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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Are there tech companies where employees have any power to effect real change?

It seems that all the successful tech companies have a model where the power is either in the hands of the stock market, where the leadership has been told 'do whatever it takes to make money or you're fired', or its consolidated in the hands of less than 3 people, who are hell-bent on making as much money as possible.

Why can't we invent a system of corporate management in which the employees have the majority stake in how the company operates? How about the employees are all voting members in an organization that holds a stockpile of 100X voting right shares? There's got to make a way to make that happen.

I suspect such an organization would be radically different than most companies today, but that it would attract talent too.

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There are a lot of them in Scandinavia and they have problems.

You still have to fire people but now it’s your coworkers firing you and taking away your right to a share of the profits at the same time.

Being disliked or considered to not be pulling your weight will have you fired very quickly because you are reducing your coworkers profits.

There are other problems and in many cases it becomes a nightmare of politics. We had a situation a few decades ago where unions were allowed on the boards of companies and they quickly realized it was the worst thing to happen to them.

It is hard to advocate for works rights and increased salaries when you are responsible for the profitability of the company.

> Why can't we invent a system of corporate management in which the employees have the majority stake in how the company operates?

We have, it's called a co-op. There aren't many that are terribly successful, but no one is stopping you from starting one.

Mondragon, the Basque truck-making coop. They've been going for as long as I have, because they were founded in the year I was born.

John Lewis, a UK department store. It's not exactly a coop, but it's pretty close. The staff are referred to as "partners". They're in financial difficulties at the moment, I think, but that's not because workers participate in the company. They're one of the few UK department stores still standing. Waitrose (a John Lewis brand) is easily the classiest supermarket/grocery in the UK - people choose where to buy expensive homes based on how close the nearest Waitrose is.

It's easier to set up a private company than a joint-stock corporation, and it's easier to set up a joint-stock corporation than a cooperative. It should be easiest to set up a cooperative, rather than hardest.

Oh - and there's the Coop Bank. Wait - that went broke due to dreadful mismanagement, and was bought by a VC outfit. So how come they're still allowed to call themselves that?

There's still a number of local chains of fairly small grocers, operating as autonomous members of the Cooperative Wholesale Society (the bank was originally part of the CWS). These are decent shops, well-run at a local level, but I'm not impressed by their head-office management. If you take their discount card, then you get to participate in board elections and so on. It's a "customer coop".

I wonder if it’s something about co-ops that limit their success, or is it the lack of VC funds to burn during the growth stage?

Obviously in this context we shouldn’t assume that a co-op would ever get to FB size. Forgoing some profit for the sake of ethics is the reason why the idea was floated here. But I would expect co-ops to make it to say, Redhat levels at least.

Can’t help but think it’s the lack of capital and connections that going for-profit with VC backing would get a company with a more traditional corporate structure.

I have mentioned upthread three BIG cooperative ventures that have lasted foer a long time; they're just the ones that I can think of quickly.

I care about coops, so I notice them, so maybe they're rather rare.

VC backing would make a coop no longer a coop. That horse is not a runner.

All this venture capital business is about getting a return in five years. A coop is about a bunch of people working together for their whole working life; it's a different way of organising work. If the thing works, then the investment is organic (and slow). The coops I mentioned have lasted a long time.

You’re talking about democratic control of corporations, and that sounds like a good idea to me. If corporations were countries they would be dictatorships, making the CEOs dictators. We know dictatorships invariably result in human atrocities, which is why I for one prefer Democratic forms of governance.

The same seems to be true of corporations: on a long enough time scale, darling startups turn into sociopathic, power-hungry money making engines. The Supreme Court says corporations are people, and if that’s true they are dark triad personality types, indifferent to human suffering, human rights abuses, and environmental destruction as long as there is profit to be made. I think democratic control of corporations would temper these sociopathic tendencies and give corporate persons a little more humanity.

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