I would like to get your opinion about employee owned companies.
I do prefer working for companies that are employee owned. This means that employees can invest in the company and that no shares are owned by external investors. The financial incentive is often the stable dividend rather than making profits due to risen share price.
For me, working at these type of companies is still way better than working for a publicly traded company where profit often feels like the only purpose (to please the share holders). However, I got a bit reluctant to invest in the employee owned company as a employee because I find the system a bit unfair:
- I find it a capitalistic implementation where the more you are willing (or able) to invest, the larger your cut of the profit. Everybody worked just as hard for that profit so why should you be able to get more if you got more shares.
- To get a management position, you often have to buy a significant amount of shares "as incentive to do your work as a manager I was always told". Of course, they have more responsibility but they already get a higher salary for that. Why also get a bigger part of the profit?
- On the management part, if there is also a voting system linked to the amount of shares you have, it also means that the management has a significant (majority?) saying in things. Legally the company is owned by the employees but not when it comes to decision making ( if employees are consulted via their shares).
What are your opinions on this and would you participate? Of course, not participating will not have consequences for the system because others will just buy those shares, but by participating you show support for an, in my eyes, unfair system.
You want to make sure you are at a broad based employee owned company that's committed to maintaining the broad base. They should pay out stock to employees to try and keep the ownership as un-concentrated as possible. At my company the amount of shares someone ones is a factor of their position but also of their tenure with the company. There are admin assistants that are going to retire very well off just because they've been there their whole career. It's good for retention and the culture seeps through everywhere. The board is voted on via shares but everyone has some so it's a bit more democratic. At the very least if the CEO were very unpopular they could be tossed out by the rank and file low level employees.
That said, it's still a corporation. Management is better but still tends to attract the same sort of people. Those at the top are generally more rightwing. But it's nice never hearing about the next quarter, knowing that it's very difficult to fire people, and generally having an extra level of comradely with coworkers.