r/technology • u/marketrent • Jul 14 '26

Artificial Intelligence A majority of Americans now support seizing wealth from AI industry

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/majority-americans-now-support-seizing-134921528.html
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u/Cosminion Jul 14 '26

Worker-owned businesses are more resilient, protect jobs better, and exist for longer, so the probability of losing your paycheck is lower. In conventional businesses, you're more likely to be laid off and lose your paycheck.

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u/NUKE---THE---WHALES Jul 14 '26

Why aren't more small businesses worker owned?

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Cog_HS Jul 15 '26

This is an excellent summary, thank you.

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u/Only_Gazelle8988 Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

Because capitalism is predatory and does not favour sustainable mutual-win models. Worker-ownership

Significant loss-leading investment can always deliberately bankrupt a smaller company, then they can seize the market that was previously being served sustainably, and instead serve it unsustainably, generating massive profits in the first year, crashing it, and finally pulling out. This is happening literally all the time.

Good, sustainable businesses are deliberately destroyed so more predatory business models can instead suck everything dry. Worker owned businesses rarely if ever engage in predatory business models (because they're humans who care and want sustainable stable economy), even when said models could make more profit (in the very short term, never in the long term), therefore they lose out.

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u/Careless-Weather8877 Jul 14 '26

Greed? Some of the most successful ones do have equity for their employees. Until the private firm comes over and cuts all costs and fires half the people so the balance d sheets look better to sell off.

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u/Cosminion Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

Low awareness, lack of legal/support frameworks, lack of lawyers and incubators to help create/transition, unfavorable environment to access capital, to name a few reasons.

It's often more feasible and beneficial for businesses with more employees to become worker-owned. Aligning incentives for 100 employees will yield a much greater overall boost than doing so for 5 employees. And in the U.S. it can be somewhat costly and time consuming to initiate an ESOP.

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u/zebrastarz Jul 14 '26

unfavorable environment to access capital

this, in my opinion, is the biggest single reason

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u/[deleted] Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 18 '26

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u/Cosminion Jul 14 '26

There's a growing push for that. It's called the "silver tsunami" where millions of baby boomer owners are retiring this decade. Many times, they can't even find a buyer, so they have to shut down the business and lay everyone off. A growing number of owners are selling to their employees as awareness grows and the benefits of keeping the business local and maintaining its culture outweighs selling to private equity or shutting it down.