The case for employee-owned companies by David Ellerman
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-the-case-for-employee-owned-companies
My first job was at an employee owned company.
What you need to understand is employee ownership is not worker ownership. Ownership of the company is related to the amount of employee stock that a worker owns, which means management always has the most ownership because they are given stock options that the rest of the workforce isn’t able to get or afford.
In the end it just turns managers into shareholders, with the rest of the workers disregarded in the decision making process.
Worker ownership has to be democratic. Equal shares for equal work. Otherwise it’s just a dictatorship of management masquerading as meritocracy.
ESOPs in the US by default work something like that. The author is definitely not advocating that. He has a similar critique of American ESOPs in this work: https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/102452
The author advocates 1 worker 1 vote (or equal voice if we are talking more sophisticated voting systems like quadratic voting). He is definitely speaking from a more democratic tradition
Oh! Well that’s definitely better than what I thought he was advocating.
But then… why not call it worker ownership? 🤔
That is strange to me as well. He normally talks about abolishing the employer-employee relationship in favor of democratic worker membership in the firm. I speculate that it has to do with trying to explain it to a more general audience
Yep this was my experience as well
