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Comment by e40 | Hacker News Reader

Unless they had a majority, that is not true. Having 1 or 2 workers on the board would be a good thing, I believe. Too many boards are out of touch with what goes on in the company.

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THey don't need a majority. They'd use it as negotiating leverage, ie, I'll vote this way if you vote that way.

What's interesting though is that Germany is an industrial powerhouse compared to the US.

> What's interesting though is that Germany is an industrial powerhouse compared to the US.

The DAX is up 37% since 2015, the S&P500 is up 74%. (That's as far back as DAX goes on Yahoo finance.)

He said industrial powerhouse, not financial powerhouse.

It's not the banking industry that is driving the stock market in the US.

Based on P/E ratios, it's not the economy either.

"What's interesting though is that Germany is an industrial powerhouse compared to the US."

There are two reasons for that.

1. The US has the stuff she develops produced abroad (IT, Computer, Phones etc.), mainly due to tax reasons (Produce in China, sell to Hongkong, sell to the US, major mark up in HK is done tax free).

2. German companies don't not pay their engineers. You can make more as a dog walker in the US or an English teacher in China than as many engineers in Germany.

And one worker on the board would change that? How? If the managers - whose duty is supposed to be knowing what's going on, that's literally what they are paid for - can't, how one person whose job is doing something else, could in addition to that gain adequate knowledge of what's going on that is impossible for others to gain? Especially in a company that has, say, a hundred of people? Best case they would know what's going in their corner of work, but in any company which doesn't fit in a single room that won't be representative of others. Unless you make that worker spend whole day on figuring what's going on, talking with all workers from all other rooms, systematizing and analyzing and processing this information to make conclusions - by which time, you just made him a manager.

They would be acting as a nonexec director it would effectively be a fulltime role maybe 2 days a week minimum.

By the same argument, shareholders shouldn't be on the board either, since they aren't management.

If the only consideration is "knowing what's going on" then yes. But shareholders are owners, so they may demand participation even if they don't know anything, just for the fact they actually own the company (at last partially).

By that token employees who own company stock should have a place on the board.

> Unless you make that worker spend whole day on figuring what's going on, talking with all workers from all other rooms,

Workers representatives are picked to represent workers in negotiations and discussion, and their job is to spend the whole day figuring what's going on.

Then it's just a kind of manager (in the better case, in worse it's a union functionary with a political agenda which may have little to do with worker's interests in a particular workplace).

> Too many boards are out of touch with what goes on in the company.

Do you have examples of this?

TSLA

How are they not in touch with what is going on in the company? The chairman seems extremely aware and involved with it. Im not being sarcastic, I'm really interesting in how/which companies people think the board is out of touch and how they are out of touch.

You had to pick THE company whose CEO is actually spending a large part of his time in the factory?

I had to google TSLA to realize it was Tesla. What's up with using stock symbols? You saved one letter by not writing Tesla.

Sorry, but have you ever worked in a bigger company?

The problems in a company are obvious for most workers.

I used to work for a while as a management consultant, and, in my personal experience, would rephrase the above as "a subset of the smart, engaged workers in a company, can often tell you 80%, of the main problems in week 1, which makes you wonder why the CEOs ( who are smart) hire you to address those problems, as well as the trickier 20%

I have, and in reality most of the problem are not real problems (at least the ones from the workers perspectives) when viewed from the C-level and board perspective. But Im still waiting for examples of companies where this is taking place and am certainly willing to accept my position is a wrong one but no one has provided a credible example yet.

Tyco, Ericsson, Comcast, IBM, GE to name a few. All of these companies are rotting from the inside out and management and contractor heavy.

Can you provide examples as to how? People just keep naming companies but no examples.

> The problems in a company are obvious for most workers.

I agree that workers see things that management doesn't, and good managers are aware of that and work hard to overcome it. However, having seen both sides of that coin, workers also lack awareness of many issues and constraints. They think, 'why don't we just do X? It's obvious!', without realizing that X would cost the company a major investor or partner, or put the company in the crosshairs of a dangerous competitor; or that X would divert resources from a higher priority; or that the CIO, who is great in every other way, opposes X and it's not worth alienating them; etc.

> The problems in a company are obvious for most workers.

The workers at best see a part of an individual tree, but the job of the board is to manage the whole forrest considering how the entire world is at that moment and where it will be in 5 or 10 years in the future.

I meant "workers" in a broader way. Maybe even everything below the board.

I have friends that were laid off (in the end) and the problems in their company were obvious to them. They did not even bother trying brining it up (hint: Never do!).

Now a major consulting firm is trying to restructure the company. They have zero understanding of the business (niche) and based on his former perspective of the company many decisions are major major mistakes (e.g. they only see the profits that a business devision brings in but they don't see how many other divisions rely on that business devision to bring in their business).

He had a genius idea (trust me) how to combine two different fields that could have started a complete new business division with basically close to zero start-up cost. He never bothered brining the idea up because "this company is too conservative to even consider this".

So, a guy with a tremendous insight into the problems and possible solutions goes totally unnoticed. And this is just one example.

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