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Comment by glutamate | Hacker News Reader

A workers cooperative is owned by its current workers. Are you going to argue that consultancies and law firms are not really owned by their current partners, either?

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Profits belong to the people who create them, not to people who used to work at the same company in the past. Expecting future employees of a company to work for ex-employees in the future is unfair. Having worked for a company, doesn’t entitle anyone to remain on the paycheck until death, despite not working there anymore.

> Having worked for a company, doesn’t entitle anyone to remain on the paycheck until death, despite not working there anymore

This arrangement is called a pension, and is still quite popular in areas of the world with strong workers rights.

Living in a country with strong workers rights, this is not how pensions work. The pensions people receive every month are literally paid by the taxes which are collected from everybody and every company during that month. Pensions are not saved money from companies you worked for, but money coming from the economy at the time of your retirement. It’s a common misconception that the state has a big pile of pension money sitting somewhere that you then get your pension from. That’s just not how it works in reality. Another difference from pensions to receiving money from a company just by owning parts of it, is also that you don’t continue to be on a company’s paycheck when you quit. You need to reach a certain age to receive money and you get that money from the state, not the companies you worked for. That’s how pensions work.

> The pensions people receive every month are literally paid by the taxes which are collected from everybody and every company during that month.

That might be how your pension works.

Other pension schemes; eg Singapores and some other former and current commonwealth countries pay pension from the returns from 60 odd years of compulsary investment and additional supplementary investment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Provident_Fund

https://www.expatica.com/sg/finance/retirement/singapore-pen...

"Returns from an investment fund" are not the same as "taxes collected monthly", money, being fungible, can make it seem that way.

That doesn’t change the fact that every month there are people putting money into that fund and people getting money out of that fund. The money you put in, is not the same money you get out of it. It’s still money that people working at that time, put into that fund. Nobody has their own personal savings account inside that fund. You only have a legal claim to a share of that fund once you retire, but that’s not the money from your paychecks and it’s not saved somewhere for you. A pension fund is not a collection of private pensions and it’s better that way. Because with inflation, your pension can increase, even though you didn’t "put in" that amount of money when you were still working. The government is able to increase pensions by shifting money from other parts of its balance sheet or by increasing debts or taxes to meet the pension demand. I’m sorry for Singapore if their state system works more like a private pension, because you don’t know how long you’ll live past retirement age, so you either take too much or too little out of that fund once you have retired and there is no adjustment for inflation. Yes, there are bad private pension systems. That doesn’t change the fact that you benefit more working in a worker-owned compay than in a solely-owned company.

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