Also doesn’t Amazon and many other tech companies give out RSUs as part of compensation for corporate employees? Obviously not all, but the OP’s complaint is, in my view, not entirely fair to levy at Amazon specifically.
This is not the same. It is similar, it gives the veneer of meritocracy and ownership but it's not the same.
Compare how much ownership per unit of work each person has. In fact, only one side knows the company's financial status so it cannot even be a fair negotiation, let alone fair outcome.
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In a society which claims that everyone is equal and in which everyone lives roughly the same amount of time, the fair distribution of ownership is according to how much of their limited time they spent building the thing.
You can admit people are not equal and then take both time and skill into account.
Restricted, but your point isn’t a good one. You don’t hire someone then hand them, idk $50,000 in stock or options so they can leave the next day. CEOs even get paid in stock grants based on performance or other such restrictions options, etc., (obviously there’s a lot of variation here) with lots of strings attached (maybe not enough but that’s beside the point).
> In a society which claims that everyone is equal
No, you are making this up. Society doesn’t claim that everyone is equal. We claim you should be treated equally under the eyes of the law, which by the way our poor performance here is a criticism that I think is very valid.
Many countries have similar clauses in their rulesets. And they don't only apply to the state, in many countries it would be illegal to pay a person less based on gender, race and similar characteristics (though of course difficult to prove).
Now, I am not saying everyone is equal[0], just that it's a very popular meme in society.
Finally, even if you get compensated by some share in the company, how large is it relative to the amount rich people own? They will still keep getting rich faster than you can, even if you work 80 hours a week and they 0.
[0]: E.g. intelligence is the only thing which separates us from other animals, and given the relative value of life ascribed to a human vs any other animal, it's laughable that the value of human lives is not dependent on intelligence to some level. Similarly, many people are so anti-social, they are actively harmful to almost everyone around them - morality should absolutely play a role in this value.
Yes, Martin. All men (and women) are created equal. The purpose of that document and in that phrase is that all are created equal under the purview of the law or God, not that "society should be equal". Those are completely different things and as you mentioned, it's a very popular (and stupid) meme which is why I responded specifically to what you wrote there.
> Exactly, that's why I say ownership should be proportional to the amount of work done (and perhaps skill involved).
This sounds reasonable, as all bad ideas usually do (and good ones sometimes) but the complexity is in the implementation. If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).
Well, what do you do when your company hires over a million people? And, what do you actually distribute to the employees? Is it the market value of the company divided amongst employees? If they work for 6 months how much value do they get? How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?
There aren't easy answers to these questions. We are in fact not great as a society (and I'm not sure we should even strive to be) at assessing who did what work. And, how do you handle people who are less skilled because they were born that way? Some people just aren't capable or competent and that's a genetic fact of life. Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay? How does that work?
Your simple idea opens up a pretty nasty can of worms here without clear answers. But there is one solution - if you (or others) think that giving ownership proportional to the amount of work done is the best way to run a company, the free market is right there waiting for you to give it a go.
> under the purview of the law or God, not that "society should be equal".
Well, gods don't exist but many people substitute them with some kind of moral system so it's not only under the eyes of the law. The second part touches upon the core of the issue IMO - whether we want equal opportunities or equal outcomes.
Equal outcomes are obviously unjust because some people put in more work, have more skill or are better in some way at some things (whether that's work or morality) and equal outcomes can only be achieved by taking from them.
Equal opportunities are much more reasonable but they too have issues - specifically what counts as an opportunity and when does it start?
- If at birth, then the society must forbid any kind of inheritance, otherwise some people are obviously massively advantaged by being born to rich parents. Even that is not enough because rich parents can afford the child a much better education and contacts. You'd literally have to take children away from parents and assign them to random families, which would probably be somewhat unpopular.
- At the beginning of a particular school enrollment or job sounds more reasonable but then people who were advantaged or disadvantaged earlier have a much better change of getting into the school or getting the job so it just adds up.
- Not to mention people who are sufficiently rich through inheritance fundamentally don't have to work, they just invest. Assuming all people need roughly the same amount of money to survive and the rest can be invested, the rich will get richer faster than the poor.
These are hard problems with no easy solutions. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to solve them, even if that means trying out ideas that can turn out bad. The alternative is increasing inequality until a collapse, a revolution or until we're back to slavery.
> the complexity is in the implementation
No shit. I didn't say it was easy. But we can start by talking about an idealized world with perfect information and what justice/fairness would look like and then make changes according to real-world constraints such as imperfect information. This has already happened to criminal law - in an ideal world, you know ow much suffering an offender has caused, how severy punishment he deserves for it, how severe punishment prevents how much crime, whether somebody is actually rehabilitated or if they'll re-offend, etc. But in the real world, there are rules about what level of proof is necessary, about what evidence is admissible, whether you can assign punishments based on risk of re-offending, etc.
With compensation, the first step would be to negotiate based on equal information (not withholding information about compensation of other employees - in the name of privacy, it could be median and variance for each position). The second step is negotiating not money-per-unit-of-work but skill level relative to other employees.
> If I start a business and hire someone who is going to do 50% of the work, I give them 50% of the company (generally speaking not even talking about $ investments here).
Not necessarily. If you started it alone and worked on it for some time, that time should count towards your share. Similarly, if you invested money into it, that should also count.
> How exactly are you assessing the value that someone is delivering or the amount of work that was done?
The exact details can be negotiated and various schemes should probably be experimented with at both the company and societal levels.
The point is that there should be no class divide between workers who get paid per uni of work and owners who take a cut from the income and/or can sell the company.
> Oh, by the way, what if you leave the company for more pay?
The company is still built on top of your work, your share just keeps decreasing relative to others as other people put in more and more work. This is actually something that protects founders - if you start as 1 man in a garage, then leave the company but it turns into something hugely profitable, you still keep getting a cut, just a small one.
A lot of people criticize my opinions based on risk (but incorrectly, given employees risk much more than owners - see other comments) but this actually spreads the risk around a lot. If you work for multiple companies in your life, you still have some income, unless all of them go bankrupt.
Oh and this solves the issue with privilege from inheritance to some degree - the children of workers didn't build the company, so they have no claim to a share in it.
