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by erlich 1464 days ago
The owners hold the management responsible. If targets are not met then they dig deeper, see staff turnover, find causes, and fix them. It’s capitalism at work. If the owners are not savvy enough then the company should fail or be sold and the capital should be allocated elsewhere.

If workers have a say it distorts these forces. And by say you mean the ability to force the hand of management. Because they already can have a say and modern companies measure everything and listen to feedback.

1 comments

Why does (in your view) capitalism mandate that only owners hold management responsible, and that workers having a say would distort that process? Are you suggesting that class warfare is inevitable? (That's a Marxist concept.) Otherwise, why keep workers out of the decision-making process?

Also, if in most tech companies workers are given equity, are they not owners also?

Workers don’t have same incentives. They can push for conditions that would risk bankrupting company, and if the company does shutter, they can simply get new jobs with no loss. Meanwhile owners lose their money.
Workers don't have an incentive of bankrupting the company. And not all employees are so blasé about finding another job- there are always some dependent upon a company for their livelihoods. Different owners also have different risk thresholds. As evidenced by the lavish VC funding of the past decade, there are many investors with a strong stomach for waste and failure.

Examples of unions fighting for management to make better business decisions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13986889

https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3mjxg/general-electric-work...

An owner that's invested in multiple companies is probably more likely to push for risk than workers are. Losing a job is not "no loss".