Heads I win, Tails you lose
Heads I win, Tails you lose
115 comments
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Oh puh-lease!
Employees don't risk anything except their career, livelihoods, and homes.
Investors take enormous risks, like a small amount of their vast wealth, and maybe even risk losing a controlling interest in the board. If they really fuck up, they might even risk not being allowed to be a CEO again for a few years.
But go on, try to convince me again that employees deserve a bigger share...
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You know, it always amazes me how people equate layoffs with losing livelihoods here. Is that how it is in America? Seems so alien, when where I live, being fired (without cause) would be somewhere between a non-event and a pleasant break using the severance pay.
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Often, yes. Outside of more senior level white collar careers, severance is often not guaranteed upon separation here. In many states, “Right to Work” labor laws enable an employer to terminate an employee for nearly any reason. To make matters worse, our health insurance is provided as a benefit by our employers, so losing your job not only means you lose your source of income, but also your means of keeping yourself healthy and getting care should you need it.
And in many cases, even if you do receive severance, the company determines what your separation package includes, and the calculations used to determine the value is kept behind closed doors and obscured from the employee. The packages are presented as non-negotiable, even though they aren’t, and employees being let go are often pressured to sign the agreement in a very short window or risk having the offer of severance rescinded. Often what is offered is a pittance, but generally Americans don’t push back against it. It’s a “better than nothing, I guess” situation.
So yeah - being laid off is a tremendously stressful and life altering experience here for the vast majority of the working and middle class.
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Depends. I'm an experienced programmer. It has never taken me more than a month of casual searching to land the next gig, no relocation.
But if you're a factory worker in bum fuck nowhere, where the factory is the town, well, layoffs are going to be catastrophic for most, particularly since relocating would almost certainly be to a more expensive area.
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Whoosh
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Whoosh indeed...
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How is it that no company has union busted by handing out shares of the business to their workers?
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Bob's Red Mill did something of the sort and is 100% employee-owned as of 2020. The stated intent was to avoid the investor-driven abuse of employees and customers for profit. It's not a workers' co-op, to be clear, but runs under an ESOP.
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Organic Valley did that
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Amazing... I gotta go see how it practically worked out. Thanks for the example!
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Kroger did that as a way to defeat a hostile takeover
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Gotta check that out - thanks!!
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The shareholders could go poor while labor gets all the money and I still won't be happy. The shareholders have more power than the workers. Fixing wealth doesn't magically summon democracy and fix power imbalances.
Power imbalance is the sickness, wealth inequality is a symptom.
All companies need to be owned by their workers.
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this is also true for customers - imo customers also need a stake in businesses especially ones that have anything approaching a monopoly.
The obvious solution would be a law that any company of a certain size should have 25% of its board nominated and elected by non managerial workers and 25% appointed by public election or appointed by an elected official.
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Or just have the entire company run democratically. And before you say this can't work let me introduce you to a worker co-op with over $12 billion in revenue annually
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I think this depends on the company.
Yes if there is monopoly, for sure, I agree.
Also companies offering essential services.
Most importantly social media. Social media is run by users, and they should have a majority representation. The social media company is just doing an IT service, really.
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the workers can be shareholders though. some companies even pay a bit in stock or options. however, dividends are usually very low and most shareholders make their money with gambling the stock market, which has little to do with labor at all.
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Sure but giving employees a tiny fraction of the company is not democracy. All workers must collectively own the company. And nobody who doesn't work there should get a say.
Also the whole thing I just said, it's not about wealth it's fundamentally about power.
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Still mad that a coworker got fired because a different, unrelated department lost a sale. Sales keeps their bonuses but socialized their loss. Fuck them.
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Last month we had our AGM where they announced record profits, like our company has literally never done better. Just in the difference in profits from last year they could give every employee in the company a $15k bonus.
Then a week later we had a department meeting where they announced 6 people being made redundant as part of a larger wave of lay-off to "keep the company competitive in a challenging market"
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The only thing that's challenging to them is showing some courage when investors ask them what they're doing to increase profit margins
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It should be illegal to do layoffs or pay freezes to save money unless the CEO's compensation is at or below a threshold set proportionally to the lowest paid employee.
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Sounds good, until you realize this just encourages them to do a bunch of “for cause” firings before the mass layoff.
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We have awarded ourselves a round of bonuses to reflect how well we've navigated these layoffs.
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The only risk management takes is becoming labor
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Set up a co-op then.
Only hire people that invest.
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Create your own business and skip investors, problem solved!
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And when the zero entry cost business is invented, that might work!
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You're kind of proving their point. Labor takes no risk of loss entering a job because generally speaking there is zero entry cost for starting a job. This is not true for starting a business.
I'm all for more equitable distribution of wealth, but OPs meme exposes a profound ignorance, not some kind of clever exposing of a contradiction.
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I had a near zero cost business. Basically I needed a computer, phone (already had that) and M365. It was $60 to create the biz myself. Any professional services company falls into this category. So they do exist, even if in small numbers.
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The entry is literally zero.
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There's lots of 0 entry cost business. Problem is they exist because no one wants to do that work themselves.
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Access to capital isn't universal, some people aren't able to work out of their parents' garage with a $245,000 loan from them (Jeff Bezos if you're unfamiliar with his "self-made" story).
Without access to capital, you don't have access to food or shelter, let alone labor. You'd have to work a full time job (or more), plus create the entire business yourself with no access to any substantial means of production.
It's not an equal playing field, and it's not supposed to be. Capitalism is a system setup for capitalists to accumulate capital. Labor and people more generally are commodities to be exploited. The system is functioning exactly as it should, and the working class is miserable because of it.
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Lol, I thought this was a joke, then I read the comments.
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115 comments
The last place I worked at sent an email of "congratulations" to the staff for a new annual profit record, and instituted a pay freeze later in the same month because they were trying and eventually did sell to a publically traded company and low payroll looks better in the sale, that proceeded to fire everyone because they were only interested in killing local competition in the market.
Workers working too hard for the owner literally cost us our jobs.
The owners have no bravery and take no risks that labor doesn't bear the biggest brunt of. This entire economy is a scam that stands on pillars of lies/propaganda.
Side note, who the fuck celebrates their employer making record profits if they aren't in a super rare in the US cooperative or generous stock dispersment program? The whole point of employment is to provide the least labor for the most reward while they try to get the most labor for the least reward, record profits means I'm working too hard for them.
AdaptHealth was the national conglomerate that swalllowed us and a hundred other local homecare/dme providers for overt competition slaughter btw. Their whole goal was/is to enshittify home healthcare/dme for private profit, and the original ceo had to step down because he committed tax evasion in a European country that actually gives a shit. If they're in charge of your grandmother's homecare/dme, say your goodbyes to grandma and make sure they didn't triple bill.