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Comment by slively | Hacker News Reader

To say this person joined and then tried to subvert is a pretty dishonest reading of this story. They worked on something for 12 years and I’m sure there were many others similarly invested. To spend such a significant portion of your life on something and have basically no input on how it’s run, directed, etc… is not a good system. In my opinion the people forming the union had much more invested in this company than the people that just invested money. I’d say the handful of people that insist on complete control for having invested money are a cancer to the org and society at large.

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There is a good chunk research indicating that when employees share governance, it has a mild positive effect on productivity & firm survival: https://voxeu.org/article/worker-representation-worker-welfa...

There are many short term pressures on executives and finance people. Sharing power with the people their decisions affect leads to better outcomes for the business than when they use their power over workers for short term gain.

On the contrary I think it’s a good system. If they want to control the company they can buy 51% of the shares. Those shares are valuable for a reason.

If management doesn't want to negotiate with a majority of workers, they are free to pick a different career path and leave it to other professional managers.

If the solution to a problem is have lots of money, it’s a solution for only a tiny portion of people, and not generally applicable.

Anyone can make their own company and their own shares and it’s practically free other than registration costs. The people with the shares get to set all the rules. That’s generally how it works. Otherwise the shares would be worthless.

You are sidestepping a massive amount of factors that allows somebody to create their own business. Even then, a company grows on the backs of its employees, and there quickly comes a time when a single person should not have complete control because it’s not just theirs anymore.

I own shares in public companies and have basically zero say in how they operate and those shares are worth quite a bit.

At this point it’s clear these arguments are flippant and not serious. I hope one day you can have a perspective on these issues that is not so shallow. They are important and you also should have a say in your workplace. Our voices matter.

Anyone who is willing can create a business, especially a software one that has no upfront costs, and the owner usually does most of the work to get it off the ground. The owner gets complete say in how it’s run until they choose to relinquish or sell control or structure it otherwise.

A company is a group effort and people can quit whenever they want. The owner doesn't have complete say and shouldn't have complete say, and it's good for employees to talk to each other so that they can use their say together.

People can quit whenever they want which is the main point.

Instead of banding together and threatening the management and owners with strike action it’s better that they quit because maybe there are other people who are happy to do the work without a union.

I think the problem is most people don’t imagine themselves as owners/managers. If they did they would oppose unions too because they would not want their autonomy taken away.

And who's to say that the current management isn't doing a poor job? Based on Glassdoor and Blind, they've been experiencing high turnover and mixed reviews at best. So why shouldn't the management and owners be held accountable for questionable decisions? Why are you so insistent that workers get no say, and can only leave? On what basis is blind obedience mandatory in the workplace?

The owners hold the management responsible. If targets are not met then they dig deeper, see staff turnover, find causes, and fix them. It’s capitalism at work. If the owners are not savvy enough then the company should fail or be sold and the capital should be allocated elsewhere.

If workers have a say it distorts these forces. And by say you mean the ability to force the hand of management. Because they already can have a say and modern companies measure everything and listen to feedback.

Why does (in your view) capitalism mandate that only owners hold management responsible, and that workers having a say would distort that process? Are you suggesting that class warfare is inevitable? (That's a Marxist concept.) Otherwise, why keep workers out of the decision-making process?

Also, if in most tech companies workers are given equity, are they not owners also?

Workers don’t have same incentives. They can push for conditions that would risk bankrupting company, and if the company does shutter, they can simply get new jobs with no loss. Meanwhile owners lose their money.

Workers don't have an incentive of bankrupting the company. And not all employees are so blasé about finding another job- there are always some dependent upon a company for their livelihoods. Different owners also have different risk thresholds. As evidenced by the lavish VC funding of the past decade, there are many investors with a strong stomach for waste and failure.

Examples of unions fighting for management to make better business decisions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13986889

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3mjxg/general-electric-work...

An owner that's invested in multiple companies is probably more likely to push for risk than workers are. Losing a job is not "no loss".

> Instead of banding together and threatening the management and owners with strike action it’s better that they quit

Why? It's pretty weird to say they should use the most extreme option without negotiation or do nothing, and that this is better than using intermediate options.

> because maybe there are other people who are happy to do the work without a union.

The main concern isn't the mere fact the union exists, it's to have a more even negotiating position, and I feel like everyone should want that. And I'm quite sure that the number of people that want that is much bigger than the number of unemployed workers, so that trade you suggest isn't even possible.

> I think the problem is most people don’t imagine themselves as owners/managers. If they did they would oppose unions too because they would not want their autonomy taken away.

Are you actually encouraging the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" point of view? How about an attempt at an objective view, that even if we look at it like a zero sum game, it's better for 20 workers to have more autonomy than for 1 employer to have more autonomy.

Money is paid for the employees backs and the business entity owns all the IP. Employees agree to this and can leave at any moment. They are welcome to start a co-op style company and give that a go. But would a VC want to invest in such a company? Prob not.

People like to pretend we don’t live in a cut throat capitalist system and that it has worked out best.

Employees did not agree to the systems of corporate governance we have. There is no real choice, and not working means starving. Nobody is pretending we live in a different system, they are trying to change it. The level of defeatism you are showing is unfortunate. “It has worked out best” is a pretty amazing assertion to make.

Removing the profit incentive was pretty disasterous throughout history. I just can’t imagine a group of employees being able to veto strategic decisions can work. The system for this is startups which is working great. If you don’t like something, setup your own company and do things the way you want.

But if employees always demanded things to be run they way they want, then you couldn’t have this level of experimentation and innovation.

I think the obvious fact is that there are not many co op companies because it doesn’t work. It’s like: stop trying to change someone else’s company, and start your own and build it from the ground up with the governance structure you want.

Nobody said anything about removing the profit incentive. Workers having a say can be setup in a lot of way, it does not require direct veto power. There have been and are many successful coops. The argument is these are not somebody else’s company, it is the workers company because they built it. That’s a lot of straw men you are arguing against.

The shares give you a claim on the profits. The rules are a combination of the corporate bylaws and the law. The latter does not let owners set all the rules: it imposes health and safety restrictions, taxes, and (yes!) unionisation rules.

The people who make the laws get to set all the rules. The shares are valuable anyway, because an economic interest in a profit making entity is valuable whether you have perfect control or not.

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