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And would this improve company productivity and morale there? For a public company obviously. And not for a capital investment to sell later but for actual ownership. So if all workers collectively decided to put a piece of their pay every week into buying some shares then did it week after week for years until collectively the group now owned a significant % of the company and could now vote on and partially control the companies operations with the long term intention of buying 51%. Would the increasing ownership and direct attachment to their own labor improve the company and the moods of the workers? Has this been tested before? Sorry for the small question, someone asked me about it and I didn't have much of an answer.
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Feb 15, 2021 02:49
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I think you’re not realizing just how many shares of a company exist on the market. I doubt most workers have the kind of excess income to buy more than a few hundred shares of a company. Plus, while stocks do generally gain value over time, a single stock is not the best investment strategy. Often a stock’s value is only tangentially related to what the company is earning. About morale? I don’t know. There are companies where workers own significant shares. I would think this would be a thing that makes the employee more emotionally attached to the workplace, but I can’t point to any studies or anything. It probably is very dependent on the socioeconomic status of the workers as well. Having worked at a place where the majority of folks earned $12/hr or less, I can’t see just ownership of part of the business as making a big difference in their lives. Paying them more, or free insurance, would make 100 times the impact.
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Feb 15, 2021 04:13
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GM's current market cap is 77.23 Billion dollars. This current work force is about 85,000 employees. If all 85,000 employees banded together to buy GM out completely, excluding any shares of GM they currently own, and all of those shares were available for purchase at the same time for the same price, they'd each need to pony up a little over $908,000. If they only wanted 51% of the company they'd pay $463k per person. Most GM employees don't have that kind of scratch. This also ignores that that certain classes of shares have different voting rights. For example, Google's Class B shares have 10 votes. And unless Larry Page and Sergey Brin plan on selling their shares you'll never buy enough to wrest control of the company from them even if you bought every other share in existence. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-larry-page-sergey-brin-still-majority-control-alphabet-2019-12 GamingHyena fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Feb 15, 2021 |
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Feb 15, 2021 04:28
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Worker cooperatives are generally more stable, more fulfilling to work at, and even often pay better (unless you'd be at the top in a "normal" employment arrangement, at least), on top of many other benefits, so in situations where they are an option they're definitely better. Most studies I've seen suggest they're better in almost every way if you wouldn't be something like a CEO otherwise. It's just, yeah, as it is now power is massively entrenched and it's basically impossible for the workers to personally challenge that, at least through buying stock, so you're not likely to see any large companies taken over this way. And even if it were feasible, I don't think many people are aware of the idea, plus there are probably ways it could be sabotaged if the people who currently own the companies realized what's happening early enough. Smaller businesses might be vulnerable to this, but even then, workers don't have a lot of money to spare generally and would have a hard time pulling it off while still, you know, surviving. This is also a big issue with starting new cooperatives up. Plus, even if it did start to take off, there'd be huge backlash against it, especially in the US, since it's actual socialism and would threaten the dominant order and narrative. Workplace democracy is one of the last things those currently in power would want. It would be awesome if they became more widespread, though. And it'd be kind of amusing to see something get attacked as communism and anarchy and whatnot and have it actually be accurate for once. (Those are also, of course, why such cooperatives are cool and good rather than downsides.) Roland Jones fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Feb 15, 2021 |
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Feb 15, 2021 05:33
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GamingHyena posted:GM's current market cap is 77.23 Billion dollars. More for the smaller public companies not the giant ones with a huge market cap and over a long period of time. And how would having different vote amounts per share work? If you bought 60% of a companies market cap even if your shares had less votes you now had majority ownership of your company to just supersede any voting.
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Feb 15, 2021 05:54
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leveraged employee buyout or employee stock options are a real corporate restructure plan that is occasionally performed. it's real and exists, especially for family-held SMEs seeking to exit, although bigger buyouts have occurred before. "where will the scratch come from" --> leverage; the new owners would own a new asset, which would serve as collateral; they only need to pledge future cashflows, which - if the new corporate form is really all that more productive - should be readily obtained. Credit availability is not, I think, really the difficulty it is generally not all employees but some employees. e.g. management buyouts, of course. Leveraged buyouts by all staff in equal stake is a much rarer form, for the straightforward reason that corporate forms with reasonably equitable employee stakes are rare. Even if all employees are shop-floor workers in a factory setting, there would still generally be those near the start of the career who would favour steep investment, vs those near the ends of their career who would favour steep drawdowns, and the nature of worker ownership is that this disparate attitude to risk is hard to equally satisfy. The logical outcome is that some staff buy in and some opt out; actually forming a cooperative may not be in consensus interest. Cooperatives have corporate governance problems and stakeholder elections too; some people will lose elections (that's why there are elections - because governance decisionmaking is not self-evident), and if they had a choice upfront, those people might not have chosen to buy in to begin with. of course in circumstances favouring such conditions, e.g. post-Soviet liberalisation, we do see waves of leveraged employee buyouts speaking of diversification, that's the other difficulty - say you are the employee; your lifetime earnings portfolio is already de facto heavily tied to your existing industry and location and employment. Is your optimal risk strategy to double down on that? Probably not. The gains have to be truly enormous to offset all that - it would make more sense for towns dominated by a single employment location (monotowns/mill towns) where alternate options are wholly unavailable (and yet that industry must remain credible as a going concern).
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Feb 15, 2021 07:35
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Flannelette posted:And how would having different vote amounts per share work? If you bought 60% of a companies market cap even if your shares had less votes you now had majority ownership of your company to just supersede any voting. So let's say there's a company that has 100 shares of stock, in two classes. There are 60 shares of class A stock. Class A stock gives you 1 vote per share. There are 40 votes of class B stock. Class B stock has 2 votes per share. Let's also say you own all the class A stock and I own all the class B stock. Who controls the company, you or me? So the number of total votes out there is 140...60 shares with 1 vote, 40 shares with 2 votes. That means to make a decision about the company, it takes 71 votes. Since I have 70 votes, I control the company, even though you have more physical .shares of stock than I do. You might even own more of the market cap than I do (or you might not...an individual share I own might be worth more than one you do), but I still have final say about company decisions if we disagree.
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Feb 15, 2021 07:56
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My company sells me shares at a steep discount (in addition to giving out RSUs occasionally etc). The issue is that, yeah, there are a lot of shares and you'd have to dump a ton of money over a long period of time to accumulate enough to make a difference. And diversification. But if you do end up with enough shares, youd either have to get involved in the decision making or again leave it up to someone else. IMO it'd make more sense to just start a union in most cases.
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Feb 15, 2021 09:13
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Another problem is that owning a modest amount of stock in a company you are working for has real drawbacks versus investing in pretty much anything else: - You often can only trade the stock during limited time windows, generally for the next few weeks after earnings. - If your compensation is already affected by company performance through bonuses and/or raises and/or not losing your job, double dipping on that factor is not great, unless you are extremely bullish on the company. When your owned stock dwarfs your salary, then the math changes substantially, obviously. However, that's not the situation normal employees will find themselves in. For these factors, most people I know who get RSUs (and myself when I used to get them) set up an agreement with their broker to insta-sell their RSUs on receipt. The incentive to hold the stock rather than cash it in is just not very strong. Aramis fucked around with this message at 16:25 on Feb 15, 2021 |
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Feb 15, 2021 14:52
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Flannelette posted:And would this improve company productivity and morale there? https://youtu.be/wA_P8CaNwro?t=143
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Feb 15, 2021 14:58
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Let's say this was actually viable outside of very small companies and special circumstances, that you wanted to do this broadly, across all industries, and that when threatened the capital class wouldn't change the rules to prevent this from happening: you'd have a level of worker coordination and class identity such that you might as well just skip the middleman and take over the government or otherwise force them to implement actual socialism.
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Feb 15, 2021 17:02
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Someone should start a hedge fund that does in a leftist way what the normal hedge funds do to companies like Toys R Us, buying up companies using leverage and then selling ownership stocks equally to their employees. This is my One Weird Trick to end capitalism, please listen to my TED talk!
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Feb 15, 2021 19:14
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