Promote Everyone to CEO

By Claudia Drdul

claudiadrdul@gmail.com

 

Conversations around economic equity typically follow a linear pattern of thinking that embraces the creation of new businesses over the the restructuring of existing businesses.  

Much of this linear thinking is rooted in the mythical American Dream where luck, family contributions, and privilege are not emphasized. Instead, Americans are led to believe hard work will make them rich. 

However, hierarchical workplace structures do little to achieve this dream. Pay inequality between CEOs and laborers is at an all time high in the United States. Last year, a study conducted by the Economic Policy Institute found “the CEO to (average) worker compensation ratio rose to 221 to 1 in 2018,” and “CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978.”

Socioeconomic mobility of workers has not increased since the take-off of the “startup boom” earlier this decade despite what many CEOs would like you to believe. For every single CEO of a startup moving up into the ruling class, there are hundreds of workers staying at or below the poverty line. 

Generally, Americans are led to believe the value of their labor corresponds with their pay rate. 

However, if this were true, assembly-line laborers would be the highest paid employees of car companies since they are the driving force behind the functioning of an auto-plant. A factory can exist without a supervisor, it cannot exist without workers putting together the product which is being sold. 

However, many Americans degrade the necessity of assembly-line workers, and use the term “unskilled laborers” due to societal conditioning which undervalues the importance of human life.

 

Labor is important. That’s undeniable. More and more companies are recognizing this fact and turning to cooperative workplace structures where workers hold equal shares in business profits, and make decisions through discussion, rather than executive decisions. The Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NoBAWC) “is a grassroots organization of democratic workplaces dedicated to building workplace democracy in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond,” according to their website. 

Rainbow Grocery, a San Francisco worker-owned cooperative, is a prime example of how businesses which are worker-owned are not only sustainable, but can become landmarks of community perseverance. Rainbow opened in 1975 and offers their employees who work 25 or more hours per week full medical, dental, and vision insurance, paid time off and profit sharing upon becoming a “member-owner” which typically happens within the first year of employment. 

Technology companies could dramatically benefit from this change in priorities. Instead, their hierarchical structure forces workers to sign over the rights of their ideas to their employers without reaping the profits of them through the rampant use of non-disclosure agreements. 

Conglomerates like Apple, Google, and Twitter normally practice the monopolistic act of buying up individual endeavors anyway, leaving little room for small businesses to succeed. 

Crunchbase.com reports that Apple has bought out a total of 111 companies, Google has acquired 240 companies and Twitter has acquired 56 companies. Every new acquisition potentially contained multiple companies which were also bought-out by other companies. 

The impersonal nature of “acqui-hiring” is akin to philosopher Karl Marx’s theory of alienation. 

In Das Kapital, Marx explains that when workers feel separate from the goods or services they produce, whether it is because someone else owns the rights to said services or goods or because they have little control over their workplace conditions. 

Purpose and pride in one’s work is necessary for a well-functioning workplace. Both of these problems can be solved through the unionization of workplaces and collective ownership of business profits.