is kinda what we see already, except everyone want to grow their kingdom, (and hire their friends and family) so it seems inevitable that the "Small profitable secret sauces" will still get diluted without strong control
    • throwaway2037 2y ago
      Microsoft was pretty famous for this in the 90s and 00s. Huge amounts of work was done by contractors, who were treated like second class citizens. There was even a big lawsuit about it, that changed how Microsoft uses contractors.
• rich_sasha 2y ago
  I was wondering about a similar, but different mechanism. There's a pool of shares that are effectively rented for free to employees, and part of their pay is the dividend they get. When you join, you get them for free (maybe there's some vesting schedule), when you leave they go away, not as a sale but just for free again. Soo... It's not like you're always inflating your share base with options. Just part of what people are paid is basically same as shareholders. This isn't some "align with shareholders" bullshit, rather I wonder if it somewhat decreased the myopic perspective of an employee. They get paid off of the success of the whole company, they have an interest in prudent cost management, and so on. They get to vote on issues affecting the whole firm, too - collectively maybe they are 5-10% or whatnot, not lots but enough that they have a voice. Otherwise, there is a prevalent, and sadly reasonable perspective of extreme cynicism towards an employer. The employer always says how we're all in it together, teamwork etc. but really, every employee is best served by entirely optimizing only their own utility. But surely this can't be optimal at the society level.
  • chii 2y ago
    > every employee is best served by entirely optimizing only their own utility. but this would still remain the case in the scheme proposed. Even suppose those employee-class shares get a voting right, they would want to maximize their own benefits: such as higher dividend payout. As for why - imagine if there's a decision between long term investment in plant & equipment, vs paying out dividend today. An employee who might not wish to stay will vote to get the dividend, as their "share" is going to be gone by the time the long term investment pays off. So the only way to align employee and owners, is to have employees own regular shares.
  • TrueSlacker0 2y ago
    That's a profit share plan. Something implemented like as xx% (usually 20%) of net profit is dispersed to staff each quarter. You don't buy into shares or anything. You don't get them when you leave.
• divan 2y ago
  Freakonomics Radio podcast recently featured a good episode on the subject: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/should-companies-be-owned-by-their-workers/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/should-companies-be-owned-b...
• wokemindvir 2y ago
  [flagged]
• zokier 2y ago
  The article seems to imply that the company would need to hold cash enough to buy back all outstanding shares, which sounds absolutely bonkers to me? Are the shares getting constantly diluted, how is that handled? How is valuation of shares done here? I can't really see this scheme working for public companies
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• sarkron 2y ago
  I am seeing a lot of debate here about what Socialism is or is not. Lots of interesting points but none of them come close to this article by the Leszek Kolakowski (Polish Philosopher and author of Main Currents of Marxism) It was written in 1956 but was seized by the censor and the student journal for which it had been written was closed down. The essay was then pinned up on a bulletin board at Warsaw University until - very shortly afterwards - the authorities took it down. From then on underground copies of it were circulated. It remained unpublished in Poland until after the fall of communism. We intend to tell you what socialism is. But first we must tell you what it is not - and our views on this matter were once very different from what they are at present. Here, then, is what socialism is not: - a society in which someone who has committed no crime sits at home waiting for the police; - a society in which it is a crime to be the brother, sister, son, or wife of a criminal; - a society in which some people are unhappy because they say what they think and others are unhappy because they do not; - a society in which some people are better off because they do not think at all; - a society in which some people are unhappy because they are Jews and others are happier because they are not; - a state whose soldiers are the first to set foot in the territory of another country; - a state where people are better off because they praise their leaders; - a state where one can be condemned without trial; - a society whose leaders appoint themselves; - a society in which ten people live in one room; - a society that has illiterates and plague epidemics; - a state that does not permit travel abroad; - a state that has more spies than nurses and more room in prisons than in hospitals; - a state where the number of bureaucrats increases more quickly than that of workers; - a state where people are compelled to lie; - a state where people are compelled to steal; - a state where people are compelled to commit crimes; - a state that possesses colonies; - a state whose neighbours curse geography; - a state where cowards are better off than the courageous; - a state where defence lawyers are usually in agreement with the prosecution; - a tyranny, an oligarchy, a bureaucracy; - a society where vast numbers of people turn to God to comfort them in their misery; - a state that gives literary prizes to talentless hacks and knows better than painters what kind of painting is the best; - a nation that oppresses other nations; - a nation that is oppressed by another nation; - a state that wants all its citizens to have the same views on philosophy, foreign policy, the economy, literature, and morality; - a state whose government determines the rights of its citizens but whose citizens do not determine the rights of their government; - a state in which one is responsible for one's ancestors; - a state in which some people earn forty times as much as others; - a system of government that is opposed by the majority of the governed; - one isolated country; - a group of underdeveloped countries; - a state that employs nationalist slogans; - a state whose government believes that nothing matters more than its being in power; - a state that makes pacts with criminals and adapts its worldview to these pacts; - a state that wants its foreign ministry to shape the worldview of all mankind at any given moment; - a state that is not very good at distinguishing between slavery and liberation; - a state that gives free rein to proponents of racism; - a state that currently exists; - a state with private ownership of the means of production; - a state that considers itself socialist solely because it has abolished private ownership of the means of production; - a state that is not very good at distinguishing between social revolution and armed invasion; - a state that does not believe that people under socialism should be happier than people elsewhere; - a society that is very sad; - a caste system; - a state where people can be pushed around, humiliated, and ill-treated with impunity; - a state where a certain view of world history is obligatory; - a state whose philosophers and writers always say the same things as the generals and ministers, but always after the latter have said them; - a state where city maps are state secrets; - a state where the results of parliamentary elections can always be unerringly predicted; - a state where slave labour exists; - a state where feudal bonds exist; - a state that has a monopoly on telling its citizens all they need to know about the world; - a state that thinks freedom amounts to obedience to the state; - a state that sees no difference between what is true and what it is in its interest for people to believe; - a state where a nation can be transplanted in its entirety from one place to another, willy-nilly; - a state in which the workers have no influence on the government; - a state that believes it alone can save mankind; - a state that thinks it has always been right; - a state where history is in the service of politics; - a state whose citizens are not permitted to read the greatest works of contemporary literature, or to see the greatest contemporary works of art, or to hear the best contemporary music; - a state that is always exceedingly pleased with itself; - a state that claims the world is very complicated, but in fact believes that it is very simple; - a state where you have to go through an awful lot of suffering before you can see a doctor; - a state that has beggars; - a state that is convinced that no one could ever invent anything better; - a state that believes that everyone simply adores it, although the opposite is true; - a state that governs according to the principle oderint dum metuant; - a state that decides who may criticize it and how; - a state where one is required each day to say the opposite of what one said the day before and to believe that one is always saying the same thing; - a state that does not like it at all when its citizens read old newspapers; - a state where many ignorant people are considered scholars; the politics of its government will not allow you to discover this; - a state that does not like it at all when its regime is analysed by scholars, but is very happy when this is done by sycophants; - a state that always knows better than its citizens where the happiness of every one of its citizens lies; - a state that, while not sacrificing anything for any higher principles, nevertheless believes that it is the leading light of progress. That was the first part. And now, pay attention, because we are going to tell you what socialism is. Here is what socialism is: Socialism is a system that ... But what's the point of going into all these details? It's very simple: socialism is just a really wonderful thing
• choeger 2y ago
  While this might sound great at first, it comes with a tangible risk: In a worker-owned enterprise, workers cannot freely sell their stock (or it would not be worker-owned for long). So their wealth is tied to the company and the value of every stock hinges on the company's long-term success. Imagine going into retirement with this six-year plan to learn that the company goes bankrupt one year later. Of course, there are probably ways to try to minimize the risk (e.g., saving the profits for the payout and keeping them separate from business cash) but it won't be very diverse. Or maybe several such companies could put their stocks in a basket and allow employees to diversify their portfolio. So I think it's a great idea as an add-on, but no one should bet their retirement on it.
• phoyd 2y ago
  Giving employees stock options does not solve the "employes should own the company" problem, when there is a market to sell the stock. Shareholders and employees have different goals and interests regarding the company. For example, the employees they may have to decide on the elimination of their own jobs in order to secure the value of their stock holdings (which btw. would make the company not owned by their employees anymore) A more interesting approach would be a model where being a employee automatically gives you a vote on company wide decisions including. the distribution of profits, just how being a cititzen of a democratic country gives you a vote on the fate of your country (similar to the Mondragon Corporation in Spain)
  • android521 2y ago
    so in the extreme case, the employees can decide to return 99% profits to themselves and return 1% to shareholders? It sounds cute but will be hard to make it work when incentives are not aligned well. Just like Communism sounds good in theory and everyone with a kind heart will like more equality but in practice, it destroys the entire cake.
• PaulRobinson 2y ago
  Companies can be owned by employees (or customers!) without the messiness of stock options. It's called a co-operative. I know in the US that worker co-operative can be marred by accusations of "communism" and that trade unions will own the business, but it doesn't have to be that way. In the UK (hardly a hotbed of communism with now close to 50 years of centrist governments), one of the best known and most aspirational brands is the John Lewis Partnership. The "Partnership" in the name refers to the fact it doesn't have "employees" - they're all partners in the business. People working at JLP, and its subsidiary supermarket Waitrose, receive a share of the profits in addition to their salary. The current CEO is dancing around trying to get private equity in to the business, but they are finding - like most businesses that seek capital investment - that investor interests in eternal rapid growth don't align well with employee interests. JLP isn't alone in being a partnership. The vast majority of UK professional firms (accountants, law firms, management consultancies and so on), are LLPs, meaning senior partners are the owners and distribute profits between themselves. Perhaps slightly more radical is the customer-owned co-operative. Started in Rochdale (possibly with the help of some of my ancestors who hail from there), in 1844, shoppers with the Co-Op, effectively get a return of profits based on how much they spend - the original loyalty program. Mutuals are also structured in this way like Nationwide are the largest mortgage brokers in the country, and if you have even £1 in a savings account or mortgage with them, you have voting rights at AGMs, and own part of the organisation. Credit unions are similar, but typically operate as non-profits. And this is all healthy. Look at the oldest businesses in the World[1], they're not driven by growth, they're not driven by next quarter's targets, they're about longevity and creating something that lasts. They're typically family owned or owned in a way that means the workers reap the benefits. Many of them change hands in private ownership, sure, but no hedge fund is going to be interested in extracting value from them - they're not intended to scale on purpose. I've come around in recent years to Cory Doctorow's ideas on capitalism (in the purest sense of that word, not "free markets", but investors making their living by demanding returns on capital), being misaligned with a healthy long-term business, particularly in the tech industry. "Building to scale" has become toxic. Unicorns are destroying our industry. I don't understand - and I know this will be controversial here on HN - why anyone would want to make some billionaire investment fund richer, just so they can have a yacht, making money off adtech. The next thing I do will likely be an LLP or a co-op (probably employee owned, but a tech firm that is customer-owned co-op would be interesting). The goal will be to build something that outlives me by a long, long time. I'd encourage others to look at alternatives too. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
• fx1994 2y ago
  We had companies owned by people/state in communism. It failed miserably and I would not suggest anyone to try it again. But to be paid with optional stocks or money after n years working for a company, hell yes. I would be the first to take that bonus of stocks and I would care much more for my company then. Now, I don't care whatever happens since no one would care if they throw me out.
• igleria 2y ago
  I would prefer having my salary indexed by inflation. Yes, even if we get deflation, before some ceo-wannabe asks about that.
• wseqyrku 2y ago
  People work for their paycheck and not their company, and they have the nerve to talk about "loyalty" and stuff like that when they won't do any of this. But I understand why companies prefer to pay you in full rather than stocks, (1) it's gonna be miniscule compared to their actual cash flow and (2) they would prefer to pay you whatever your contract says and keep whatever interest for themselves, even if that's not much. So they are optimizing for their own interest in both ways. I'm not knowledgeable in this area but as a normie that would be my guess.
• toldyouso2022 2y ago
  Uuuh no thanks, I want to be paid now whether things work out or not
• Narhem 2y ago
  Let's take it a step further and say when a company screws the livelihood of others they should be holden to providing financial compensation for their failures. That being said working for a company who actively fights against me makes me just not want to work.
• infinitedata 2y ago
  When I first saw this, more than money, I thought about voting rights. You shouldn’t need a CEO, direction of the company would be all about shareholders voting and bringing ideas.
  • android521 2y ago
    wow, have you seen any organization with more than 50+ people that can make it work this way? if everyone has equal voting rights, this company or organization would be destroyed in no time. In democracy, you vote a leader but then the leader(s) or the elite elected few would make decisions themselves. You can vote them out but you certainly don't get to vote on every decision or ideas.
• karol 2y ago
  Ha ha ha. When I hear the average quality of employers ideas I thank for the leaders and the founders who can see through that gibberish. There is no large company in the world right now that is run this way and for a good reason.
  • sunaookami 2y ago
    Ah yes the competent founders, leaders and managers that always find new ways to exploit their workers and customers. >There is no large company in the world right now that is run this way Huawei
• mharig 2y ago
  [dead]
• GardenLetter27 2y ago
  A nice idea in theory, in practice it becomes a bureaucratic nightmare though - even just offering shares is extremely difficult between different countries, tax treaties, etc.
• bowsamic 2y ago
  [flagged]
• derelicta 2y ago
  Yes. It's like every now and then STEM-folks discover that workplace democracy is actually a good thing and maybe the goddamn soviets were unto something lmao.
• protocolture 2y ago
  I think I read some compromise position years ago where the workers didnt just own the business, but the business would issue new bonds/shares every year based on effort put in. The problem with traditional worker owned businesses is that you assume that being a shareholder would incentivize work, but it turns often enough into a race for the least effort while still getting paid. A classic coop failure mode. If share of profit is proportional to effort every 12 months you eliminate that. That said, I cbf reading the article. Sorry but at least I am honest.
• nsajko 2y ago
  Wikipedia page on worker's self-management: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management
• lo_fye 2y ago
  Or work for a company that's a registered B-Corp https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/ https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/
• morning-coffee 2y ago
  > Every company should be owned by its employees Today's latest example of someone, after observing the current state of some system governed by laws of economics, declaring a "solution" by merely stating how something "should" be. If only the world worked this way...
• paxys 2y ago
  Something doesn't add up. The company claims to be 100% employee owned, and hands out new shares to employees every year as part of their salary. But the employees can also sell their shares to fund purchases. So...who do they sell to? And what happens when an employee with a bunch of shares quits or gets fired?
  • itake 2y ago
    The company might buy those shares back
• markus_zhang 2y ago
  I think the idea is, every company should be managed and owned by its employees. Employees in total should own about 51% of the stocks, as a start. Nowadays you see so many examples of management and even the owning entities (VC and other funds) mismanage the companies, simply to benefit themselves, and leave employees in the wind.
• kkfx 2y ago
  Companies needs money, money came from revenues but typically it's not sufficient and loan are not cheap. So companies try to get money from third parties, it's a bit cheaper but still not so cheap, stocks are cheaper, and if you have stocks while employees can buy them, have options and so on, they likely have not enough money so you can't keep the ownership "inside". Similarly you can "give ownership" to those who are new hired and get back ownership" from those who left for some reasons. To resolve current very unbalanced society we need another thing: public money. We need to ANNIHILATE central banks and the current banking system. Money must be created by the government with public investments, so the government propose a new road, the parliament accept the proposal, some will make the new road getting "new" money from the State. Doing so regulate enough to avoid hyper inflation but still tie money on a physical substrate, tied to the real world resources avoiding pure finance.
• sotix 2y ago
  My grandfather founded a construction company by himself many decades ago. He built it up over many years to a behemoth in the region and created a culture where people worked there for life. When he retired, he sold the entire company to the employees with everyone getting a cut. His funeral was full of so many faces I had never seen before. Somebody pointed out to me that these were the dozens of people that he made millionaires by deliberately deciding to do right by the employees. It was really moving to talk with so many people who had reaped the benefits of their labor and were grateful for his decision. That to me is the model that I want to work for. Yes, people at the top made more than at the bottom. But they had been there for decades longer, and the gap was not as extreme at every other company I’ve worked for. Wealth was collectively shared. My family could have been a lot wealthier if he had kept a cut of the company. But he retired comfortably and didn’t feel that he deserved any more money that others earned for him. I really admire that decision.
  • astura 2y ago
    >My family could have been a lot wealthier if he had kept a cut of the company. Unlikely... He probably made just as much or more with the ESOP than he would have selling in a private sale. When a business owner creates an ESOP for their business they sell their shares of to the company to the company itself TAX FREE for a fair independent valuation. It's just another way for a founder to cash out. It absolutely does benefit the employees, but it's not an act of charity, the owner still cashes out and realizes the full valuation of the company they built. https://www.forbes.com/sites/darrendahl/2016/07/07/if-you-dislike-paying-taxes-youre-going-to-love-esops/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/darrendahl/2016/07/07/if-you-di...
    • sotix 2y ago
      Well in this case, the company has more than quadrupled its profits since he sold the company. The new employee owners have done a phenomenal job running it.
• Luker88 2y ago
  This reminds me of that old funny viral video: "democracy is government... by the people...of the people...for the people... but the people are retar*d" Like everything, the best things probably require balance, and the devil is in the details. IMHO it has merit, but with caveats. I would not want to have the same shares as a normal worker if I have personal risks (like a work security responsible, or CEO). For better or worse, CEOs have experience in guiding companies, and almost no employees have that. OTOH even a small worker representation might do wonders, increase engagement, better law compliance and the like. the options are not just 0% and 100% to workers, there could be different requirements depending on the size of the company. Small companies could be required to have a bigger worker representation, because the impacts of the single worker is much higher. The weight of the workers' shares in money could be different than its weight in the decisions of the company, too. Maybe the workers just get a vote for X% on the board, regardless of actual shares.
• alfiedotwtf 2y ago
  <door bursts open> Economics 101 has entered the chat
• karaterobot 2y ago
  I've never worked for a company where I would have traded $1 of my salary for $2 in ownership. Most companies' stock isn't worth anything financially, and I don't give half a shit about a sense of ownership. Just pay me money in exchange for work, and let me get back to living my life.
• philip1209 2y ago
  Countries work well as democracies, but businesses thrive as dictatorships.
  • dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    Excellent way to put it.
• SoftTalker 2y ago
  This is a really bad idea for the average worker. "We've got a number of people that have been here 15, 20 years and they have $1 million plus balances" Sounds good but they are catastrophically undiversified. Nobody should have their entire nest egg in one stock. Yes they are motivated for the company to do well, but so many things play into a stock price that are out of any one person's control. Just giving them profit sharing that they can invest as they wish would have most of the same motiviations. Anyone making a decent wage and saving in a 401K should be able to save $1 million over the long term. And do it much more safely in a well-diversified portfolio.
  • ragebol 2y ago
    (These) shares yield dividends right, even if the stock price itself is low? Profit sharing doesn't give you any say in anything.
  • asoneth 2y ago
    Agreed that there are some downsides for employees. I worked at a company that incentivized owning the company's stock. The company was doing fine but it was still controversial among employees because of the risk of correlating your employment and investments -- if the company does poorly then you may lose your job and a large chunk of your investment at the exact same time. (In practice there also ended up being some jealousy as people who decided to play it safe missed out on some large gains.)
  • francisofascii 2y ago
    Isn't there some asset insurance vehicle to protect against a catastrophic loss?
    • Mesopropithecus 2y ago
      That's what options are for. But I find it more cost effective to just diversify my investments.
  • charles_f 2y ago
    This is so backwards! Workers are always at the mercy of shareholders (for whom apparently it's not bad to own a share?), and whom again and again will do a little layoff here and there because we need a percent or two more this quarter. Profit sharing will be the first thing to stop if results are temporarily worse. On the other hand, if the company is owned by its workers, nothing prevents them from redistributing all of the profits in dividends, aka, profit sharing.
• ozim 2y ago
  There is a little * and fine print. Every profitable company. There is nothing written in the article what happens when company would be profitable 5 years and then suddenly crashes because of market forces. Can employees take the hit and work next 2 years without salaries to wait out until market goes back?
  • panarky 2y ago
    When a company's shareholders are employees, their wages don't stop just because the company loses money two years. Just like a company whose shareholders are pension funds and index funds doesn't stop paying its employees when they have a couple down years.
    • ozim 2y ago
      Most of companies in the world are not pension funds or F500 or that company in the article - my take is that it is misguided also to label "one single company owner takes all" because that is not true. Most of companies in the world are mid to small size companies that cannot survive 2 years continuous loses without taking a loan to pay their employees. Those loans are not "mortgage rate" like 2% but more like 20% and it sinks those companies quite a lot. Most company owners are not Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs as people would like to imagine and unfortunately most of arguments I see are like 99% of company owners would be flowing in riches like ones mentioned ... just to remind Steve Jobs died of cancer and all the money he had did not help him (like Walt Disney who is frozen /jk)...
      • panarky 2y ago
        So for the companies you're talking about, the ones that can't or won't retain profits from good years to ride out bad years, it doesn't really matter whether the shareholders are employees or not, the employees are still out of work with zero income.
• talkingtab 2y ago
  Corporations pay employees and generate profits for owners. The third party is the customers. The first comment (currently) uses the word "profitable", in other words it asks what happens when a corporation is NOT profitable. We live in a time when profit is shrinking or drying up. So what happens? Corporations are controlled by owners, so they do two things: - they lower wages (inflation) - they raise prices This happens even when the owners have made stupid decisions. This happens even when the owners have committed criminal acts (Boeing, Sacklers, and many more). And the owners are also protected from legal consequences. The corporate model is obsolete. Simplistic answers like letting employees also be small owners will not fix this. We need a new model that provides the benefits of Corporations while ending the excesses, irresponsibility and criminality of owners. In the USA our constitution does not allow any action that denies equal protection under the law. Corporations have decide they enjoy the rights of citizens to buy elections. Owners, having made this decision may not enjoy any protection under the law that are not provided to ordinary citizens. No protection of their assets from bankruptcy and no protection from criminal prosecution. If you as an individual decide to sell OxyContin to any and everyone you would go to jail and you would be bankrupt. But not owners. [edit: typo "if owners ..." => "if you as individual ..."
  • arminiusreturns 2y ago
    I often hear people say "if corporations are people how do we execute them?" I remind them that this current insanity of profit at all costs has not always been the norm. Of course to a certain degree it has, but a long time ago, in America at least, corporations had to prove they were providing a public good or service, and if they were found to not be, their charter could be revoked! That right there is the death penalty for a corporation. While I'm sure it would have its own set of issues, I often dream about a world in which that becomes the norm instead of destroying the world so a multimillionare can get a few extra mil and the billionares get a few extra bil, while they oppress us and compromise our governments.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• vladms 2y ago
  Some ideas were in fact already tried, but whomever does not history might suffer reliving it. For example check: https://www.familistere.com/uploads/media/5a9c4bd061fce/familistere-press-kit-2017.pdf?token=/uploads/media/5a9c4bd061fce/familistere-press-kit-2017.pdf https://www.familistere.com/uploads/media/5a9c4bd061fce/fami... To quote: "the association’s economic and social model fell victim to its users and competitors. The hierarchy of association members, originally intended to reflect ability, led to opposition between Associates (whose status had finished by seeming hereditary) and other, less privileged active members. The spirit of the Familistère co-operative colony faded with each new generation." It is fascinating that these things were already tried more than 100 years ago. It is also interesting that they did not succeed for simple reasons (people trying to take advantage of other people). I think any proposed solution must be more structural - involve more than ownership but a set of values...
  • hkt 2y ago
    Some other examples: * Yugoslavian worker self management (arguably successful: the place had some other problems that hampered them, shall we say) * Mondragon (the world's largest worker cooperative) * John Lewis Partnership/Waitrose (an employee trust with some workplace democracy) * Rehn–Meidner model (which is more about mass ownership across the wider economy and was tried in Sweden if memory serves) There are a _lot_ of variations of this kind of thing and only some have been tried. Most haven't seen much action at all, just a few sui generis examples - most of the more specific examples above, really.
    • s1artibartfast 2y ago
      yeah, It is really fascinating to learn about the historic and academic study of these challenges. Most of them have been explored, mapped, and debated by economists in a very robust manner for 100+ years. One interesting perspective that I gained from a recent Econtalk podcast[1] is that neither profit driven corporations or democratically governed worker collaboratives are perfectly efficient. It is rather a question of when and how the two perform or fail in contrast. It is easy to build criticisms of each when comparing it to an idealized alternative, where all of the challenges have been hand waved away, but that is a meaningless comparison. https://www.econtalk.org/does-market-failure-justify-government-intervention-with-michael-munger/ https://www.econtalk.org/does-market-failure-justify-governm...
• ninetyninenine 2y ago
  The tragedy of the commons applies here. Any time you have something that’s commonly owned by many people (the more people, the more the tragedy applies) you have incentives that become misaligned.
  • dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    >The tragedy of the commons applies here. Agreed. More specifically it's a tragedy of commons of people who are of average iq + maturity. Overall cohesive group size is directly proportional to the iq + wisdom of participating individuals.
• ETH_start 2y ago
  "Why are worker’s cooperatives so rare? This is not a trivial question — because they can pay “dividends” in the form of wages, they can entirely avoid corporate income tax. They must be so inefficient by nature of their structure to outweigh their advantages." https://x.com/captgouda24/status/1780345152885641350 https://x.com/captgouda24/status/1780345152885641350
• Nifty3929 2y ago
  I 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 story picks up AFTER all that, when the business is already large and successful, and the owner just wants to retire. And what happens when the business struggles or fails later? In the case of Central States, the workers were asked to buy shares from the owner, probably using a portion of the salary they'd otherwise get. IOW, they're being underpaid relative to market, in exchange for ownership, expecting to get more later when they sell the shares. So far so good, but how does this look when the business has a rough patch, even one that's not their fault?
  • layer8overhere 2y ago
    This.
  • hemantv 2y ago
    Individuals have visions not committee. We build monuments for individuals not for committee. Having said that no man is island of itself. Current incentive structure works great to motivate individuals to start companies
    • sidmitra 2y ago
      >We build monuments for individuals not for committee. That's the second time i'm hearing that quote today from completely unrelated sources. The quote is from David Ogilvy, in case anyone is wondering. "Search all the parks in all your cities; you'll find no statues of committees." https://x.com/The_AdProfessor/status/1705254246109651053 https://x.com/The_AdProfessor/status/1705254246109651053
      • binxbolling 2y ago
        Seems like it's deliberately using "committee" as a pejorative to make a political point. Flip it to "you'll find no statues of groups of people" and it's patently false.
• WalterBright 2y ago
  Back in the 90s, the Seattle Times reported that there were 10,000 Microsoft millionaires in the Seattle area, not including home equity. Microsoft has made a heluva lot of people rich. So has Amazon. I also know employees who rejected getting part of their compensation as stock, wanting a higher salary instead, and then got mad when their coworkers made bank on the stock.
• fourseventy 2y ago
  "But unlike Walmart, Amazon, and Apple, it’s not just the executives getting paid out." ???? Employees at all three of those companies get options as part of their comp.
• XajniN 2y ago
  I will just leave this here… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-management
• marklubi 2y ago
  I'm all for giving equity in a company to incentivize employees. The problem I have with this blanket statement, and the article itself, is that most of those employees didn't take on any of the risk. The risk/reward system is askew at that point. When you're ready to put everything on the line, let me know. Been there. Took three attempts where I went broke and had to find employment before finally getting one to stick.
• elijahjohnston 2y ago
  Our society isn't ready for this. Because of the godlessness of our society, the self has no grounds by which to engage with others, and by further incentivizing profit for more individuals, the further our society will tend to engage with itself as profit as its highest purpose — even outside of the workplace — consciously or unconsciously. I could see this being less dangerous if our society was deeply rooted in a religious reality, where an individual's engagement with the world is driven by a holistic good, as opposed exclusively to a financial good.
• bankcust08385 2y ago
  Apart from communism, worker- and customer-owned co-ops is the only escape hatch for workers from for-profit, extractive corporations subject to the demands of investors to commit arbitrary dismals, create unsafe working conditions, and all manner of other problems when the interests of owners and workers are out of alignment. Unions are a half measure that don't address the fundamental problem of an adversarial relationship between workers and managers/owners.
• kemiller 2y ago
  Honestly the big tech tech companies are already captured by their employees. I used to think that would be a good thing but in reality it just means the economic opportunity is limited to a small set of people with highly elite and performative entry criteria. But a gradual path to employee ownership might make sense at smaller companies.
• fsckboy 2y ago
  If you tie your income and your savings together, you're not saving for a rainy day. A rainy day will wipe you out. Ever heard the investment advice "diversify"? It's recommended because it's mathematically provable that you can achieve the same income with lower risk by diversifying away the co-variances between your different income streams. In the same way that it's nice to go to the market and buy the phone you prefer, the car you prefer, the milk you prefer, etc. you should make investments that are right for you too from among choices.
• ARandomerDude 2y ago
  It's amazing how many people believe that every company is publicly traded. The vast majority of companies do not have stock and never will. If every company were owned by its employees, the net result would be higher unemployment, and many of those who found work would then do so as contractors. Hiring an employee is a major decision, especially for small- to mid-size companies. For a fledgling family business, giving an hourly employee an ownership stake in the company you and your wife started in your garage is a non-starter for most people regardless of their stated political ideology. For megacorps with deep pockets, mandatory ESOP would immediately accelerate the replacement of humans with machines. If you look at the incentives you can fairly quickly guess a person's (and a company's) future behavior.
• munificent 2y ago
  > “It's hard to build true wealth for yourself if you don't have some type of ownership in something, and it's hard for most people to get ownership in something,” Ruger says. I think this is a really good insight. But it also touches on something that many of the HN crowd, especially in the Bay Area find uncomfortable: home ownership. One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little plot of real estate, so it's rational that it's a goal of many. But at the same time, once that piece of ownership has been attained it's also rational to want to preserve and maximize the value of that investment. But that can often (but not always) lead to the kind of selfish NIMBY behavior that is criticized everytime anything related to urban development comes up. Is there a middle ground balance where we respect that ownership of property is an important, attainable kind of wealth building for middle-class people while also accepting that a city must also develop in ways that benefit people that aren't homeowners, or aren't homeowners yet?
  • indoordin0saur 2y ago
    Land value tax.
  • apwell23 2y ago
    > One of the ownership assets that is most attainable by many Americans is a little plot of real estate most attainable is buying stock through IRA account.
    • officeplant 2y ago
      As someone who had their first stock based savings account gutted by the 2008 economy we really shouldn't rely on stocks. I was in college and my college fund vanished very quickly. It was a fund set up for me as a kid, managed by my petrodollar worshipping uncle. We're all just a collapse away from nothing while being desperate for line goes up behavior to save us. But this is just my point of view from someone on the poorer side of things.
      • tadfisher 2y ago
        Your scenario is an example of mismanagement; you were already in college, so those funds should have been moved to less-risky investments (bonds, money-market, or even a savings account). For retirement, Fidelity and Vanguard offer "Target-date retirement" funds, which automatically rebalance to reduce risk as you age. This is a misnomer, though, as you could easily select one of those funds for college savings or whatnot.
• flerchin 2y ago
  Aligning incentives is how you get everyone pulling in the same direction.
• overrun11 2y ago
  The company profiled, Central States Manufacturing, has compounded at 20% per year since its formation in 1988 (according to the article). In comparison, Amazon has compounded at 23% since its IPO in 1997. If you are lucky enough to be a worker at an employee owner company that has 1 in a million anomalous stock growth you will do very well. This is not surprising. World wide public equities have grown at 5% real over the longest datasets available, 7% for US based companies. Even these numbers are misleading because company returns are heavily left skewed: a small minority of companies do tremendously well and the rest are stagnant or shrinking. From 1991 to 2020, 55% of US stocks underperformed 1 month T-bills. From 1926 to 2016, 4% of stocks have outperformed the total stock index. I do not see what is so amazing about this? If you think that employees deserve a larger share of the spoils then you can advocate that they receive more of it directly as compensation, no employee owned corporation needed. If they will make the same on net but with some of it locked away in a single company's equity than you've just made those employees' economic situation _more_ precarious than it was before. Non-employee equity ownership arises naturally but these articles always try to paint it as the result of the nefarious machinations of top-hat wearing capitalists. Suppose this company needs more capital than employees can raise but won't or can't take on new debt. Equity must be sold to outsiders. The article also wrongly suggests that owning equity is exceptionally difficult without employee owned companies: "it's hard for most people to get ownership in something." But we have a whole public equities market that anyone can participate in and innovation has only made it easier over time. Index funds have made diversification automatic, fractional shares have solved daunting investment minimums and payment for order flow has eliminated transaction fees and concern about getting a fair fill price.
• tacocataco 2y ago
  Mondragon is probably something of interest for this discussion. It's a federation or worker owned enterprises. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
• HumblyTossed 2y ago
  Easy for you to say, but did those employees start the business with the full backing of their rich parents? No! They didn't!
• Animats 2y ago
  Central States is in litigation with some of its retirees over a "dilution event".[1] This is like CAP table problems of additional funding rounds, where earlier owners are diluted. The picture in the article doesn't look like a Central States product. Central States makes prefab metal buildings. So do other companies, most notably Butler Buildings. Most farms and rural businesses have some of those. They look nothing like that picture. [1] https://ia601700.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.arwd.69941/gov.uscourts.arwd.69941.81.0.pdf https://ia601700.us.archive.org/11/items/gov.uscourts.arwd.6...
• linsomniac 2y ago
  I came shockingly close to being a billionaire, and one of the things I've been fantasizing about recently for how I'd spend a billion dollars is: angel investing in a private Amazon/WalMart replacement (online, retail, warehouse, delivery). Never to touch the stock market. With the goal being to build a business that could pay people a living wage to work there, and allow them time to hit the john when they need to. Rather than filtering vast sums of the revenue into the C-suite and shareholders, coming up with a way to make the workers be able to afford housing. So far, it's just a pipe dream. "We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
  • xikrib 2y ago
    Doesn't sound like you're in the gutter champ
• SanderNL 2y ago
  Businesses are some kind of feudal leftovers that refuse to die. The serfs not only accept it, they actively defend it. Meanwhile the billionaires lean back and smile. I don’t see why nation states should be democracies, but “businesses” should be private dictatorships. It’s a waste of shared resources. Your personal army of value generating serfs is taking away from our collective capacity to do useful communal work.
• jackcosgrove 2y ago
  I've wondered if there's some way to structure an accelerator along similar lines, if not employee ownership then a partnership. For example, it's well known that startups are risky. VCs mitigate this risk by spreading their funding across many startups. Could founders do the same with their equity? Consider an accelerator class with thirty companies. As a condition of being in the accelerator, each founder could agree to give X% of options to every other founder in the class. If one of the companies takes off, the other founders could wind down their own (probably failing) companies and join the one success. You would probably have to tinker with the ratios to provide good incentives, i.e. every founder doesn't get an equal share of every company; the winning founders get the largest share among their class, etc. And the accelerator would have to exercise a lot of quality control with whom they admit. But still it's an acknowledgement that business success is in large part random and diversification is how you account for that. Or rather, it's an extension of that acknowledgement to the founding/managing class of early ventures, rather than reserving it for investors.
• krmblg 2y ago
  Always considered the idea/realisation behind Motion Twin (a french game dev studio set up as "cooperative") quite interesting: https://motiontwin.com/faq https://motiontwin.com/faq
• cmpalmer52 2y ago
  I’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 ESOP that long) and the other company’s sale gave me about 150% of my current salary. Both went right into retirement accounts to defer taxes. The mood or “culture” was better, I think, during the ESOP period. Certainly cost saving was more on everyone’s mind, because every company dollar unspent was part of the profit and increased the valuation.
  • turjchowder 2y ago
    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.)?
    • cmpalmer52 2y ago
      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).
• niederman 2y ago
  I find it incredibly ironic that this article is describing this system as a positive form of capitalism when in fact having workers own the capital is the _definition_ of socialism.
• niederman 2y ago
  I find it ironic that this is being described as some better form of capitalism when in fact having the workers own the capital is quite literally the _definition_ of socialism.
• AnnoyedComment 2y ago
  [dead]
• localfirst 2y ago
  This happened in South Korea in the late 70s when the founder gave 100% of his stake in a famous pharmaceutical company. Fast forward to 2024, the employers who now own the company are fighting amongst each other, involved in bribery, and the company is now at risk of a hostile takeover perhaps even bankruptcy as they've been losing market share steadily after it became 100% employee owned 50 years ago.
• sub7 2y ago
  For private startups, all common stock should be given proportional participation rights in all secondary sales. All too often founders can and do derisk/cash out in funding rounds and then the common stock winds up at 0. Employees = fucked
• 768tryd 2y ago
  Careful, people usually love these ideas until they figure out they came from Karl Marx.
• kazinator 2y ago
  How does this work? Every new hire has to buy a share of the company? Or they get it for free? Are they forced to sell or return it when they no longer work there? Not everyone wants to be forced to buy a risky investment as a condition of employment, or just the hassle.
• systemvoltage 2y ago
  Then every employee should be ready to sacrifice their personal net worth if the company makes losses. They can reap the benefit, but also take losses. Seems entirely fair.
• rimmells 2y ago
  If a company needs capital injection (boot strap), will employees be required to fund or put up their assets as collateral? How will bankruptcies be managed?
• drumttocs8 2y ago
  I'm a big fan of the ESOP model, particularly in engineering firms. It's hard to find a better way to motivate younger employees to put in those hours.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• Thecattlesuck 2y ago
  [flagged]
• MichaelRo 2y ago
  Since we're clearly not being serious here and rather in a "who argues for the dumbest thing" contest (with the OP voting for communism), I raise the bar and sustain the contrarian thing: I declare EVERY EMPLOYEE SHOULD BE OWNED BY IT'S COMPANY! Beat that, bitches! :)
• 55555 2y ago
  On the scale of a society, it would actually be better if this extra compensation was simply given as cash and the employee invested the cash in the S&P500. The story here isn’t that the company gave out some stock but that the company grew to be worth billions of dollars. We can’t rely on that happening to every company.
• hyperliner 2y ago
  [dead]
• ornornor 2y ago
  I wonder how different this is to buying stocks with your savings, in terms of wealth redistribution. Of course it’s a different mindset then, owning a bunch of random shares vs the place you work at, but I’m wondering about wealth only as the article establishes that owners of stock are better off than wage-only people.
• tticvs 2y ago
  > That’s right, this manufacturing company will become a unicorn this year—one of only 6,000 companies in the world earning more than $1 billion in revenue. This is not what "unicorn" means. I do not think this author knows much about what they are writing about.
• welzel 2y ago
  The article has a clickbait title. It is also wrong. NOT every company should give stock options to its employees, because ... it only makes sense if long term success of the company can be significant influenced by its employees. Also, those stock options can be a barrier to growth and become a liability if needed adjustments are blocked in order to protect "stockholder" NOT all employees should get stock options, specially not the ones who contribute very little to the value generated. NOT all employees want stock options, as people just want to take the actual money and be free to switch companies. The stock options are a way to control employees. employee stock options are interesting when the allow to vote on the board. THIS is amazing - and almost nobody does it, because it would actually shift power to the employees. In most companies, giving stock options is almost a scam; you save actual money for salaries, pretend to share revenues (you don´t) and lock-in high value employees. Also you spread your stocks so you are more protected against hostile takeovers. Stock options are a great way for the actual owners to save money and actually become more powerful.
• self_awareness 2y ago
  Giving employees full control over the company is a recipe for this company destruction because of disagreements.
• AbstractH24 2y ago
  This My wife is in an industry that’s quickly getting unionized by 20-something who think unions are a paneca and are about to learn unions just create a different set of problems and add misaligned incentives. What is really needed is something more like Germany where employees are significant steakholders
• ngcc_hk 2y ago
  Not every. Not all thinking again. Each film is unique.