Jokes and Humor

Completely agree. My wildest fantasy would be a phase in of co-ops/employee owned companies. This could be done over a 10 year period with each year requiring 5 more percent of the company value be owned equally by the employees (judged by the employee with the lowest stake). By the end of that decade, employees would own a controlling stake in their employers and would have plenty of time to organize a method of governance.

There's one critical metric that I think would determine how easily a company could make this transition: (total company value)/(2 x total company payroll). A $1M company with a $500k payroll would require each employee to pay an entire year's salary for them to have a controlling stake. That's very achievable over a 10 year period without really even having to give the ownership to the employees. The owners could just sell it off to them.

With this metric in mind, the companies that would transition the best would be ones that pay their employees very well relative to company value. Something like a small welding shop with a high number of skilled employees might be able to do this easily. A tech company with huge valuation relative to the number of employees would be forced to offer aggressive stock buying programs for employees (for every share you buy, the company matches 10 shares for example). This would force companies that don't pay well to either buy back stock, issue new stock, or drastically increase their payroll to make the transition.