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.
Ultimately, as long as there are markets, even coops will behave like capitalist companies...
Yeah it fixes... Some of the problems? To some degree?
Its still souless market fufillment. Instead of being exploited by some suit, the workers now exploit themselves, in order to survive in a market world
Done right, I suspect that employee owned stuff can be an effective tool for social change, as well as providing the option for better working conditions and pay. But its a tool, and all tools have limits.
Even if they wouldn't, the moment they would pose a serious threat to capital, the government will send it's boots to shut it down immediately.
possible fake info
I think it happened in france sometime in the 80's when workers took control of a factory, but I'm not sure and I can't remember any details. So I might have 100% dreamt it.There has been a lot of pyrrhic wins for the workers in France in the 70s/80s because deindustrialization was unfortunately unstoppable.
Ironically, as everywhere else a lot of those workers have turned to fascism, here’s a long but interesting article about this: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/mar/18/my-mother-the-racist
IIRC something similar happened in Italy when the PCI was still a serious force