Also, people overwhelmingly would rather exchange their stake in the company for the equivalent value in cash. It's only when the company's valuation skyrockets when they retroactively declare this to be unfair.
Have any data to back that up? Comparing a democratically run corporation to the US government is a non sequitur. Outside VC there is no business model that will allow you to run at a loss for decades. So it's a scenario that's not even possible hypothetically.
Somewhat anecdotal but there is a Worker Co-op in Spain, Mondragon, that's been a very competitive corporation for over 50 years. It can clearly work long term and it leads to better outcomes for employees and the communities they work in.
Anecdotally, I hear that Ford's biggest problem right now is the union's resistance in adopting the Toyota production system. If I were a factory worker, I wouldn't want to change the way I do things just so the shareholders get richer. That's a perfectly reasonable attitude to have, but it does place Ford at a disadvantage to car makers without unions like Tesla and Toyota.
The employees all know they could run the business but they cant picture themselves doing it. Their arguments are "It's to complicated" but struggle and fail to explain how. It might still not be a good idea but that they draw a blank is the ultimate hurdle for now.
Well it literally is. If they are talking about Wall St. bankers they have no way to replicate the results of those people. Wall Street can make poorly thought out multi-trillion dollar bets on housing bonds and when they go bust they get bailed out and still get their Christmas Bonuses. There is no similar mechanism to protect a non-institutional investor from similar levels of risk.
If you want to sit on the sidelines because it's too risky for you, that's fine. But don't then complain that others make money on stocks.
You, and anyone else, can buy FAANG stocks, index funds, or whatever.
Many of us might be fortunate to have well paid jobs, and the ability and capital to invest, but it's understandable how someone could view the ability of those with capital to generate further capital without any labour to be unfair.
I've known many people who didn't have any cash on hand, yet lived high on the hog with expensive clothes, new cars, and nice houses. They didn't have any cash on hand because they spent it as fast as possible.
And maybe that is how it should be? Maybe life shouldn't be about the most efficient way to run a business.
Also, what's best for the workers isn't necessarily what is best for society. Globalization is anti-worker, but it helps the consumer with cheaper prices, the company with extra profits, and developing countries afford what developed countries take for granted like antibiotics.
This line of discussion is also making the assumption that what's best of workers and what's best for companies are necessarily in conflict, which is rather silly given that if a company goes under, the workers themselves are in trouble. There is at least one example I can point to where a workers union forced management to recognize the need to be more economically competitive. [1] Also, it makes the assumption that management and/or shareholders necessarily know best for a company's future, and there is no shortage of evidence to the contrary, some even recent. [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13986889
I don't find much value in hypotheicals. Even the far right Ben Shapiro admitted he would support UBI if automation makes most jobs obsolete.
There are smart workers and dumb shareholders, but at the end of the day, people respond to incentives. Audi workers would never agree to convert their factory to EV had Tesla not already proven that EVs are something consumers actually want. This isn't a bad thing, but it comes with a cost. Tesla was able to ramp up production as fast as it did because they didn't need to run every decision past a union.
Your opinion doesn't change the fact that your response was invalid. You are responding to a normative, idealistic statement about universal values with your own slightly more concrete hypothetical. A misapplied exercise in practicality.
> Audi workers would never agree to convert their factory to EV had Tesla not already proven that EVs are something consumers actually want.
That seems like a hypothetical without basis. One doubts that General Motors assembly line workers were the ones who killed the EV1.
> Tesla was able to ramp up production as fast as it did because they didn't need to run every decision past a union.
There are some smart CEOs and there are dumb ones. Who's to say that the incentives given to traditional management schemes are truly correct? Businesses fail all the time. Startups, in particular, fail all of the time, and there are no shortage of egregious examples of boneheaded management decisions, or of shortsighted shareholders. Pointing to a Tesla and Musk, or to an Apple and Jobs, is simply survivorship bias.
What's your point? I obviously don't think the purpose of life is to maximize shareholder value. I'm merely illustrating where I find such idealism falls apart. I could be more specific, but I'm not trying to write a book.
You don't need to be a Nobel economist to know how people respond to incentives. An average family person doesn't want to risk their time, money, and health on helping to pivot Audi to a company that makes bleeding edge EVs. A company that is truly revolutionary has to focus as much energy as possible on delivering or some other company is going to do it first. That's why most successful startups are very cult-like. This comes at a cost to the worker and leads to scam companies like Theranos, but the alternative is that you're left behind.
That article is from 2017. EVs were already more or less an accepted mainstream technology, even though certainly not the majority of the automotive market yet. You're making it sound like it's as difficult as it was for Tesla back in 2003- the union was simply demanding Audi management to respond to the needs of the market and expand its product line, for the betterment of the company and to protect their livelihoods by staying competitive. Audi building EVs does not require, as far as I know, a pivot.
Theranos is also a good example to mention. Perhaps if it was a worker-owned co-op or a union there, some sort of countervailing force against both managerial and investor incompetence, that fiasco could have been averted. Perhaps with a system in place to provide support against those powerful forces, and someone sympathetic to listen to whistleblowers, Ian Gibbons would still be alive.
It's all well and good to lionize Randian revolutionary lone geniuses, but the creative destruction they tend to wreak in their wake tends to fall upon a lot of the little people. And worse off, these geniuses at world-changing companies are few and far between, and far outnumbered by copycats and wannabes who cause more damage through imitation. We have checks and balances in our societal governance; why not likewise in our corporate governance?