alt Hacker News> Worker-owned companies
what or how would such a company form in the first place?
The initial capital would essentially be from the workers themselves. Then, what about the newly hired workers - do they have to pay to get in? or do they get a share of the equity once they're hired?
What about the initial workers who have paid capital - do they get it back if they choose to leave? or do they now own equity, regardless of being an employee there?
You make a good point, that raising capital is the central problem.
It's particularly difficult today when wealth inequality is so high. When so many corporations have vacuumed up trillions of dollars of market cap, and billionaires sit on dynastic wealth that only gets spent through the lens of their ego, slowing innovation in sectors of the economy that aren't traditionally profitable like education, healthcare and the environment.
It seems odd that workers don't have much capital these days, while company owners and investors have millions or billions of dollars. It's reminiscent of the Gilded Age and robber barons collecting businesses into monopolies before regulation, or selling off their parts like private equity firms do today with companies like Toys "R" Us. It leads to feelings that the most likely future is one of megacorps and striking workers, with widespread suffering and violence while productivity is at an all-time high. Case in point:
https://apnews.com/article/amazon-warehouses-quebec-union-jo...
In other words, we live in a rigged economy that hasn't catered to workers since 1980s trickle-down economics and austerity brought neoliberal policies that aren't recommended by macroeconomic principles into widespread adoption.
I believe that's a result of former colonies gaining their independence, so colonizer countries like the US and UK began colonizing themselves. Rather than investing in shared prosperity by nationalizing their means of production, or at the very least incentivizing the creation of worker-owned cooperatives, they chose to privatize them to maintain existing power structures.
Just like in the game of Monopoly, eventually a lucky few end up owning everything if they get an early win. When traditionally 90% of businesses failed in their first year, today we might have 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 startups dominating sectors of the economy due to above-the-fold and long-tail effects.
Multiplied wasted effort under rugged individualist culture eventually grows to consume the entirety of workers' time as they scrape to make rent. Potential tires into wasted talent and widespread underemployment over lost decades as capitalism consumes itself in the end. Eventually driving populist movements that could shift the US's capitalist democratic republic and even Europe's social democracies into authoritarianism or even fascism. Books like Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty go into great depth exploring the inevitabilities of this late-stage capitalism.
Wow am I such a bright-eyed optimist this morning!
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