CEOs usually follow the worse forms of human collaboration known to our species: totalitarianism, dictatorships, monarchies, and centrally planned messes.
Anything that removes the power of CEOs and gives it to the worker should be highly encouraged. Economic democracy is the final frontier of human empowerment and giving workers then means to have democratic control over the economy can only unlock more human potential, not less.
Not the same at all, you're talking about a highly specialized skill with a small amount of people that are mostly compelled by either military order or international law. Deciding who should be the leader among the in-group doesn't require being ordained by the priesthood (the boardroom), it should be decided and voted on by the workers.
To make the actual analogy you wanted, maybe you should discuss fragging:
Just want to call out that these are both not great examples?
High performance sports teams have a captain that is often elected in some form from the team.
Likewise the crew of a pirate ship used to elect their captain.
Both examples serve contrary to your point, and there's no reason you couldn't have something similar in business: a cooperative that elects a CEO, rather than it being done by a board of other CEO's.
> Anything that removes the power of CEOs and gives it to the worker should be highly encouraged.
Pretty sure the moment you do this, the workers liquidate the company and distribute the assets among themselves, as evidenced by the acceptance rate of voluntary severance offers in many past downsizings, such as the Twitter one.
Accepting severance isn’t “liquidating the company,” it’s individuals minimizing risk when leadership is downsizing. Explicitly, in the case of Twitter.
“Accept this money and go or be fired” isn’t remotely comparable to the situation and claiming it is reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of the offer?
> Anything that removes the power of CEOs and gives it to the worker should be highly encouraged.
The only thing that will do this is if workers are the resource bottleneck.
> Economic democracy is the final frontier of human empowerment and giving workers then means to have democratic control over the economy can only unlock more human potential, not less.
This already exists. It's called free enterprise and freedom of association.
Unless of course you mean that nobody can own or expend resources without (nominally) everybody agreeing... which has also been tried, and failed horribly.
For one such example, see the years long fights in city halls over resource usage or utilization, such as building new developments for example. A corporation trying to get something done moving at that pace would, well, not get anything done. That is why worker owned co-ops, which you can create today even in this capitalist system we have, do not outcompete capitalist structures generally speaking.
better is doing an insane amount of lifting here. In the last 30 years China has lifted more of its own people out of poverty than all democracies summed together over the same time period.
Plato said it best when talking about the benevolent dictator, so in those cases, it's not the "worse" form of human collaboration. Not everyone follows the labor theory of value.
No, we know it's the worse form of collaboration because dictatorships have never been good systems of government. Does this really need to be stated? That dictatorships are always bad and never good, that people deserve autonomy and freedom, and that we should be molding society to fit the needs of those that actually serve it (the workers)?
> because dictatorships have never been good systems of government.
This is literally historically wrong, there are many examples to the contrary. If you think any form of government is "always" wrong, I can point you to failed democracies that then prospered in a dictatorial rule too, such as Singapore or South Korea or even China if you want to count that, which have all been basically one party rule to great effect.
Why not? Let's not act like the average CEO isn't also an actively hostile member of the company toward its workforce. Why should people be forced to work under such hostile regimes? People should be empowered to vote for their leaders where they work. Boards have this authority already, there's zero reason why workers shouldn't be granted the same priviledge.
It won't make the companies worse run, why would workers want to destroy their means to live? CEOs do this with no skin in the game, the workers should take that skin as they will always be better stewards than the single tyrant.
No one is forcing people, they can switch jobs, hence why we vote for politicians, because we cannot switch countries (as easily) but we do not vote for CEOs. Well, by working at a certain company, that is automatically a vote that one supports that company and wants to continue working there.
Where is your evidence that companies won't be worse run? Workers could just vote to give themselves massive raises and hemorrhage the company, ironically like how some private equity firms operate but en masse. No one would start companies in this sort of scenario thereby causing the economy to fall, especially in comparison to companies that don't have this sort of voting system for companies.
My evidence is the fact that companies layoff people in general due to the ineptitude of their executives. My evidence is that people do not like it when others have dominion over them.
The ability to deny someone healthcare, the ability to eat, how you dress yourself, who you can speak to, and even if you can subsist in our society (notice I didn't say thrive); these are things no human should have over another.
Companies have the ability to destroy lives and workers have ZERO recourse.
My solution is simple, workers should be able to vote for their bosses. If these executives are as good as you say then they should win the election easily. I mean after all boards vote on who becomes an executive, why shouldn't workers be allowed this right as well? Boards + executives decide company strategy, why can't workers be allowed to do this too? Why can't their be consensus building where we actually give workers the freedom to dictate their own success? Boards + executives vote on their salaries too (hint, they never go down), workers should have this right too.
I'm sorry but the more I think about it, the more farcical it all seems. Workplace democracy should the next pursuit of human rights as democratizing the economy can only lead to more human flourishing as democratic governments have provided thus far.
If it's good enough for the state, it's good enough for the F500.
If you want socialism, you can make your own co-op right now. In fact, I too was in a software engineering co-op where we all made decisions together and chose an external facing CEO. It works, but only at a small scale. There's a reason co-ops are not the dominant force in the market, if socialism really worked they would be but turns out capitalist corporate structures simply perform better.
And also, the way you dress yourself or have healthcare? Do you not think co-ops like REI don't have a work uniform or give their workers healthcare? Sorry but your takes sound extremely naive, where have you worked before? As I said I have literally worked in a software co-op and it's not all it's cracked up to be based on how you're describing them.
Anything that removes the power of CEOs and gives it to the worker should be highly encouraged. Economic democracy is the final frontier of human empowerment and giving workers then means to have democratic control over the economy can only unlock more human potential, not less.