If 51% of the employees would benefit from firing the other 49%, you'd be as good as gone anyway. Not saying it would be worse, but the same incentives are at play.
No, because the average employee has both a lot more in common with their peers and because the gains are lower for people whose stock shares are orders of magnitude lower. Joe from accounting isn’t laying off a department so he can sell shares worth the price of a Corolla before taxes.
For the last 15 years I’ve been telling anyone who would listen about my idea for a John Lewis (British retail chain) model IT consultancy- employee owned, everyone is motivated, high quality, etc.
Except last month I met someone who worked there and got TUPE (involuntary contractual transfer of employment) to Wipro (Indian outsourcerer) a few years ago.
So even though this corporation is owned by the employees, and is one of the best examples of this in the UK, it seems you also need some kind of management structure that is also immune to the usual senior leadership trolls to avoid it turning out to be shitty.
Yeah - the answer is that the cost to deliver a service from my local government is a lot cheaper than it is when it's coming from the private sector.
People meme on 'lol government efficiency', but actually sit down and calculate your marginal cost for the services you pay for that are funded by taxation. It's not even close - the cost to operate these services per person is crazy low.
In fact, you don't even have to look that far for government-adjacent programs. Co-ops for utilities are notoriously cheaper for their service area than a private utility, almost without exception.
So yeah - the government is not perfectly efficient. It's not going to give you exactly what you want all the time, but it's still 2-3x more efficient than the private sector when it comes to actually absorbing the costs as a citizen or user of a service. "Lol government efficiency" is not the burn you think it is.
Reasonably efficient. Local schools are good, local roads are good, job market is solid, housing is being built and the urban planning is better than most areas. Taxes are high, but not NJ/NYC high.
No, this never works... The socialism glaze on HN amazes me...
I am Swedish, in Sweden, and we are a market economy combined with unions. Companies can do layoffs but for a 3month agreement, they have to notify basically, WARN.
these corporations would never work because they would optimise for the wrong thing - they would get their face eaten by other more efficient and ruthless corporations
These corporations exist and do work. Worker owned companies have their own challenges and their own advantages.
For example they tend to be more stable during crisis, because workers tend to vote for lowering salaries/benefits temporarily rather than doing layoffs. So they retain talent better. But they also tend to have difficulty to grow quickly, for obvious reasons.
Besides full on coops, there are also plenty of examples that are hybrids (partially worker owned).
> they would get their face eaten by other more efficient and ruthless corporations
You're possibly of assuming that a company needs to have an adversarial relationship to their workers in order to be competitive. I don't think that's generally true. This approach has advantages in specific situations, but disadvantages in others.
If 51% of the employees would benefit from firing the other 49%, you'd be as good as gone anyway. Not saying it would be worse, but the same incentives are at play.
No, because the average employee has both a lot more in common with their peers and because the gains are lower for people whose stock shares are orders of magnitude lower. Joe from accounting isn’t laying off a department so he can sell shares worth the price of a Corolla before taxes.
Presumably ~100% of the employees want to feel secure in their jobs, so I don't think this would happen unless the benefit to the 51% is extreme.
For the last 15 years I’ve been telling anyone who would listen about my idea for a John Lewis (British retail chain) model IT consultancy- employee owned, everyone is motivated, high quality, etc.
Except last month I met someone who worked there and got TUPE (involuntary contractual transfer of employment) to Wipro (Indian outsourcerer) a few years ago.
So even though this corporation is owned by the employees, and is one of the best examples of this in the UK, it seems you also need some kind of management structure that is also immune to the usual senior leadership trolls to avoid it turning out to be shitty.
Even under non-hierarchical systems someone has to take out the trash.
Have you look at how efficient your local government is?
Yeah - the answer is that the cost to deliver a service from my local government is a lot cheaper than it is when it's coming from the private sector.
People meme on 'lol government efficiency', but actually sit down and calculate your marginal cost for the services you pay for that are funded by taxation. It's not even close - the cost to operate these services per person is crazy low.
In fact, you don't even have to look that far for government-adjacent programs. Co-ops for utilities are notoriously cheaper for their service area than a private utility, almost without exception.
So yeah - the government is not perfectly efficient. It's not going to give you exactly what you want all the time, but it's still 2-3x more efficient than the private sector when it comes to actually absorbing the costs as a citizen or user of a service. "Lol government efficiency" is not the burn you think it is.
You're making it sound like I am not already paying taxes for those "absorbing of costs".
The flip side is that sometimes things go poorly and the (lack of financial) incentives are such that costs might not get reined in for a long while.
Reasonably efficient. Local schools are good, local roads are good, job market is solid, housing is being built and the urban planning is better than most areas. Taxes are high, but not NJ/NYC high.
When local governments are captured by corporate interests this isn't the argument you think it is.
"captured by corporate" is a feature. It is either Corporate or the Vanguard. We are almost agreeing.
No, this never works... The socialism glaze on HN amazes me...
I am Swedish, in Sweden, and we are a market economy combined with unions. Companies can do layoffs but for a 3month agreement, they have to notify basically, WARN.
You'll also be less exposed in privately owned companies.
these corporations would never work because they would optimise for the wrong thing - they would get their face eaten by other more efficient and ruthless corporations
These corporations exist and do work. Worker owned companies have their own challenges and their own advantages.
For example they tend to be more stable during crisis, because workers tend to vote for lowering salaries/benefits temporarily rather than doing layoffs. So they retain talent better. But they also tend to have difficulty to grow quickly, for obvious reasons.
Besides full on coops, there are also plenty of examples that are hybrids (partially worker owned).
> they would get their face eaten by other more efficient and ruthless corporations
You're possibly of assuming that a company needs to have an adversarial relationship to their workers in order to be competitive. I don't think that's generally true. This approach has advantages in specific situations, but disadvantages in others.
Im literally saying the opposite that no adversarial relationship needs to exist.
That’s exactly why you don’t need worker owned companies