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Comment by liaukovv | Hacker News Reader

The company doesn't exist to make money for it's employees.

Perhaps it, or some larger subset of companies, should? Co-operative style employee ownership is one way of achieving something along those lines.

This creates inverted incentives: to take as much from the pot as possible while putting in as little as possible. Same reason as why such communal systems never work if they get much larger than one family.

Inverted by whose standards? You could just as convincingly argue that capitalist enterprises are the ones with inverted incentives: to extract as much value from workers as possible while paying them as little as possible.

In the communal system it is in the best interest of each agent to work against other agents.

Tragedy of the commons and all that.

That doesn't actually change in a traditional capitalist system. The only difference is that owners and upper classes have more power than the individual to make their interest of getting the whole pot for little work happen

In capitalist system owner can enforce cooperation so the pot itself grows. The proportion that workers capture here is of course dependant on external factors, like labour market and laws.

that works great until you need to raise capital. You either need to do loans (unsuitable for early stage companies due to risk and capped upside for investor) or issue equity which brings us back to square one.

That's an excellent argument in favour of radical unionization.

And the employee doesn’t exist to make money for their employer’s shareholders, and this entire article shows how employees can capture some of that money if they work in solidarity.

>And the employee doesn’t exist to make money for their employer’s shareholders

which is why the employer pays the employee for their service.

>this entire article shows how employees can capture some of that money if they work in solidarity.

creating a cartel is one way to strengthen your bargaining position.

Yes. Denmark shows the power of the worker’s cartel. It’s smart business tactics, the kind that the employer would praise in their own management.

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