The cult of the CEO must end.
Around the country, collective action is in a resurgence. I saw striking aircraft workers today. I believe it was Beech, but I’m visiting family and can’t say for sure as Wichita KS is a manufacturing hub.
What if we just made all the workers into CEOs?
Like the workers owned and operated the business? Their hard work would be rewarded with profit sharing? That would actually mean I’d have to care about the shareholders.
That doesn’t work. You need a decision maker.
It’s not a terribly difficult job so they don’t need to get paid more than anyone else, but executive action by committee doesn’t work.
executive action by committee doesn’t work.
Is there actually any evidence for that? Isn’t that basically what they have in Switzerland? And they are one of the absolute richest countries in the world.
Above the CEO is usually a committee called the board, which govern all stock companies, and by far the most successful big companies are stock companies.
Companies run by a CEO without responsibility towards a committe (board) have much higher risk of doing something incredibly stupid that ruin the company. And can’t be removed no matter how incredibly stupid and harmful they are to the company.
For example as we see with Elon Musk and Twitter. Donald Trump and his Casinos. Pillow guy. Michael Dell.
Funny enough also Steve Jobs at first, but then taken in to rescue Apple successfully later.
You are muddling two different concepts in your Switzerland argument. You are probably referring to the fact, that Switzerland has a direct democracy for certain political decisions in addition to having a parliament. But that is not why it’s a rich country. That’s because of their big companies who are by no means anything else but die hard capitalistic and self serving. You might know some of them for their evil deeds, for example Nestlé.
At very least, adopting the German model of having union reps on the board of directors would be a sensible step.
Executive by committee is different than a board that gets together regularly. The board usually gives the ceo direction.
It’s also why most countries have both a committee and an executive instead of just a committee.
In the case of Elon he usually makes shareholders lots of money. Sure he tanked Twitter but that was after they got paid.
I hope one day I can see labor universally organized. I sadly don’t think I will, but that’s the dream
And average corporate profitability isn’t much different than it was in the late '70s. So that means the CEOs are being massively overpaid, and there’s a weakness in corporate governance that prevents shareholders correcting the problem.