[red-iron-pine]

wait until you hear about how inefficient executives are killer.

there is a bell-curve for leadership, and it's pretty damn clear after centuries of mercantilism and capitalism that they're not smarter than you are. it's a cartel, and the bellcurve applies to them just as much as it applies to your SWE I's straight out of college.

[slt2021]

executives exist regardless of union exists or not, execs are hired by shareholders and employees have no vote into this

[nerdponx]

Why shouldn't employees also be shareholders with a collectively nontrivial voting stake?

[yunohn]

Sadly, even companies like Google that are famous for doling out equity to employees, chose to segregate their stock classes and give employees non-voting shares.

[slt2021]

if they have $$$money$$$$ they are welcome to purchase on open market, as many shares as they would like.

problem is most retail investors never even vote for annual shareholder meetings and never bother to read proxy statements and shareholders' meeting agenda.

[nerdponx]

I said collectively. Workers don't get paid enough individually to buy relevant ownership shares (or even any shares). This is literally the point of collective action.

[slt2021]

In industries where employees are critical part of business theybhave a vote and meaningful share.

For example startups where early engineers have options/shares and management listens to them and wants to keep them happy.

Sadly in most cases with big tech - there is no reason to give a vote to employee class because they are not critical.

I mean look at twitter - musk fired everyone he could and twitter still works.

Same with google - google could fire everyone outside Search&Ads and still run its cash cow machine.

All critical code is written by early and now very senior engineers, current employees are tiny tiny cogs that are not critical to business.

Why would anyone gove a vote to these people?

[nerdponx]

> In industries where employees are critical part of business theybhave a vote and meaningful share.

Employees are critical in literally every industry, otherwise they wouldn't be employed.

> For example startups where early engineers have options/shares and management listens to them and wants to keep them happy.

You're confusing "importance to the business" with "market power". Tech employees generally tend to have market power in the current economy. And how many of those options (read: lottery tickets) and shares even grant the employee voting power?

> All critical code is written by early and now very senior engineers, current employees are tiny tiny cogs that are not critical to business.

This is absolutely not true at the companies where I've worked. Can't speak for FAANG.

> I mean look at twitter - musk fired everyone he could and twitter still works.

This is a really weird example to generalize from. Most businesses are absolutely not organized this way.

> Same with google - google could fire everyone outside Search&Ads and still run its cash cow machine.

This is speculation. Google does a lot of things that aren't directly "making money on ads", but if they didn't think those things were worth doing, they wouldn't do them.

> Sadly in most cases with big tech - there is no reason to give a vote to employee class because they are not critical.

Weirder still is the notion that businesses ought to give their employees voting shares based on some notion of criticality to the business. I am arguing that employees should be unified, in a union, and that the union should seek to obtain a nontrivial voting share of ownership in order to ensure that employees are well represented in business decisions. Some leftists argue that the union should be entitled to this share. I won't even go that far, although I think it's a good idea.