> Bread and circuses are the result

I'm not interested in debating the merits or lack thereof of socialism as a system of government, but the "bread and circuses" thing applied to Roman citizens.

Unless I was misinformed, the overlap between the people in the Roman empire who were citizens and the people in the Roman empire who were the labour force was very, very small.

You get it; pedantry is pointless here. The folks benefitting from a thing will vote themselves money and perks until the place is bankrupt. It takes a different mindset to sign the front of the check, than to sign the back of the check.

>The folks benefitting from a thing will vote themselves money and perks until the place is bankrupt

So, executive boards of companies?

Exactly. I tend to criticize plans like this because of their essential similarities to current arrangements, not their differences.

The positive aspect is that it introduces democracy into the system (through control by officeholders), if only for the moment that it takes for power to recentralize (as any autonomy that the business has is lost due to patronage appointments from the central government or larger unions.) Maybe this could be prevented by handing control to the union of the workers in a particular company, or a particular location, rather than large unions that cover entire industries.

This doesn't seem like an accurate assessment:

"He finds that codetermination laws are negatively associated with productivity, but profit sharing, worker ownership, and worker participation in decision making are all positively associated with productivity." ---http://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Money_and_Economics/Coop...

"The positive effects are found most uniformly with respect to profit sharing and, to a slightly lesser extent, individual capital (share) ownership and participation in decision-making by workers." ---https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0147596787...

Do you have citations to back that up? A quick search turned up a couple of hits (one old, one relatively recent) that both said that Employee owned businesses performed reasonably well. Certainly not conclusive, but a first stab.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/darrendahl/2016/07/19/are-emplo... https://hbr.org/1987/09/how-well-is-employee-ownership-worki...

Employee-owned is very different from employee-managed.

I recall VW put a single member of labor on their board; it broke the company as other members courted the vote of the uninformed labor rep, giving up perks until labor costs were bankrupting the place.

Companies operating in a competitive environment have to be pretty efficient. Optimizing a company for employee benefits is pretty much at odds with that. I know, they will all be more loyal etc. But that's different from lowering product cost and controlling profit margins. You fail to make payroll even one week, the game's over.

An anecdotal characterization of the members of a board catering to a single representative of labor on that board isn't a model for what employee managed companies look like.

Of course, since labor representation on boards is widespread in Germany, most medium to large German businesses are a good example. I assume the German economy is in tatters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

Forgive me for my ignorance. Lets consider what happens when the workers run the company, not when they have some small input. Experienced management is crucial to correct operation. They folks in the mail room, the factory floor, the loading dock are perhaps not going to have the same motivations as someone trained and charged with deciding the future direction of the business?

If we presuppose educated and trained labor members who are used in management, well then I guess we have that now? In every company everywhere.

There are lots of successful co-ops though.

To be fair, bread is the result of employee ownership of Arizmendi bakeries. I don't see how that's a problem, though.