If you can afford to risk your income on your company's fortunes, start your own or join a startup with a founder who seems trustworthy.
For me and most people, predictable income is much better than risky equity.
He isn't saying: We want a profit sharing agreement instead of salary.
He's saying: Extra salary that is immediately covered by the company raising the cost of their goods (rather than say - reducing executive pay, removing middle managers, or making less money for shareholders) doesn't get us where we need to go.
Because if the cost of buying all your goods is going up in direct relation to the raise in salary, (and this is happening across the market: inflation) - you aren't really getting a fucking raise at all. You're just floating.
The answer instead (at least in my opinion) is to change tact on how companies prioritize.
1. Workers need to be valued above shareholders (drive long term growth rather than sacrificing the golden duck for next quarter's profit)
2. Discrepancy between CEO and average pay needs to be curtailed - the current balance is driving a huge wedge into the relationship between a company and its employees.
3. Remove the inappropriate leverage that companies wield by controlling your healthcare/medical insurance costs
4. Remove pools of labor that are self-defeating: Jobs that pay so little the employee must be subsidized by government programs to live (think walmart/uber/etc) The best course of action here is likely labor movements (unions)
I'm not sure the best way to do, but I would love to see it happen.
As for the "valuing workers over shareholders" stuff ... Well, maybe? To be perfectly honest this isn't really what a Betriebsrat is about. I mean sure, they do have some influence, but in general their territory is more in terms of company operations, less in terms of how much is paid out to shareholders.
To be perfectly honest the Betriebsräte are facing much of the same problems that most other elected bodies are facing in the western world (or at least Germany). Sinking voting share, less and less people caring about it and as they kind of loose some soft power.
They still have the hard power guaranteed by law of course, but their soft power is essentially waning.
We here on HN are the ones who need to do this most of all because we work in the industries and companies that have for the last 10 years actually made enough money that the division results in something significant. This is not the norm. You can easily end up with values in the hundreds of dollars of profit/employee for a more normal industry. Even if the profits were 100% shared, we aren't necessarily talking about pulling people out of poverty or something.
The parasite class in society is smaller than you think, percentage-wise. Quite a lot of us go to supporting just one of them. I think getting rid of them would be a great boon... but not because simply redistributing their wealth would solve very much. The real problem they create is that they steal $X dollars and end up creating second-order effects that mean $X·Y dollars of wealth are never created in the first place, where Y is pretty significant.
2021 profit # employees profit/employee
DISH Network Corporation $ 6.143B 16,000 383,937
FOX Corporation $12.909B 9,000 1,433,333
Wynn Resorts Limited $ 1.205B 30,200 39,735
American Airlines Group $ 2.046B 123,400 16,580
Bath & Body Works Inc $ 3.096B 92,300 33,542
Hasbro Inc $ 6.42B 5,600 1,146,428
Advance Auto Parts Inc $ 4.929B 68,000 72,485
MGM Resorts International $ 9.68B 74,500 129,932
Hormel Foods Corporation $ 1.928B 20,000 96,400
Paycom Software Inc $ 0.89B 5,385 165,273I just spot-checked 1 randomly, and didn't cherry pick.
33,3 billion USD profits/1,622,000 employees = 20k USD/employee
The median employee made 29k in 2020.
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-salary-pay-m...
Of course that, like equity, doesn't substitute a decent salary, it just complements in a way that gives positive incentives.
Source: Have worked for profit sharing companies before.