You’re describing a race to the bottom for quality of jobs. But in this system we all have to have jobs, so you’re describing a race to the bottom for quality of life for most people. I think it is reasonable to question and discuss how we can better optimize our goals so that people’s material needs are met but jobs also don’t suck.
> So workers do own the companies, in proportion to how much value they deliver to the world due to market cap weighting.
This claim hides a great deal of assumptions about economics that are highly contested. For example the idea that how many shares you buy is proportional to the value you deliver assumes that workers with zero shares deliver zero value, which is obviously false. This also assumes that wealthier people, who own more of the shares in index funds, and delivering proportionally more value. Lending does have value, but it has limits. Imagine in the extreme case a company with 100 employees where 100% of the shares are owned by one person. Does that person provide 100% of the value?
My point more directly is that worker’s labor has value unrelated to ownership in shares, and simply offering stock options is not the same as a worker owned company, in practice.
Who says? What if we said the point of a company was to make its employees' lives better?
> In the US a vast majority of adults now own index funds
in proportion to their wealth. That's the problem - ownership is distributed unevenly, and the inequality causes social problems.
Good news! The world spent the entire last century experimenting with that idea. It did not work out well. I’ve already explained why.
But, you are of course free to start a company doing that. If it turns out to produce better outcomes for customers (the world), you will win and society will win!
I’m guessing you won’t test your ideas though, and will instead vote for authoritarian central planners who will deploy this straight to production via laws. Then your country will cease growing, and will be forced to slowly dismantle this worker-optimized system as a result. See Europe over the next 50 years for more info.
Where are these so called experiments? I only see employee conditions getting progressively worse. If you go back long enough, we did get a few wins like weekends and some limits on hours after a lot of people died for it, but that's about it.
The last change we had was probably WFH which only affects a small portion of people and, realistically, is only being accepted because it's cheaper for companies.
>But, you are of course free to start a company doing that.
I argue nothing different than the status quo can ever succeed without deep structural change.
It's like trying to be a pacifist in the middle of a war zone. You will be killed. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with being a pacifist, but it simply cannot work under those conditions.
The part that people seem to forget is that we chose to value profits above all else. We can also choose to change that. Even if it's extremely hard to imagine this with all the propaganda we've been bombarded with in the past century, it's possible.
They're repeating propaganda about communism and socialism.
It's tiresome, really, the degree to which Americans have bought the propaganda that countries like the Soviet Union themselves spread, that they were communist, when in fact they were authoritarian dictatorships with a few very-badly-thought-out planned-economy features.
True communism has never been tried, it will work this time around…
Please then, what was it? Capitalist? Feudal? Democratic socialism? I need a clear answer..
It's obvious that "communist" policies don't entail that you have the same government as the USSR, so I think it's fair to call arguments that suggest so propaganda. It's probably meaningless to argue about whether the USSR had "true communism".
That's the problem with this type of topic. As much as I like to talk about it, there never seems to be any real talk. People pick a side and arguments be damned.
The extent of their knowledge generally extends to "communism bad" and there's no good faith in actually talking about the shitty situation we're in today.
My original answer was not even citing communism at all. I was specifically talking about worker conditions, but people seem to be unable or unwilling to have a conversation and instead degrade it and down vote.
Why don’t you go visit a Cuban state-run grocery store and tell me how much you’d enjoy living there?
I'm saying communism is bad.
> in proportion to their wealth. That's the problem - ownership is distributed unevenly, and the inequality causes social problems.
Maybe we should work on helping people to manage their tendency towards jealousy. One way is to have a culture of personal responsibility so that if you're poor, you believe (rightly or wrongly) that it's your own fault so you're not filled with hate for people who have more money than you.
I think workers should have a seat on every board; workers should have a right to first refusal - with a preferential price - on companies that are going through an exit; and that the state should provide an investment fund to allow for this to happen on the condition that the business be ran as a worker co-op.
I think policy such as this would bring stability, long-term thinking, and more genuine customer empathy that isn't solely profit-driven, while reducing costs and driving up baseline wages.
Democracy is important in our politics, but we spend more time at work than anything else. Therefore democracy should be part of our workplaces too.
It's worth adding that none of this prohibits businesses from starting up and reaching the point where they exit with a handsome reward.
No, no one is more important or less important than anyone else. Every role has to be played order for anyone to benefit. Someone has to bear the risk and pay the upfront costs; someone has to do the operational work in order to deliver value to the market and someone has to be willing to pay for the resulting product in order to generate net positive value for all participants. If any one of these items is missing, the entire initiative fails.
So the participants negotiate arrangements that mutually incentivize each other to pay their parts satisfactorily. Whether those arrangements meet the speculative standards of uninvolved strangers' dogmatic ideologies is not and should not be relevant.
> So the participants negotiate arrangements that mutually incentivize each other to pay their parts satisfactorily.
I don't think this is accurate. Stakeholders in a founding business certainly do this in order to set the pace of initial growth and retain key staff. Organisations which are in the last stages of an exit do not act in the interests of the workers or the customer - they act in the interest of the party that is set to buy them and the major stakeholders set to profit the most. And whether it's by destroying terms and conditions, laying off staff, or by slashing pensions, all of this serves the owners and major stakeholders at the expense of everyone else. Having a better distribution of ownership disincentivises these malicious activities.
Studies show that cooperatives produce more stable, sustainable businesses which are not designed for short-term speculation.
• Worker co-operatives are larger than conventional businesses and not necessarily less capital intensive
• Worker co-operatives survive at least as long as other businesses and have more stable employment
• Worker cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses, with staff working “better and smarter” and production organised more efficiently
• Worker co-operatives retain a larger share of their profits than other business models
• Executive and non-executive pay differentials are much narrower in worker co-operatives than other firms
Source: https://www.uk.coop/sites/default/files/2020-10/worker_co-op...
I'm afraid that this is not true. Owners are not just the ones who enable the business to be initiated in the first place, but are the ones who bear risk on an ongoing basis in order to keep the business up and running. Firms that need ongoing capital infusions to expand operations, or that incur debt in order to get past short-term financial bottlenecks, absolutely need someone to be responsible for the inherent risks associated with doing so.
Eliminating the business owner as the risk-bearer, and setting up a business in which "workers" are the responsible parties makes workers themselves bear all the risk. In the status quo, the worst risk exposure that workers face if the firm faces financial difficulty is that they will just lose their jobs -- i.e. that the customer that has to that point been purchasing their services will simply cease making further purchases. But in a situation in which these service providers were the owners, and therefore responsible for the firm's obligations, they would not only lose their jobs but would also be on the hook to repay its debts and/or will suffer the loss of whatever funds they put into it to ensure it had sufficient capital to operate.
Workers generally don't want to do this, and usually prefer to just receive an agreed upon rate for services rendered for as long as the relationship persists.
You may note that the industries in which worker-owned co-ops are relatively common are the ones that have low risk inherent in the business model -- markets with predictable demand, long product life cycles, and relatively inelastic price sensitivity, e.g. grocery stores. Industries with high volatility, rapid technological change, short product life cycles, high need for capital, and elastic demand simply don't work well under a co-op model.
> Organisations which are in the last stages of an exit do not act in the interests of the workers or the customer - they act in the interest of the party that is set to buy them and the major stakeholders set to profit the most.
Ultimately, everything is just a proxy for consumer utility. A business that is acting in the interest of a potential buyer needs to ensure that the firm is performing viably, since the buyer usually aims to operate it (or, if they aim to liquidate it, the current operators need to maximize the liquidation value).
In either case, the only way to do that is still to satisfy market demand -- we may frown at the tactics they use to do so, but ultimately, they will only use tactics that are effective in terms of encouraging customers to actually purchase their goods or services. At the end of the day, it's still customers assigning more value to the product than to the money they are exchanging for it that enables the form to earn a profit.
> Studies show that cooperatives produce more stable, sustainable businesses which are not designed for short-term speculation.
Per my point above, I believe you have the causality inverted. Co-ops are only suitable for stable, sustainable businesses that have low risk exposure and low capital requirements. The correlation you are seeing is because co-ops generally don't participate in more volatile markets in the first place.
False comparison bc today's companies balance customer value with shareholder value. Collectives can do the same thing.
The fatal scenario of companies optimizing for owner's benefit is in fact the scenario we have today where investor-owned companies benefits themselves more than customers, eg pollution, disposable plastic products that can't be repaired or maintained, like the millions of apple tvs that just become landfill overnight, fake shortages to raise prices, stock buy backs, low quality processed foods manufactured in at bliss point.
Um, what? The point of a company is to make profit for its investors, and making a useful product for the customer is only a byproduct of doing that. This is why corporations are making record profits, instead of investing it all into R&D or rainy day funds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
The minute you start optimizing for employees instead of customers, you’re delivering less value to customers (the world) and asking to be disrupted. This is good.
In the US a vast majority of adults now own index funds (either via their personal retirement or public pensions). In fact, the largest shareholder in almost all public companies is some index fund.
So workers do own the companies, in proportion to how much value they deliver to the world due to market cap weighting.
The system we have now has evolved out of thousands of years of humans battle-testing various other systems. The current form has taken pretty much the entire world out of devastating poverty at breakneck speed. Seems like we shouldn’t redesign it based on the whims of armchair internet commenters.