> People should own the product of their work.
You do own your work, but you agreed to sell it for a salary. Makes sense, because there is often no tangible "product" you could own otherwise. What should cleaners own?
You do own your work, but you agreed to sell it for a salary. Makes sense, because there is often no tangible "product" you could own otherwise. What should cleaners own?
Can a 40 year old man have sex with a 12 year old girl if she agrees? What if she's 18? The first is illegal and wrong. The second is legal but most people will tell you it's at least gross. Why? Because of the power differential.
Starting a company takes investment (obviously money but also time spent on administrative tasks, hiring, marketing, etc.). Rich people can just buy companies and get passive income.
Salary negotiations are also unequal - one side has much more information and almost always more time and monetary reserves.[1]
I am tired so i'll cut it short - there's inherent power imbalance in the employer-employee[2] relationship which makes the outcome inherently and unavoidably exploitative.
[0]: They'll often use the word illegal because they have been taught to follow rules but have not been taught about differentiating legality and morality.
[1]: Why do you think you come to the company to the interview instead of them asking to meet you at a restaurant like normal business deals might be discussed? It's so ingrained this is normal that what I said sounds absurd.
[2]: Have you ever thought what those words actually mean? Employees are literally being used, it's right in the name.
(There might need to be further legal restrictions like minimum wage or tying wage to the skill coefficient used to determine rate of gaining ownership - see my other comments.)
> 0.00001
That's a lot of zeros, must be a huge company and/or a very low skill short-time worker. And a small country if one vote is worth more than that.
I don't see that changing anything. As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation, the rest pretty much follows.
Negotiations, just like salary today, except all sides negotiate with the same leverage.
> As long as there is private property, and you can sell your work for compensation
And that's why I think work should automatically give ownership by law - and therefore decision making power. See, slavery used to be legal too but then enough people decided it's too exploitative, picked up rifles and changed it. Employment is similar, instead of owning a full person, rich people own the entire economic output for 8 hours a day and instead of flogging, they fire workers they don't want. It's less bad but the same principle with more indirection.
As the cleaner you don't have the same leverage as the CEO. There would be no change in leverage at all. That's what you don't seem to understand.
As the cleaner, the only leverage would be that you don't need a job. And if you have that kind of leverage, why would you clean at all?
I am all ears for a new system that could actually work, but I don't think it will come from you. You don't seem to be willing to actually think through things.
Generally, on a team, people know who does good work and who works poorly and drags others or the whole team down. Given that, I can see hiring/firing decisions being made at the team level. If a whole team is seen as underperforming/redundant within the organization as a whole, then the team should be given the choice of either making itself leaner or severing cooperation with the rest of the company. This is still hierarchical but bottom up.
Regarding your last sentence and your general attitude, I think I'll sever our communication here.
> So I don't see why anyone should retain sole ownership of all profits from a business that they require others to do the work in.
Because they are offering, and there are takers? Nobody is forced to work for your business.
This is the root of the fallacy - nobody is forced to work for any particular business but everybody is forced to work for some business since 1) starting a new one is more costly than working for an existing one 2) we'd all end up working for 1-person businesses.
It's the same as people claiming they are sovereign citizens. It's a nice ideal but it doesn't work.
So what are you going on about?
a) "You're not forced to do it, you chose it so it's consensual and therefore right."
b) "The value of your work is determined by how much you managed to negotiate."
The issue with a) is that consent has to be informed and between parties with similar bargaining power, neither is true in an employer-employee relationship. Also choice from a limited set of options where some have large artificial upfront costs is not the same as 100% voluntary free choice.
The issue with b) is that the product (both the output sold to customers and the organization producing the output which can be sold by the owners) have value. This value is independent of the negotiated compensation for work.
Hence, arguments ignoring these issues are fallacious.