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Employee-owned company vs. Corporate Structure

• incomingpain 2y ago
  Employee owned is pretty rare. There's some exceptions like where you're encouraged to buy your employer's stock to make them richer. There's a reason why a union with a presumptive whole crew who could start a competitive business never ever does it. Nobody wants to be the owner.
  • cloudbonsai 2y ago
    > Employee owned is pretty rare. A partnership is basically an employee-owned company, and it's a fairly common structure among law/financial firms. It works reasonably well. The catch is that your business should not require lots of capital to run.
  • datavirtue 2y ago
    There is another word for it but "rare" is certainly not appropriate.
  • Matticus_Rex 2y ago
    > "like where you're encouraged to buy your employer's stock to make them richer." That's not why companies incentivize employees to buy stock. Like, not even a little bit. The margin of difference that employees buying a little stock makes in "making them richer" is ~nil.
  • solardev 2y ago
    > There's a reason why a union with a presumptive whole crew who could start a competitive business never ever does it. Nobody wants to be the owner. I think there's another reason: It's really hard for worker-owned cooperatives and ESOPs to raise capital, because by definition only their employees can be owners. If a bunch of unionized minimum-wage grocery store workers wanted to start their own grocery store, they could all pool their savings, but it wouldn't get them very far. Tech is one of the few sectors in which this might be able to happen (high-paid employees starting their own startup), but I guess culturally tech is too capitalist and too cutthroat and selfish (as in almost never civically minded) to make this common. Nonetheless there still are some: https://github.com/hng/tech-coops https://github.com/hng/tech-coops
• aristofun 2y ago
  It depends i guess. Technically many public companies are partially owned by employees - and corporate as hell at the same time. Clarify the question, it is very vague.
• solardev 2y ago
  Are you talking about an employee owned cooperative? Employee stock ownership plan? Something else? It really depends on their governance structure, not just financial ownership. If each employee owns some tiny percentage of shares, it doesn't really affect the governance much. If it's a one member one vote coop though, employees have power to elect the board who can then appoint the kind of managers they like. In theory. In practice I think most employees don't really care about all that and just want to collect a paycheck and go home and a small core group ends up running the show unless something goes terribly wrong.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• xabi 2y ago
  Just take a look at this corporate owned by workers (81,507) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
  • yamumsahoe 2y ago
    man this is a good case study, thanks for the read!
• Matticus_Rex 2y ago
  As others have noted, the answer here totally depends on what you're talking about. Employee-owned coops and LLC partnerships and ESOPs, etc all get different answers, and "traditional corporate structure" has a bunch of different meanings as well. But the other part depends on what you're trying to do with the company; the answers are also different for a software startup seeking investors than for a consultancy, and different for a consultancy than for a grocery store, etc.
• ipaddr 2y ago
  I ended up in an employee owned place. Money ran out and wages were traded in for a period for company ownership. It created a flat org in some ways but also created a separation between old employees and new ones. The real leader was the lawyer trying to get new funding. When the money never came they folded all first world locations and became an Indian owned/run company and tried to sell in that market. The product tech became outdated after the first iphone so it made sense to go low end
• Neethu123 2y ago
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