Not knowing a lot about this, my question is, who has to pay for the overhead? If we all own a part of the company we work at, does that make me responsible for paying the cost of running the business?
Yes… kind of…
One potential structure would be that various leadership roles (like the C-suite roles we see in any regular company) would be elected positions selected from someone within the company. Their leadership roles would day to day function like the C-Suite does, but instead of being beholden to a board of directors made up of the top investors, they would be beholden to the workers.
So for financials, there would be an equivalent to a Chief Financial Officer for this theoretical socialist company where the position is elected from the workers who handles where all the money flows to and from, making sure resources are being allocated correctly, everyone’s needs are met. And since it’s elected from the workers, there’s incentive to do right by them, and they have already worked alongside them.
So you, Upperhand, might not be directly responsible, having ownership along with every other worker means you have an impact, even if it’s indirect, by voting for good leaders, and doing better work would benefit everyone at the socialist company.
Its the same as any business. The business earns money by selling something and that goes to pay for the activities involved in running the business. The difference is that the workers get to share in the profits and success instead of just a small group at the top.
How pay is distributed is also up to the workers (owners). Nothing says it has to be equal. All this means is that the people doing the actual work get to make the decisions. Not some investor who only cares about profit.
Overhead is the same (maybe less if management is smaller and cheaper) but dividends go to workers instead of shareholders.
Downside is that raising capital to grow the business is much harder and it’s much harder to take risks because the effects are not diversified.
But there are other ways to handle it. I wouldn’t vote for dividends to be distributed fully, I’d want my bonus, but to put the rest into investing in the company, raising wages, etc. Workers co-ops generally do pretty well once they’re off the ground. The only problem they really face is that privately owned businesses are more able to cut labor costs and thus can undercut on prices until the cooperative competition fails
I can answer this one with some confidence. Yes, people are still paid for their work.
What? My question isn’t if I’d be paid for my work. My question is, how does the overhead get paid? Is it equal among all people? How does it work?
Would the worker pay to operate the business? Essentially yes*, the non-wage operating cost of a business could be withheld from the workers’ wages to pay for things like the electric bill of the building they work in. This is because the workers of the companies who provide that electricity also have a right to what their labor provides. The other possibility is that the government would pay for these costs through taxes (which is indirectly paid for by the population, of course).
Just because a business is worker-owned doesn’t mean that every dollar of revenue is distributed to its workers. All companies would operate more like a union or non-profit company where they are limited in the amount of money they can stockpile, but how that money is raised and spent would be determined by the workers or (more likely) leadership that the workers elect to run the company.
*According to Marx, end-stage communism wouldn’t have a need for fiat money and the transition to that state is some form of socialism. Marxists have different ideas for what a government and economy look like in these various stages and how the transition between them happens. Because it’s easier to imagine and explain an economy similar to what we currently have, this hypothetical assumes an economy with some form of socialism that uses fiat money, businesses that compete with each other, and the government is some kind of representative democracy.
Do you think the board pays the overhead?
If you and your friends start a business everyone pays their part to launch it, just like any other business, the difference is that the workers own the business so they split the profits and decide how it’s ran.
Look into workers cooperatives, you might have people who provided the funds to launch it, but after a while the business is supposed to be able to refund them if they ask for the money back. Otherwise it’s like any other business, revenues are used to pay what’s necessary for the business to run.