Companies have a largely democratic component at the top, called the board. Voters (those who own the company) have representatives on the board. Some boards also have representatives from the employees, that varies.
Except there's also a bunch of companies with special dual class share structures, where the founder gets way more voting power than everyone else and you can't even buy your way in. A lot of tech companies do this. This is, functionally speaking, an autocracy.
If you want an actual corporate democracy you would need to assign voting rights to everyone working at the company, aka build a co-op. Co-ops are a great corporate structure in a lot of cases but you can't really raise capital that way because VCs all want on your cap table, so all the big companies wind up being plutocracies.
I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
This is just wrong. As kmeisthax mentioned, shares can have different voting weights - if any at all. Many shareholders have no voting power.
> I employed a painter a few months ago, and I decided what colour the kitchen now is.
Did you actually employ them, or did you buy a specific service?
The same phenomenon is happening with "Opt-In by Default". This is newspeak.
Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
From kmeisthax? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49683985
I'm not asserting this definition. I'm arguing against the attempt at newspeak. If one share doesn't imply one vote (because there are different classes etc.), what is wrong with pointing out the obvious contradiction in "One share, one vote"?
> Keep in mind that the US is a democratic republic (thus a democracy) yet spent the first part of its history restricting who could vote based on (approximately) both gender and race.
I disagree that the US was a democracy while voting was restricted, but that's not really relevant. I'm not claiming that my view is right, or that anyone should be convinced - take that up with kmeisthax if you wish.
You cannot argue that a particular usage of a word is wrong while claiming that you aren't taking a position on the definition. And if you do take a position on the definition then you must be able to justify it.
Your view on the US and voting restrictions is directly relevant. It is what I am challenging. The common definition of democracy does not (to the best of my knowledge) include anything about equality. Those are entirely separate matters. The early US is widely recognized as a democratic republic (thus a democracy), albeit one with a great deal of institutional inequality.
As for a rationale as to why I would think this: Democracy literally means "rule by the people". If you have so much institutional inequality that one guy can out-vote or veto literally everyone else, then how do the people actually rule in any meaningful way?
I will admit that this argument is very voting-centric. Democracy does not mandate the use of voting. You could, for example, have a democracy in which the exercise of democratic power is mediated entirely through protests. This is how disenfranchised populations in the US and elsewhere wound up getting suffrage in the first place. But protests are also an incredibly inconvenient means of exercising power. When the people take power the first thing they do is usually to implement a voting mechanism anyway, so it's not inherently invalid to assume that democracy implies voting.
Of course, this doesn't work in reverse: voting does not imply democracy. Shareholder voting is a system that exists specifically to ensure the people who loaned the business its start-up capital can exercise effective and indefinite control over it. This is voting built to enforce plutocracy (rule by the rich). Furthermore, the other pseudo-democratic features of publicly held companies, like the fact that anyone can push through a shareholder resolution as a form of protest, are being slowly pared away. Texas in particular is trying to pull corporations away from Delaware on the basis that they'll shut up the small activist shareholders trying to do democratic protest in their board meetings or through lawsuits. Does this still sound like democracy to you?
[0] I am skipping over a lot of internal politics among North Korea's ruling elites, but I don't think it's necessary to go into any great detail other than to mention that such people exist.
Voting is a democratic instrument, but a blunt one and not the most important.
"...those who spend five minutes voting every three years and call it democracy..."
Majoritarianism is undemocratic in that any desire less than 50% + 1 is deprecated.
If you care IMO the most important feature of a democracy is rule of law and access to the courts.
damn, I guess feudal aristocracies or oligarchical nations are also democratic.
If you are describing how a US corporation that is not a worker cooperative is run as a democracy, you either dont know what the term means or you are being in bad faith.
when a literal handful(as in the number of people could be counted between both hands) can decide the fate of tens to hundreds of thousands of people, calling it "largely democratic" is lolworthy.