Beyond that, it's not as if you're putting any of your own money on the table. Ownership (whether that be private management or shareholders) is putting their money on the table.

If you'd like a higher risk/reward level, negotiate for equity or other variable compensation.

Of course, your suggestion also implies a labor market balance that simply does not exist. The article is actually about the fact that corporations are realizing record profits by employing fewer people and paying less to those whom they do employ. It's a buyer's market for labor. Not exactly a strong negotiating position for the worker.

This thread. Otherwise, you are changing the subject. We're not talking about personal finance here.

I don't get it. If they have enough money to buy stock in their own company, they have enough money to buy stock in some other company as well. Even if the money comes from not having to pay union dues, which is what the post I was responding to hypothesized, there's still no reason why it has to go into the stock of the company they work for.

To advocate that--rather than participate in the upside--employees should simply buy stock in other companies is irrelevant and does not address this lack of parity.

The added notion that employees should invest in stocks instead of participating in union advocacy (that, in part, attempts to provide them with some parity) is just plain cynical and suggests a total lack of respect for the worker.

I mostly responded to this in responding to your post in the other subthread we're having, but I do have one other comment about this. I think there's a key distinction to be made here between two reasons why corporate owners/executives get more upside: one is a good reason and one is not.

The good reason is that owners and executives have to deal with all the business risks that you talked about in the other subthread: finding product-market fit, raising capital, how to scale, etc. Workers don't; they come to work, do a job, and go home. Like it or not, it's easier to find people who will do the latter than it is to find people who will do the former; so, since the former type of person is scarce, they can demand more upside in exchange for the use of their talents.

The bad reason why corporate owners/executives get more upside is basically the one that's been given multiple times in this thread: corporate owners/executives are in a position to take more upside by abusing the corporate governance structure, whereas workers are not. (Unions were an attempt to stop this by giving workers more of a voice in the corporate governance structure; unfortunately, in many cases, the unions have ended up with exactly the same governance problems as the corporations they were supposedly fighting against. I saw this firsthand when I was working in the auto industry.) In fact, in many cases it's executives manipulating the structure for their own benefit at the expense of the owners, not just the workers. This is easier now that many "owners" are large mutual funds rather than individuals holding large blocks of stock, so the theoretical model of shareholders controlling the company by voting their shares bears little resemblance to reality in many cases.

One reason why I like the "why not start your own business?" response to this issue is that I think a larger percentage of people really are capable of dealing with the business risks themselves, instead of letting someone else (the owners/executives of the business they work for) do it. I think our society would work better, overall, if we had a larger number of smaller, more diverse businesses as opposed to a smaller number of large, monolithic corporations. The large, monolithic corporations are a historical artifact of the way the industrial revolution happened, and I think that in many ways they have outlived their usefulness.