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Is Google a worker collective just because new employees are thrown a handful of shares?

If 80% of Google was employee owned, then it would be.

Plenty of companies are "employee owned" because the founders control the majority of shares. One person or a small group of people – whether they are employees or not – having total decision making power is the opposite of what worker collective means.

Who decided on that definition?

In my books share ownership can be unequal, so long as the bottom rung still have a few shares each.

Anyone can make up their own definition, but there are also some standard ones – e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

Like I said, please provide actual names or organizations with credible authority, such as the OED, and link the source.

EDIT: I'm not going to do this work for you and dig through all the places cited at the bottom to see if there's some source with that credible authority that proposes such a definition.

Depends on who you count as employees - Sergey? Larry?

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