If employees don’t own a meaningful part of the company today and pay 1-1.5% of their wages to a union, how will that give the union enough money to buy a controlling stake in the company?

Amazon’s market cap is ~$1.25T. Under the conservative (false) assumption that a union bidding for half the shares would not move the price at all, that union would have to spend ~$625B on those purchases, meaning total employee dues would be that much, implying a wage base (at 1% dues) of $62.5T, or more than 3 years of the entire US GDP.

Said differently: if employees could buy half their company for 1% (or even 10%) of their wages, there’d be no need for them to have a union negotiate their wages.

This isn't an argument against datavirtue's point: it's an argument that Amazon (and, by extension, the other major tech companies) are just too big for a healthy society and economy.

There's a common trap I've run into in my hobby of game development, that probably has a name that I don't know: trying to solve every problem with a single solution (and also its close cousin, rejecting a proposed improvement because it doesn't solve every problem). This is clearly also applicable to real life, with things like people complaining solar isn't viable at all because it can't provide for every bit of our energy needs on its own.

The idea datavirtue suggests is a good one. It just needs other things to be happening at the same time to support it—like strong antitrust action against the tech giants.

i wonder what percentage of shareholders vote and how many shares you need to practically influence a company direction.

Activist investors seem to be able to get results with 5-10% of shares. But there's probably more to it than that.

I have no idea why that doesn't work in practice, apparently it's rare for it to work.

In abstract I like unions and unions have helped me out, if I had become a cop obviously I'd be part of the Union, and I suspect union negotiators were persecuted in Chile for very very good reason in the elite's view. Like those guys would actually negotiate hardcore, knew all the tricks, well-read, not intimidated by glances or ugly looks, knew what to charge...basically a union negotiator. Negreated the negreators, well and that's why they were persecuted. Strictly money in that case.

It's never spoken openly, nobody ever brings up union negotiators. Think hostage negotiator. And working in the interest of the company, don't want it going underwater so it can keep paying wages. And also making sure the business stays competitive, but actually. In one case in Uruguay there was a strike, sort of the workers took over the factory and started working again right away, cut the management out completely, kept it going fine, hostile takeover so to speak.

Kinda sounds like you're describing cooperatives.