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Comment by adampk | Hacker News Reader

Again, I am not trying to to defend the counter but am I missing something or is there quit a large logical gap in your hypothetical?

I assume if I am doing the hiring, then I will also be responsible for the additional hiring/firing, selecting the right talent, choosing the right way to compete against existing product/services? Is that not continued activity as I grow my start-up into a category-defining enterprise? How to allocate that profit, into R&D, more people, sales, etc, aka growing a company?

Then after doing that for 10 years that company is now worth billions of dollars and I own it. I don't see where in this chain I have done the exploiting?

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So what you're describing is the work of a director - work that should be paid but that I intentionally excluded from my example because a lot of people just think by default that directors should "own" the company because that's the status quo.

I still think that directors should be well compensated commensurate with their capability and role. I just think that they shouldn't be able to exclusively control and take the profits generated by the work of everybody involved. Corporations are autocratic or oligarchic in that way - this leads to the select few that society seems worthy of profit control having more power in our society. This is because the owners can keep workers' wages as low as the market will sustain while inflating their own total compensation to absurd proportions, as we've seen. With a cooperative structure everybody involved has a stake in controlling the company, so executives have to take everybody's needs including the workers, into account, instead of just looking out for themselves and investors.

As for where the exploitation comes in - it probably comes down to different perspectives on the word. To me, it's exploitation if one person is profiting off the labour of another. Of course in a company the shareholders are often also working, but if a company grows to a billion dollars from a million its not because the directors are working 100x harder.

In this hypothetical I thought we were talking about a founder-operator. It seems like your point does not work in this case?

A founder-operator has two roles in the company - as owner, being the founder and thus a shareholder, and as director or whatever work role they have. I only take issue with the former part as I think people should have a say in how the company they are a part of is run. Directorship is still a skilled job that should be compensated thusly.

Ah I think we got to the core thank you.

You believe that when you join an organization you automatically have a say in how it is run.

I think that an organisation is just a group of people and just like in our countries, we should be able to make our voices heard democratically. I think we should aim to make more areas of our lives democratic, including our workplaces where we spend much of our lives.

So yeah, I think you should have a voice in how the company you work for is run.

Is this not captured by “voting with your feet” by choosing to work there/leave there?

(This of course does not apply to the very disadvantaged)

I think voting with your feet only works in theory, because Amazon is well known to engage in abusive employment practices (including according to workers) and yet has a great number of warehouse and delivery staff and its founder is the second (?) richest man on earth. Many low paying jobs have high turnover rates because they can just use people up until they quit (if they even have that option) and then bring in an unemployed person. They have to incentive to treat their employees with decency.

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