Bob Moore sounds like he was a good dude. If more business leaders thought like him we’d all be a lot better off.
I’m worried it’s the end of an era. They have really high quality product, all of it!
But that’s the point: that level of wealth and power is unhealthy. For literally everyone. We can’t just hope more of these insanely privileged people resist corruption and greed to do the right thing and treat their employees fairly (more than fairly, in this case). He was a good dude all right, but a huge exception to the overwhelming norm of wealthy people exploiting their workers…
Socalism is quite a nice concept and one that has the potential to be implemented at a large scale.
This sounds like a mondragon corporation, a specific type of co-op primarily from the Basque region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation?wprov=sfti1#
Bob was genuinely a good man and the Red Mill products are amazing.
Communism! How dare he! Giving power to the people who built his wealth from? Might as well give him a parade in Red square!
But seriously people shouldn’t be able to transfer their corporations to their families. Once you die/retire it goes to the workers by law. If you didn’t amass enough wealth in that time frame maybe you should have budgeted better. Why should current and future workers continue supporting wealthy peoples children.
Estate taxes are the way to deal with that. Otherwise you potentially get massive distortionary effects from people trying to dump all their ownership into liquid assets right before they die, assuming that’s what you meant by wealth. It also gets odder when you no longer have a single owner. Jeff Bezos is fabulously wealthy and holds lots of stock in Amazon, but he does not own Amazon outright. You could say that when he dies, his stock goes to the workers. Okay, what about stock held by funds like Vanguard or pension funds? What does death even mean then? It’s a whole mess, or you could go with the simpler estate tax.
People are careful with their words on this and often act like it’s a gift. It’s an ESOP so he sold it to his employees. That said, it’s still a better model than selling to a public company and I’m sure he did take a loss on it compared to that.
From the perspective of the employee it basically is a gift (more a benefit).
Employees don’t pay for stock in an ESOP; they’re earned by being employed there (with different options for how they’re divided, but restrictions so they aren’t excessively dominated by the highest earners).
