A company is it's employees. If IBM still has cheese slicer designers in 2016, it's because they failed to train them. The discussion we're having here is because there seem to be no repercussions to their failure.
shareholder capitalism is a noxious falsehood that has very unfortunately been enshrined in our current interpretation of the law.
this should not be regarded as a baseline truth nor a desirable transitional state. it is a bad idea that we must not succumb to.
companies are multi-faceted entities with many different stakeholders. the workers are a 100% necessary stakeholder and the company cannot operate without them.
And... so what? Sure, the company needs employees, but it doesn't need the people who are there.
What's noxious is the whole idea of "stakeholders", as if working somewhere gives you some kind of ownership. If you want to own your job you need to be self employed.
If I hire someone to cut my grass is he now a "stakeholder" who needs to be consulted when I sell my house?
its really kind mind blowing to me that you don't see a difference but I'll spell it out for you.
a company is an organization of humans. a house is an object.
You purchase a service from the lawn care vendor. You are their customer. You are not the employer of the guy who mows the lawn. That guy is either self-employed or he might be the employee of a lawncare company.
>its really kind mind blowing to me that you don't see a difference but I'll spell it out for you..
Oh, THANK YOU for the scraps of information you're about to impart.
>a company is an organization of humans.
No it isn't. A company (or corporation) is a legal fiction in which the owners are pooling resources to make money. It may do nothing and have no full-time employees. It may own other companies who do nothing and have no full-time employees.
The "organization of humans" isn't the company. Those people are employees who work for the company. I know it's in fashion for CEOs to say "we are the company", but that's a polite fiction you tell people to motivate them. If you have any doubt this is true, watch what happens when the company doesn't need them any more.
>You purchase a service from the lawn care vendor. You are their customer. You are not the employer of the guy who mows the lawn. That guy is either self-employed or he might be the employee of a lawncare company.
While that's true from a legal perspective, it's a meaningless distinction. I'm paying the guy to do a job. If I stop paying him to do a job, it has an impact on his life. In leftist parlance that makes him a "stakeholder", by which they mean he ought to have some input into the decisions I make as the owner.
> No it isn't. A company (or corporation) is a legal fiction in which the owners are pooling resources to make money.
A company is a generic term in English for any (particularly business) organization. It includes things that do not have distinct legal identity from the persons comprising the organization.
A corporation is specifically a particular form of company, distinguished by distinct legal personhood and other particular legal treatments.
Many factories are completely or almost automated now, especially in Japan. This trend will only grow larger in the future as robotics improves. Even the repair and maintenance of the robots will soon be done by other robots.
AI is already doing the same thing for many white collar jobs.
The company of the future will indeed operate without workers.
>The discussion we're having here is because there seem to be no repercussions to their failure.
What do you mean? There are massive layoffs, a falling share price and lots of bad press. What other "repercussions" should there be? Should the government come in and shut the place down? Should it force IBM to keep all employees?
Again, what sort of "repercussions" should a company have when they make bad business decisions? The shareholders and employees have suffered, that's the punishment.
But they are not the same group of employees though ;-) that's the point.
> The discussion we're having here is because there seem to be no repercussions to their failure.
Ok and how should we punishing all the failed startups though? Who is holding them responsible for their failure?
> it's because they failed to train them
We should try. But in general this is like the idea of "Why don't we just retrain all the coal miners to write web apps?" The reality is that you can't retrain everyone.
Some of the programming stuff seems easy to programmers for example, because well, we forgot the time when we didn't know it yet. But it is not something you can take a few night classes and read a book or two and get to writing back-end services.
Not sure if that brings any comfort to the workers. They still lost their job. Most owners just turn around and do another startup and so on. Should they be punished and held responsible for it somehow. For hiring and then making bad decisions and failing.
