A reminder that he's behind Build Canada and Build Toronto, and that Build Toronto's Eric Lombardi is running for the Ontario Librral Party leadership as we speak.

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[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I would actually suggest you look at Shopify’s governance, Shopify employees/insiders primarily outvoted Wall Street to give Tobi “founder shares” that have outsized vote power.

I think as a whole, Shopify has paid much higher than other Canadian companies and employees have placed a lot of trust in Tobi specifically over the years.

Fun fact: early Shopify did have direct profit sharing, x% of profit was rewarded back to employees based on their votes on an internal board (called Unicorn), but eventually it was demonetized.

[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

Yeah, I was considering working for them at one point. I only noticed the political activism of their exec layer (not just Tobi) during the LPC leadership election. Around the time when they launched Build Canada to advocate for the usual set of pro-corporate policies wrapped in an "Abundance" foil. Which sucks.

That's the thing though - the purpose of proper worker democracy is that when someone is voted worthy of a power - they get it. Once they're not - it's taken away.

I think early tech attempts to do pseudodemocracy were mostly a reflection of the tight labour market. The real power rarely extended beyond the founders and sometimes the very first employees. Now that there's a (perceived?) oversupply of labour, things have flipped rather fast. Not saying some people didn't believe in the pseudodemocracies they were creating, rather their beliefs were created by the labour market. Also in part by having been in the same classrooms with their future employees. It's a bit harder to get convinced they deserve less when you know they're just as capable.

Speaking of pay, half a lifetime ago I used to think that this or that tech firm "overpays" given the labour market rates at the time. With my current understanding of the system I believe we're generating outsized value and we're very often woefully underpaid. For example a back-of-the-napkin shows that Google pays shareholders more than US $500K per emoyee over what it pays. For Shopify, that's US $200-250K. Under a one-worker-one-vote, most of that would go in workers' pockets. And that's before voting for cutting the exec layer compensation much closer to Earth and redistributing that too.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

I definitely agree things are over saturated right now.

I don’t know how, but I’ve met a lot people from Apple Google Meta and Netflix (less so Netflix actually), earning huge salaries to do nothing at all and have very few actual skills. I have no idea how things got like that, but it’s on hiring managers at these companies.

I agree employees should be paid proportional to the value they bring in. It’s one reason I don’t like strict salary bands and hate tenure based seniority. Briefly tech was the only field doing that.

Once everyone formalized their bands it got a lot harder to get raises, and the bands are completely disconnected from value. Plus, companies are making bands based on private survey data from companies only shared with other companies (smells like system price fixing/collusion in the labour market to me).

But once you’ve added salary bands and all that the workers might as well form a union. There’s no employee agency to lose anymore anyways.

I wouldn’t be opposed to more worker democracy, but I’m also a bit traumatized from shitty unions. So I don’t know what the answer is. I’m never going to work for a union that does tenure based seniority for example — I just can’t stand the “I got here first” mentality.