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Comment by tasubotadas | Hacker News Reader

Workers are free to start and run better companies.

They can only do this if they're starting from a decent financing scenario, which they hardly ever are. Most of the companies founded this way have to do work-for-hire projects, and that relies on a "Goldilocks" work pipeline where there isn't too much or too little, because either extreme threatens payroll or creates staffing pressure.

A company that gets a fat check to go conquer the world is one that is engaged with the demands of the investment market to seek maximal growth or ROI or whatever metric the investors are looking for. This is derived from the overall investment landscape, which went from "easy money" to "infinite money" during the pandemic. When you are in an infinite money environment your goal is, essentially, to consolidate everything you see into your org. The only thing small players can do is try to get acquired.

As long as the brakes are on the dollar, the trend will stay reversed and companies will downsize to fit a smaller capital structure.

No they are not.. worker owned companies don't have the same legal structures as capital owned companies, at least in the US. Which is why you see almost no co-ops or other worker/employee owned business here.

Why can't 100 employees incorporate and get 1% of the shares each?

Most of these smaller companies that get bought out and eviscerated start out as mildly profitable stable founder run small companies. If they had kept going like that everyone would basically have the best of both worlds.

worker owned companies don't have the same legal structures as capital owned companies, at least in the US.

This is false. In the U.S., worker-owned coops are just corporations. Or partnerships. Or LLPs. or LLCs. Or a variety of other business entity types. (The point is, in the U.S., the ownership structure does not necessarily determine the legal entity type.)

For example: every law firm in the U.S. is employee-owned, by law. Most accounting firms are employee-owned, also by law.

For specific examples of employee-owned businesses that aren't law firms or accounting firms: Publix Super Markets, WinCo, Brookshire, WL Gore, Gensler, HAC.

Companies can be employee owned, but there is no (and there should be) laws specific for them that make them attractive to start. The fact that 2 of your examples are required by law to be that way and the other examples are so few that it really drives the point home that our laws discourage employee ownership instead of encouraging it.

To put it another way, according to a brief internet search, there are around 1.3mil companies in the US with >10 employees and there are around 6000 employee owned companies. As such employee owned companies make up around 0.005% of businesses in the US and, IMHO, this shows that the legal system isn't there for them or there would be more (a lot more) of them.

They would if there was less tolerance for monopolies and fair rules. It would appear that the only way to achieve that is through radical political change. Essentially we need to revert back to capitalism and end the ongoing gilded age.

> Essentially we need to revert back to capitalism and end the ongoing gilded age.

For what it's worth, government spending as a fraction of GDP was single-digit percent in the actual Gilded Age, compared to almost 40% today.

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