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Comment by j4nt4b | Hacker News Reader

If employees want to influence a company's political stance, then they've already lost, because employees are not shareholders. It's not their call to make.

They would have a leg to stand on if they were part of a worker's cooperative, because then they'd be owners. The juicy job market for tech workers may obscure this fundamental fact, but when the rubber hits the road any overpaid engineer is still considered hired help and forever "below the salt". Until workers build up a co-op sector to compete with private sector companies, they will never have a say, no matter how much they kick and scream.

So either sit your ass down and sell your soul like you already said you would, or get out there and start building. Not just for yourself, but for all of us. Because we will never have true democracy as long as most of the wealth the people generate gets sliced and diced at board meetings without even the veneer of representation.

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Uh aren't most employees shareholders in most public tech companies? I've definitely been a shareholder in every public company I've worked at.

This is true but in reality the percentage of ownership is so tiny that most regular employees have no say. This really just leaves billionaires, institutions or the C-suite with the power to control large companies.

Yes, but have fun organizing anything meaningful when executives and large funds own enough shares to overrule any fraction of workers out of hand.

I was looking for a response in general to this and I think your comment nails it for me. If you want to drive societal change you need to get off the bench and commit, and please do because the world needs more people to be engaged.

Thank you. One way I look at it is, imagine working for somebody who pays you in political campaign donations to causes of your choice, then takes the rest of the money you've made for them and doubles that contribution for the other side. It's really a no-win situation for the worker.

I came here to say basically this. An employer is responsible for its own political positions because of how corporate governance is organized. Employees who disagree with said positions, whatever they may be, are free to terminate their employment if management doesn't agree to be lobbied by employees to assume certain positions. True say comes with ownership.

There are other forms of cooperate governance than co-ops and corporations, and there are other ways to ensure non-investor stakeholders like employees (and the community) have a say in some business decisions. Unions are an obvious one. The German model for corporations is another: employees get an actual seat on the board with an actual voice and a vote, by law.

None of these are perfect solutions, but any of them would be a step in the right direction. When manufacturing was the engine of economic growth in America, workers figured out how to get it to work for them. Tech is becoming the new engine now, and it's time for us (the workers) to figure out how to implement systemic changes to ensure our concerns are heard and addressed.

As to your main point, I agree. Whinging about your employer won't change anything - the systems themselves need to be changed.

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