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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

I believe that an employer should make a substantial margin on an employee's labor. That provides a stable situation, covers for the employer's risk (if an employee's project/work fails to create value, they still get paid), and covers the overhead.

If you want full value (which might be zero or negative at times) for your labor, you should start your own thing and keep 100% of the value you create.

If my employer wasn't making at least 3x (and ideally more like 5x) the total cost they were spending on me, I'd start worrying about the stability and longevity of that relationship. (So far, very happily employed there almost 13 years and no end in sight.)

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> I believe that an employer should make a substantial margin on an employee's labor. That provides a stable situation, covers for the employer's risk (if an employee's project/work fails to create value, they still get paid), and covers the overhead.

A workers' cooperative can do the same job. What justifies the privatization of the cooperative's profits to a single individual?

> A workers' cooperative can do the same job

Then the workers should go ahead and form such a cooperative.

The profits go to the owner, whatever that is. The employees chose the company (and implicitly the ownership structure) when they began employment. It's not like citizenship where one is born into the situation and the contract is mythical; they had to sign one.

Do you not believe in the sanctity of property rights?

>Do you not believe in the sanctity of property rights?

Well of course not. Property is theft, and all that[1].

[1] -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Property%3F

Where in sokoloff's answer did they specify that the margin went to an individual? I interpret "employer" to mean the employing company, composed of many individuals who, like sokoloff, also want stability.

Ok. Why should the company be subject to nonworker ownership and exploitation?

I'll address the ownership angle as that's simple (at least in my mind): because someone (or several someones) put up the capital to start the business. They own it.

If they want to exchange some ownership for some cash, they can sell all or part of their ownership stake. If they want to exchange some ownership for labor or other services, they can create a stock or option grant program, typically with vesting. There doesn't seem to be anything unnatural to me about someone putting capital at risk to form a business owning the resulting business. No different than putting my capital at risk/committed to buy a house or a car. I pay for them and I own them.

If you want to avoid that situation that you find exploitive, you are free to start your own (individually or as a collective) and keep/share as you judge best.

You could make a similar argument for taxes. The state provides a stable environment, covers risk, and handles overhead. Yet people (in some countries, at least) are significantly more accepting of corporations taking many times the value they are creating in profit versus the state taking a proportion of their earnings in taxes.

That's because their relationship with employer is voluntary.

Only up to a point; unless you are rich you are in effect required to take a job in most countries, and there is often not any choice available in employment. Compare that to the state where the relationship is not optional but you do get a vote in how it is run. Plus you potentially have the option of moving to another country.

You have a choice of many different employers and you have the choice to form your own venture (be it software development, business consulting, running a restaurant, doing landscaping, driving Uber, or even walking dogs and doing general errands).

I'm not aware of countries where your choice is "do this one specific job for this one specific employer or else starve".

You may in theory have a choice of employers but in practice you may not. I'm an experienced programmer and have a fairly wide choice of jobs I might take up but in the past I have literally had to take whatever job was available.

Starting your own venture may be possible but is dependent on aptitude, access to capital and the state of the economy (it's unlikely that we could all start our own businesses for example; the market wouldn't support it).

The recent rise in economic migrants suggest that it many cases it really is easier to switch countries than switch jobs in one's own country.

Same is true for vast majority of countries.

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