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.
I didn't see this before i posted an adjacent discussion. As somebody else already mentioned, there's the concept of worker cooperatives which is similar to what you are writing.
To prevent the usual overexploitation and degeneracy, i believe a worker cooperative would also need to be non-profit. And there's of course the issue of how to decide/regulate management salaries, especially if non-profit.
AFAIK (correct if i'm wrong), non-profit coops have a better track record at keeping companies afloat for a longer time, since they care more about stable employment, and obviously don't consider "sell shares, and abandon the sinking ship" to be a viable strategy.
With strong enough regulation one wouldn't need the additional incentive "to do a better job" (as a manager/chief) from owning a significant portion of sales (which as previously stated isn't even such a strong incentive long-term). I believe most people, if competent enough, would try to do a good job. And for the rest, regulation such as anti-misconduct laws and punishments, ensuring qualifications and etc, but that leads into the obvious question of where and how such regulations should be decided upon and enforced.