[PLUG] OT, FYI...IBM Layoff

[Jeme A Brelin]

On Tue, 28 May 2002, sendai wrote:
> I think you are have a good point about the executives and the recent
> stock market fiasco, but remember the companies that caused the
> collapse were primarily run by a lot of idiots with no business sense
> who had no business plan and got venture capital just by saying they
> were a high tech startup.

Right, like Enron.

Don't blame startups for the stock market fiasco, blame the stock market
itself, the failure of late market capitalism to properly link profits to
productivity and employment, and the pervasive deregulation and
privatization of the public trust.

> The advantage to having an employee only owned business is that the
> lower management and grunts are on the board. Upper and middle
> management is fighting for them as well by definition.

No argument there.  Management is rightly a servant class; managing
business affairs that aren't directly related to productivity.  
Unfortunately, many people in management believe they manage the
production or workers.  They exist to prevent the truly productive
employees from being distracted from the truly productive work by
unproductive processes (like time and expense reporting).

A better model than the "publicly" held corporation used today is a worker
held syndicate where decisions are made collectively on information from
designated advisors and researchers and what is today called
"management" is either eliminated or simply reclassified as "business
administration"... the generic, non-industry-specific tasks common to
whole classes of production.

> Besides, you CANNOT have a large corporation without competent
> executives. Techs can be businessmen but only by exception not rule.

What is an executive?  One who executes the will of the masters?  In an
employee held company, the masters are all of the employees and they
execute their own will.  And certainly it cannot be said that a CEO is
more responsible for the execution of productive work than the men on the
factory floor.

The modern corporation is a sick creature.  It is a collective
intelligence constructed poorly and operating contrary to its own purpose.  
It is, in short, selfish and insane.


Preston wrote:
> Sorry, as a tech boom skeptic who prayed nightly for people to come to
> their senses ever since the Dow crossed 7,000, I don't have much good
> to say about most executives. If executives actually cared about
> getting business done and not about stock value and making themselves
> wealthier, we wouldn't be in a situation where thousands of people
> needed jobs in the first place.

Going "public" (that is, selling your company to the same rich few that
own every other company) is nothing short of abandoning your former
business and entering the business of selling stock.  Your former industry
is now simply one asset to be taken or left at the will or whim of the
careless and thoughtless exhorbitantly wealthy.

> It sounds like a nice idea to start a new company that focuses on the
> customers, but as someone else already pointed out, the reason this is
> even a discussion is because of what happened to Sequent. So
> apparantly the cycle is always going to be that technologists and
> those who LOVE to do good work will always come up with good ideas and
> will poor sweat and blood into getting something off the ground and
> then the suits will step in to ruin the entire operation by focusing
> primarily on making middle to upper management rich.
> 
> I don't see this cycle ever ending.

Use your imagination, sir.  We break the cycle by stepping outside of it
and simply working.

Direct employee control (a democratized workplace; which includes and
requires a debt-free organization) resolves all of the problems of
exploitation by the wealthy.

OK, that's a bit pie-in-the-sky.  I mean, I definitely see the real
probability that the rich and powerful will find a way to destroy that
organization and anyone who uses such a model and that they have
constructed an entire economic and social system based on usury and
bribery in order to prevent such an organization from finding a foot-hold.

That's why I go back and forth between trying to help the system evolve
and advocating its wholesale destruction to make way for a new society of
freedom and democracy.

J.
-- 
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     Jeme A Brelin
    jeme at brelin.net
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