[munk-a]

This has always been theoretically true. But only in the modern economy is it significantly true.

Prior to industrialization individual skill was the primary contribution of value to companies so, while a single person might own the premises, the value of the company was in those employees. In the modern economy employees have been commoditization to be interchangeable and the result is that employee power has been severely curtailed without compensation.

Compare a rando factory to a sports team, losing a star player on a sports team can drastically effect your valuation and thus those stand out employees are considered primary assets of the teams (and often times teams will have both injury and sudden contract termination insurance for their players). Your statement that companies generally aren't employees is correct, but it is newly correct and unhealthy for society. Those lower level employees are the only ones actually producing value for the company.

[magduf]

That's true, but they also have nearly zero influence on the company or its direction. And legally, they have zero ownership (unless of course it's an employee-owned company, which Boeing is not), so they simply have no say.

It's just like the assets (buildings, equipment, etc.). The company isn't going to be productive at all without its buildings and other assets. But do the assets get a say in things? Do the assets own the company? Of course not, they're inanimate things. Employees are not much different.

[munk-a]

Everything you've said is true of the world we're living in, but they aren't inherent natural laws - our changing culture has devalued employees to the point where they are viewed as having as much of a say as a building, but it's good (while accepting this is the case) to question if it must be the case and consider how else things could work. Given more ownership of the ultimate ends of their labour people are more invested, this is why key employees are often upgraded from mere tools to investors by the issuance of stock options - that sort of thing is never going to happen in a company like Boeing merely because of our culture.

If Boeing had granted partial corporate ownership to technical employees they would advocate much harder for the caution that could have averted this incident, bonuses (and the mere promises of such) are a partial salve to this but have other complications around being non-binding, unaccountable and a form of wage insecurity.

So, I just wanted to mention that this sort of creeping failure isn't inevitable, it's inevitable in the scenario as presented. Given a different company culture this incident likely never would have occurred and giving employees and vested (and vesting HA!) interest in the company is one such route.

[magduf]

I think you have some fanciful ideas that simply are not borne out by reality.

>this is why key employees are often upgraded from mere tools to investors by the issuance of stock options - that sort of thing is never going to happen in a company like Boeing merely because of our culture.

What are you talking about? I don't know about Boeing specifically, but stock options were very commonly awarded to engineers back before the big 2008 market crash. I had them when I worked at Intel. They sure didn't cause any change in my behavior; the effect of any one engineer at a company that large is usually pretty negligible for the company's stock price, and stock options are a very small portion of an engineer's overall compensation package. After the market crash, it seemed like stock options mostly fell out of favor (because they all became worthless!), and these days companies now offer RSUs, if they offer anything at all. Stock options were a big deal in the dot-com days because tech companies' valuations were inflating so quickly, so those options represented a LOT of potential profit, but not so much after the 2000 crash.

Anyway, the point is, you're talking about stock options like they'd solve this problem, and as if they aren't already common. I'm not sure how common they are now (they don't see to be so much), but they absolutely were in the past, and I don't see any evidence that it made a difference.

>If Boeing had granted partial corporate ownership to technical employees they would advocate much harder for the caution that could have averted this incident

What makes you think they didn't? Or that it would make a difference? Stock options don't give engineers any authority to override executive decisions by management. They can either do what the executives say, or get fired and lose all those options (unless they've vested). Either way, it gives them no real power.

The simple fact is that a company is not a democracy, and is much more like a dictatorship (or a cabal I guess, with the board picking the dictator but having the power to replace him at will). I can't even imagine any large company working well with a democratic style leadership when competing with others with traditional management. The simple solution is that companies like Boeing have to have very strong regulation to oversee their operations and make sure they make safe products, and that's the government's job; there's countless examples throughout history showing that expecting any organization to police itself effectively without some kind of checks by outside organizations doesn't work well. The FAA and by extension the US Government totally failed in their job here, and so did the foreign regulators to a certain extent (by trusting the FAA too much).

>Given a different company culture

Boeing's company culture is a product of the country it resides in. I don't see how you're going to change Boeing's culture without changing America's culture.