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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

Yes, companies should be accountable to their owners, who in many cases are shareholders. Property ownership is what aligns incentives toward the maintenance and improvement of infrastructure, which in the end benefits us all. There's no sin in profit.

When you strip property owners of control over their property and give control to people with no skin in the game, you misalign incentives and contribute to bad decision making and eventual decay arising from the accumulated consequences of bad decion making.

If you think companies make bad decisions now, just wait until they're legally obligated to obey people who don't give a damn about the company's survival and who want to hijack the effort for stupid ideological and status signaling games.

Utopian projects that amount to taking stuff from property owners and giving it to ideologues never work. They usually end up generating nothing but heaps of bodies.

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> no skin in the game

The presumption that people who spend 40+ hours a week of their lives there, and are dependent on the company for their income and healthcare have "no skin in the game" is odd.

The sort of person advocating employee control, in my very direct experience, comes to take the company's profitability for granted and wants to push the company in unprofitable directions for reasons that are personal, political, and ultimately emotional. I've seen this pattern play out too many times to believe the idea that someone who merely works at a company (and who can move to another) cares nearly as much about success as someone who built the company, or at least whose fortune is riding on it.

Conversely, in a publicly traded company if you don't like the way it's being run you can exit your position with the press of a button.

I know people who were exactly not like that.

Anecdotes cancel out. Do you have a point, or a strawman?

"The sort of person advocating employee control,"

Nobody talks about employee control. It's about employee participation! And employees are a stakeholder in the success of the company. They contribute to it, they benefit or suffer from it. Employees had a part in building the company.

Someone working in a company that skirts OSHA requirements for short term profit gains has a lot more skin in the game than investors in my opinion.

> Utopian projects that amount to taking stuff from property owners and giving it to ideologues never work. They usually end up generating nothing but heaps of bodies.

Giving property owners unfettered rights to seek profit over everything else tends to end up generating nothing but heaps of bodies (oh, and a bunch of wealth for a few individuals). So I guess in that case it's worth it?

I don't think workers organizing to make the place they work safer and better long term is "stupid ideological and status signaling games". Adding worker elected board members isn't a new idea either, it's been done with some success.

If a company is violating OSHA, report the violation. If OSHA isn't strong enough, get it fixed.

If you want a company not to do something, pass a law that prohibits that thing. The law is wonderful. In theory, lawmaking happens in the open, according to well-known rules, and everyone gets a say. It's not perfect, but nothing is.

What internal corporate activists want is the power beyond the law. They want to make stuff up whenever it suits them, behind closed doors, and without accountability to the public. And they want this power because they want to compel companies to do things that are deeply unpopular, things that would never make it through the lawmaking process.

These people are using the language of democracy to undermine democracy.

You can't say, "Use this idealized theory of getting things done that isn't real" and then say "because I'm worried about this demonized theory of getting things don't that hasn't actually happened".

I'm not on board with 50% of this but damnit if you're pushing me to be on board with all of it.

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