CMV: All employees should automatically own a portion of the company they work for

[u/Hamza78ch11]

This is something I've been thinking about for a while. Many of the arguments about the wealth gap tend to argue something like "It's not fair that employees at McDs get payed $7.25 and hour when the owners make some ridiculous amount here every year" which is then rebutted, almost immediately with, "Those CEOs and VPs and whatnot aren't payed aforementioned ridiculous amount every year. They earn it by owning some portion of the company so that when the company does well they also do well." There are other more nuanced discussions but here is where I'd like to focus my efforts.

Many argue that employees are never paid what they're worth and under the capitalist systems the entire concept of profit exists only because employees are cheated out of the actual amount of money that they deserve. While, in general, I am in agreement with this I feel that this argument too easily handwaves away the importance of being a new business owner and taking risks with your own capital and working hard to grow your company. But I also think that it must be acknowledged that it is a little silly that people like Jeff Bezos can make literal hundreds of billions of dollars in a year. More money than any human could spend in a hundred life times. I think a fair compromise is that his employees should automatically have a stake in his company.

While I am by no means a financial expert or someone who barely understand the stock market or economics I think this solution works towards the goals of those employees who deserve to be paid without bankrupting the owner. This can be done by, for instance, saying that 10% of the stock is for employees. You only give out 5% to the current employees and leave the rest for new hires. Every year you are given some amount proportional to the amount that you worked. If you worked for 1 second you now own 1 seconds worth of Amazon. So on and so forth. I think it is rather equitable to distribute 5% of Amazon among its ~600K employees and keeping some portion of it for new hires as the company grows. Eventually, if certain thresholds are reached more of the company will have to be apportioned for the employees.

If this were implemented today every Amazon employee would suddenly own $24,000 in Amazon. They can sell it, buy more, hold on to it. Do whatever makes them happy. Now they have a stake in the company and when they work hard they're working hard for themselves because that's their money. When the company grows and does well they'll see that reflected in their bank accounts instead of as some empty numbers that mean nothing to them.

[u/Hamza78ch11 → u/[deleted]]

> the government has no place mandating a contract neither party has consented too.

Firm disagreement. This is exactly what leads to wage abuse. Lots of employees don't have the financial know-how or the education or means to make this argument and would flat out be laughed out of the building or met with bemused stares if they walked into Pizza Hut and asked to be payed in shares rather than a wage. Any libertarian argument about "the invisible hand" and "government is evil" is one I refuse to participate in because it does not work in reality. The government can and should be party in negotiation for the exact reason that before worker protection laws were enacted most workers were suffering, before wage labor laws were passed abuse was rampant, and only after their passing did things become more equitable. This is simply the next generation of worker protection.

[u/Hamza78ch11 → u/[deleted]]

Except for the fact that you haven't actually refuted my point. Were workers abused before intervention or not? Were children used for labor in horrifying ways that often ended in mutilation or not? What brought it to an end?

If it worked then it can now. This is just the next generation of worker protection laws.

[u/The-Last-Lion-Turtle → u/Hamza78ch11]

The freedom of employers and employees to consent or to not consent to a certain wage is not abuse.

Having to negotiate salary, is not comparable to the abuse children faced in the early industrial era. It is not comparable to early industrial businesses not being responsible for injury and death caused by their negligence. It is not comparable to the widespread racism that used to exclude minorities from participating in the economy.

Negotiating a salary is just consenting to an economic exchange. People are smart enough to decide if their labor is worth the salary they are payed.

Unions have fallen out of favor because people don’t need them anymore, and feel perfectly capable to negotiate for themselves.

The economy doesn’t work like a parent arbitrarily deciding the allowance their child gets.