Comment by emilecantin
2 days ago
I think there should perhaps be a law that any corporation automatically has a new class of un-tradeable VOTING shares, worth 50% of the overall vote, held by the employees. Everybody with an employment contract with this company is entitled to 1 vote, no more, no less; whether they're the janitor or the CEO.
Employees of a company are the ones who are the most affected by the company's decisions, it's only fair that they have a say.
How much is a vote worth in dollars? Because there would be a market for those votes, not just a spot market for dollars or internal market using vacation days, it would be reflected in salary and benefits and company policy etc.
Couldn’t you just make the voting anonymous to make sure that buying votes isn’t possible? Why wouldn’t I just take your money and still vote however I like?
A law like this just means getting full time employment becomes that much more difficult and the vast majority of people working for a company will be non-voting contractors without benefits. The existing employees would even vote for changes that make full time hiring more difficult in order to avoid diluting their own votes.
It would obviously need to be accompanied with rigorous enforcement of employee classification. I know there would be a bunch of possible ways to game this, so there are a lot of other rules we'd need to add but I didn't want to make my comment too long.
Also, I wouldn't necessarily make a distinction between the full-time employees vs the part-time ones.
I think you’ll find that won’t actually work in practice. Many contract workers are not independent freelancers but actually employees of a different company who contracts the work out as a whole.
For example, a courier company like UPS employs all of its workers but the packages it delivers are for other companies who contract with UPS to do the work. If you force all businesses to employ their own couriers then UPS can’t even exist as a company and small businesses that depend on courier services would simply be unable to function at all.