Thursday, September 09, 2004

Employee Risk

I added the idea of employee shares to my rants about the free market. The problem with both options and employee stock plans is that they transfer risks onto employees with not real political power. The biggest danger of employee ownership is that it creates an opportunity for insiders owning the stock to really ream the employees.

The alternative, it seems to me, would be a financial instrument that recognizes that employees already have a great deal of risk invested in their employer...employee shares would be held by the company treasury. The employees would receive dividends and can vote for the board.

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