Worker-owned companies, only financed by debt and not actions.
You can have the top management own 20% of the company, middle management 20%, and the workers 60%, prorate the votes following that, and vote should be anonymous. On highly disputed issues (defining a new direction that needs more than the CEO/CTO opinion), you can have a lottery to form a team representing those percentages. Make the workers invested in the company, in the product, in security.
Having your top management paid to extract as much money as they can for the investor is a recipe for exploitation and poor products.
How would such a company come together in the very beginning? What would the formation process be exactly?
I’m having a hard time imagining it because usually there’s one person or a few with expert knowledge, awareness of an opportunity, and a vision of what they want to achieve. They make great effort and sacrifice in the early days to take that vision from 0 to 1. They eventually build it up into a larger organization with employees, but it didn’t start that way.
For those folks to only own 20% of their own venture - not even a controlling a share of their own baby - may not be enough incentive.
Every company starts somewhere, so how would this system work in reality?
On the other hand, if a large group of workers have a good idea for a new company and want to start one with shared ownership, they can already do that using an LLC or other corporate structure.
Thank you, that's a really good summary of a plausible workers co-operative structure. I say go for it. There's nothing in the regulatory or legal framework in most countries to stop you doing this. In fact there are successful co-operative commercial organisations, and have been for centuries.
I just don't see how this disincentivizes the managers and key stakeholders in companies from conspiring like this. Most top managers of companies own a lot less than 20%, I doubt the managers of any of the oil companies own anything like that much, so if anything this would give them even more incentive to try and boost the value of their company. How do you see this preventing such conspiracies?
They typically do, actually. How do you think those initial formation and other legal fees get paid in most companies? And they’re usually working for free for a while (sometimes years) before the company is in a state where it can raise money by selling equity. Put those together, and the founders have frequently put in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars into a company that was worth precisely $0 when they started.
What? That's the standard model. Use your own funds to create an MVP, and use that MVP to raise outside capital. (no bank will give you a loan for an MVP)
Workers have been working below market wages for decades. If wages had kept pace with productivity improvements and inflation, wages would be far higher today. Instead, the benefits of technology and other productivity improvements have all gone to the handful of people you relentlessly defend.
What is a “below market wage”? The market wage is literally what people are paid.
And why should average wages keep up with average productivity? You’d expect productivity gains to go to those who are more productive, no workers who productivity hasn’t changed.
You can have the top management own 20% of the company, middle management 20%, and the workers 60%, prorate the votes following that, and vote should be anonymous. On highly disputed issues (defining a new direction that needs more than the CEO/CTO opinion), you can have a lottery to form a team representing those percentages. Make the workers invested in the company, in the product, in security.
Having your top management paid to extract as much money as they can for the investor is a recipe for exploitation and poor products.