My first thought: there’s a sliding scale between worker ownership and investor ownership and it might be much more tractable to increase the share of worker ownership than to increase the number of 100% worker owned firms.
My second thought: if the benefits of worker ownership are due to superior governance, maybe increasing worker ownership should go along with weighing interests of different agents via geometric expectation maximisation
Startups sometimes offer shares to their early employees, but it seems to me this is usually some kind of scam. Or maybe “scam” is an unnecessarily harsh word, but it is definitely a form of “it does not mean what you assume it means, and I strategically do not correct your misconceptions which are obvious to me”.
Only a smart fraction of startups sells for millions, but when they do, only a small fraction of employees who own shares actually gets rich. Most often they find out that their shares are some special kind of shares (different than the ones owned by the CEO), and therefore… blah blah… they are practically worthless. Or they find out that the shares were so diluted that although the company grew 1000×, the value of the shares did not. Etc., I am sure new tricks to make employee shares worthless are being invented every day.
So, I guess a campaign to make co-ops more attractive should include an explanation why current employee shares are for all practical purposes not a form of worker ownership.
My first thought: there’s a sliding scale between worker ownership and investor ownership and it might be much more tractable to increase the share of worker ownership than to increase the number of 100% worker owned firms.
My second thought: if the benefits of worker ownership are due to superior governance, maybe increasing worker ownership should go along with weighing interests of different agents via geometric expectation maximisation
Startups sometimes offer shares to their early employees, but it seems to me this is usually some kind of scam. Or maybe “scam” is an unnecessarily harsh word, but it is definitely a form of “it does not mean what you assume it means, and I strategically do not correct your misconceptions which are obvious to me”.
Only a smart fraction of startups sells for millions, but when they do, only a small fraction of employees who own shares actually gets rich. Most often they find out that their shares are some special kind of shares (different than the ones owned by the CEO), and therefore… blah blah… they are practically worthless. Or they find out that the shares were so diluted that although the company grew 1000×, the value of the shares did not. Etc., I am sure new tricks to make employee shares worthless are being invented every day.
So, I guess a campaign to make co-ops more attractive should include an explanation why current employee shares are for all practical purposes not a form of worker ownership.