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Comment by tehjoker | Hacker News Reader

If the employees owned the company, they would not fear automation and would reap the benefits. The problem is that the company is owned by tyrants.

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The buisness model is often to buy a good or service and then sell it for a higher price. Customers might pay for human hours, or explicitly want the work to be manual. Then it would be wrong to charge 10 hours for something that only took 1 hour. And the market/demand might not be big enough for 10x output.

We're not talking about bespoke loafer stitching, more like menial and mind-numbing excel sheet collation or something of the sort.

I think a lot of engineers make the mistake of thinking that "cost-plus" is the most appropriate way to price a product/service.

Do I care whether Dunkin makes a nickel or $0.75 on the donut they sell me? No. Is it "unfair" for them to have 4x margins on donuts? No.

Relatively few services are sold by the hour. Most spreadsheet mining is done for the value derived, not for the human labor input.

Is there a mainstream company structure that aligns interests in this way? Or would this require a paradigm shift?

it's usually called a cooperative (and a lot of farms operate this way).

That's a producer coop, a worker coop is what your thinking of part of KFC is a producer coop BTW

Mondragon [0] is often seen as the most successful large scale cooperative. Don't know if that was exactly what you were asking for though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

Mondragón id also not free from problems pinned on the neoliberal school of management, such as bankruptcies that shut down whole factories leaving workers out to dry.

https://www.theguardian.com/social-enterprise-network/2013/n...

Also John Lewis & Partners in the UK with 38,000 staff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_%26_Partners

Marketplace had a decent episode that covered it:

https://www.marketplace.org/shows/marketplace/there-are-6000...

Employees can join together and start their own company any time they want to.

Poor people can stop being poor whenever they want to. They just need to get a better paying job.

It’s not that simple at all and your comment is disingenuous.

While OP's comment points out the fact that in a liberal economy you are free to start any business as you see fit, your comment simply is intentionally absurd and pointless. You are in fact free to launch your own company or cooperative. That's an undisputable fact. If your labor is so critical and all managers are useless tyrants then why are you choosing to give away your means of production to useless tyrants? By your logic wouldn't it be obvious that starting your own company is the solution to all of your problems?

Companies usually require a lot of capital to get off the ground, I think that's the subtext there but I could be wrong. Being able to operate at a loss for an indeterminate amount of time and equipment being two costs that come to mind.

I started my first business when I was 8. It cost nothing to start it. There are tons of companies you can start for nothing or next to nothing. There are books filled with ideas on such you can get from Amazon.

`There are tons of companies you can start for nothing or next to nothing.`

And there are tons you can't start like that and it depends on where you live as well. Who's to say said employees are in a sector where it is that easy?

And if it is one of those one could start without much but i would want to start a business that can't ruin my life if it goes bankrupt due to something weird or unforseen happening. Well I legally have to put up a large amount of cash at the start. And then there's bs like noncompete agreements in employment contracts which i've faced a few times and which I notably looked at in depth once because yeah... I could totally do what that employer was doing way better. But hey I still can't go to it's customers today.

>I started my first business when I was 8

How much of your upbringing was atypical? How much of it was due to familial influence? Or a unique environment? It's interesting how people tend to be blind to their own privilege.

There's this pervasive idea that those who are entrepreneurs are better than the rest and therefore justifies their wealth and status. There's this other equally pervasive idea that we're all exactly equal and therefore "if I did it, you could have as well".

I did it on the sly because my parents didn't want me doing it. They were pretty angry with me when they inevitably found out.

What I did was order greeting cards through the mail and sell them door to door.

A couple years later, my family moved to Germany, and lived on a US base. I discovered that German candy wasn't available in the US, and vice versa. So I contacted my best friend in the US, and we'd ship each other the missing candy and sell it to the other kids at school. If I'd been less of a dimwit, I could have made quite a bit more money at this than I did.

> There's this pervasive idea that those who are entrepreneurs are better than the rest and therefore justifies their wealth and status.

It has nothing to about being better. It is about entrepreneurs are willing to take the risk and make the effort, and that justifies their returns.

If you're not willing to take the risk and make the effort, that's your choice, not your lot (at least in America).

It may have cost you nothing but someone was feeding, clothing and sheltering you. I'd like to start a business but I don't have the capital to cover feeding, clothing and sheltering costs in the meantime. Instead I work 4 - 6 hours in the evening trying to build something.

The "lot of capital" is a function of the sector and the business model chosen by the enterpreneur, not mandatory or unavoidable. In ventures where labour cost is the dominant expenditure then cooperatives enjoy a competitive advantage as losses can be shared by all members in the form of pay cuts.

There are a lot of companies which make losses at first or otherwise need a fair amount of capital to begin.

Given that, why would employees expect they ought to own the company without buying in as the other partners did?

Well that's what one of the previous comments that led us here stated no? That it's not always a matter of 'just start your own company if you don't like the way it's going'

>If your labor is so critical and all managers are useless tyrants then why are you choosing to give away your means of production to useless tyrants?

Lack of capital. It's called capitalism, not "i have an ideaism" for a reason.

The combined wealth of workers is usually more than enough to start a company. The only reason it doesn't happen is that the workers don't want to risk their hard earned cash.

The risk most fear is losing the ability to provide for yourself and family, for most people that is only one or two significant financial mistakes away.

...which is another way of saying they lack the surplus capital to speculate on starting a company.

There are plenty of businesses where entire countries don't have enough capital to start a competitor (e.g. oil companies, aircraft factories).

It's called capitalism, not "I have an idea-ism" for a reason.

There are some businesses that operate in markets with low barriers to entry but they tend to be A) new and extremely risky or B) hypercompetitive.

I think that's just half of it. Founders and CEOs get a lot of shit, but they're paid well for a good reason: they manage to sell and profit.

Take a successful factory, remove the officers and management, leave it to the assembly line workers - it's a good bet they will fail even if they have some cash to keep it going for a year.

And look at all the startups with insane $$ invested that failed.

Try launching a one person it company in the UK you will deemed to be an employee under IR35.

1099 status in the US is almost as sucky

I run a one person company in the UK and I definitely don't fall under IR35.

Also IR35 doesn't provide any of the workers rights that employees get such as sick pay or notice of termination.

Want to run that past HMRC or try working for any public body, Oh apart form "self employed" barristers, funny they seem excluded unlike us greasy engineers and boffins

With IR35 its much more favourable tax treatment on 2x to 3x FTE pay

Want to run that past HMRC

I have. I also have many public sector customers. Not every one person business is a freelancer or contractor.

>You are in fact free to launch your own company or cooperative. That's an undisputable fact.

It is a fact, but it's not the only relevant fact; a capability theory of rights, or a positive (rather than negative) conception of freedom invalidates your point. A freedom is practically useless (to the individual) unless you can actually take advantage of it.

One business you can start that will cost you nothing is write a book about how people cannot start businesses in America, and sell it on Amazon. There are a lot of books for sale on Amazon complaining about America; somebody is making bank off of them.

Employees != poor people, necessarily.

I know of, and buy from, multiple employee owned (flour) companies. Don't know how it is to work for one, though. It's an interesting question why they aren't more common.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Arthur_Flour

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob%27s_Red_Mill

Dumb.

And then they can hire their own employees...who proceed to automate their own jobs.

So nothing has changed and nothing is fixed.

I mean, if we could automate all jobs, then wouldn't we reach a pretty great end goal of no one having to work anymore? What is left to be fixed?

What is left to be fixed?

How people who don't own the means of production reap benefits from it

They would cease to exist due to starvation - that's the reality under capitalism.

Yes, but much of the capital is controlled centrally.

Luckily it takes very little capital to start software companies.

Or any number of other companies, like writing a book and selling it on Amazon. Or starting a lawnmowing service. Or a maid service. Or a realtor. Etc.

The garage door spring on my house broke one day. I googled for garage spring repair, called the local company that did it. Turned out it was just a guy with a bunch of springs in his trunk. He had it fixed quickly, charged me, and drove off. Evidently that was a nice business he had. A car, some springs, and an advertisement.

This only works for a subset of workers, not all of them, which I think is what GP was getting at. It's a matter of justice in society, not a subset of society (mind you, a subset that can afford to do this in the first place) just trying to better things for themselves.

You realize co-ops are a thing, right?

Yes, I am saying much more of the economy should be organized along those lines at the very least. Heavy industries should be nationalized.

Most startups offer equity to their employees.

"the company is owned by tyrants"

Citation needed.

all of us employees with startup equity know that it's a far cry from employee ownership, and it's disingenuous to suggest that we have any quantum of control when push comes to shove.

How many quantum of control do you have on a democratic society where your vote is worth as much as the vote of any of your million fellow citizens?

Not being able to force your personal will onto others doesn't mean a society or organization is not democratic.

Having others will dispassionately forced on you, or me, or them is a strong indicator of an undemocratic society.

That definition does not make any sense. Not having your way all the time does not mean you live in a dictatorship.

In democratic society, on principle, how much your say is worth is not determined by how much money you are able to invest in it. Your analogy would only make sense if you can "buy" votes, and arguably the political sphere is in a pretty sad state too with how much control voters actually have. At best, you're saying that a company can be just as undemocratic as the modern state. That's not a high bar to cross.

Two words: dilution and liquidity

This typically happens at big companies, though.

Yes, and liquidation preference. A company can get sold for $1 billion and still have 20-percent-owning founders who get $0 from the sale.

Being a startup employee is statistically just a bad deal, in terms of hours invested to equity out. Being a cofounder or advisor isn’t too bad.

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