Chobani Yogurt CEO Hamdi Ulukaya Is a Pro-Employee Billionaire in Expansion Mode | Hacker News Reader

Chobani Yogurt CEO Hamdi Ulukaya Is a Pro-Employee Billionaire in Expansion Mode

bloomberg.com

33 pointst2318 comments

What does 'pro-employee' mean in this case? I saw that he advocates a $15/hour minimum wage (saying, additionally, that this is not enough). Are there other things that he's doing that are pro-employee?

(E.g. Is there employee representation on his board?)

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chobani

He gave a 10% ownership stake to employees. He implemented 100% paid parental leave.

He gave about 10% of the company's worth of his own stock to his employees.

Equity grants, charitable donations, many employees are refugees.

A puff piece for Hamdi Ulukaya and Chobani. Nothing of substance here.

Though I am curious: Compared to other companies that are considered pro-employee (e.g. Costco), what does Chobani do for employees that's so pro-employee? Hamdi may be for a $15/he min. wage, but does he pay at least that without laws in place? That would be pro-employee.

I haven't read anything beyond this article, so if you have any insight, I'm listening.

Here is a video about him giving stocks to the employees in the company.He's got an interesting story as well.

https://youtu.be/HyHVLq-KtFo

It could end up like Whole Foods. As long as the original owner was around, it was always a highly rated place to work. He even wrote a book about how a business could be profitable if employees, customers and suppliers were respected. Since Mackey sold to Bezos, not so much.

pro-employee? who made his billions?

Being an advocate for someone does not mean that you extend to them everything you have. One can be an advocate for the homeless without letting them sleep in your bedroom; one can be an advocate for immigrants without wanting instant citizenship for anyone; one can be an advocate for free speech while also not allowing objectionable rallies in your place of business. In the same vein, one can be an advocate for employees (giving them respect and fair working conditions) while also developing a business that lets one profit handsomely.

I recognize that you understand it as an act of charity. That by giving much more than necessary to employees, he is pro-employee. He is legally entitled to the profit, after all.

I see it as: his employees created the vast majority of the profit he enjoys. He didn't work thousands of times harder than his $15/hr workers after all. I'm not making a moral judgement here. Notice I'm not saying what he should or shouldn't do. But I think it's a mistake to call him pro-employee.

In fact I do applaud his personal actions. We both understand the employees are not entitled to the profit. His giving back is a wonderful move for his employees. He seems like a wonderful CEO to work under and probably a great person.

Makes sense, I think that setting aside the moral judgment, our disagreement might hinge on what denotes a "pro-employee" individual. I'd be curious what an example of that might look like in your view (genuinely curious, trying to understand).

He made his billions from profits, the part of the value generated by workers’ labour that isn’t paid to workers but instead appropriated by owners.

I hardly think the word "appropriated" describes business profits that return to the business, as that (at least in my mind) seems to connote taking something without consent. While there certainly do exist instances of labor without consent in the world today, Chobani employees seem a pretty far cry from that.

Likewise, in nearly all businesses, there is an added value to the employees that justifies the ceding of a share of the fruits of one's labor. Someone working at a full-time job always provides more value to their company than their paycheck provides in the long run. In return, however, you get benefits that you wouldn't otherwise: a stable and predictable paycheck, the ability to specialize in one area, institutional stability, existing business relationships that you can utilize.

I definitely agree that there are lots of mismatches between business practices and what employees would prefer (I tend to be pretty content with my career compensation, but I would definitely rather they paid me more, without question). To say that the profits reserved for a business are taken without consent from the laborers, however, seems disingenuous at best: if employees truly weren't getting any advantage from working at a company, what reason would there possibly be from not just doing the exact same work for themselves and reserving all the profits for themselves? It seems that the advantages of an employee-employer relationship are taken for granted until the alternative option of labor-without-an-employer is explored.

To be clear, I think workers starting their own businesses and deciding that they would be better off doing something different (e.g. worker-owned models or co-ops) is fantastic! However, I also think that businesses which decide to take a portion of their labor force's work as profit are also totally fine and reasonable, even from an employee's point of view.

Workers don’t work for themselves because they lack means of production like tools, premises, access to supply and distribution chains, copyrights and patents, etc. They all require initial capital, which workers are far less likely to have than owners and their descendants.

Since we don’t own means of production, all of us workers are forced to sell our labour or perish. We are coerced into working for one set of owners or another, all of which became owners from the profit generated by other workers’ unpaid labour.

> value generated by workers’ labour

Exclusively?

Largely. The other source of value is nature, hence all of the environmental degradation we see.

What about the place of work, equipment and resources provided to do their work?

That is capital that owners had to pay for in full, so there’s no creation of value happening.

The owners obtained this capital from the profits extracted from other workers in the past or, if early enough, the appropriations known as primitive accumulation.

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