351
Sony and Bandai Namco abolish employee bonuses in favor of raising average salaries
(automaton-media.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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What if instead of zero profits, all employees are paid in part via some amount of ownership stake in any company?
My issue with the "we take all the risk, tho!" argument is that I'm never even allowed to take the risk, too. For example, my current company is small, compensation has grown disappointing after we were acquired by VC, and there is no pathway for me to begin purchasing any kind of ownership stake. We're just the labor, despite all of us having been here longer than the new owner, in many cases having been here to build the thing the new owners bought.
So it must be pretty damn attractive, actually, for those at the top to continually offer that to one another, while withholding it from anyone below executive leadership. I'm pretty tired of hearing it as a justification when those "taking all the risk" end up doing so goddamn well, and the rest of us are locked out of it in the first place. It's just abusive language we've all internalized.
Edit to add: ya know, it was probably easier to swallow and originated in the prior eras, where a steady paycheck was a safe and stable way to go through life. These days being an underpaid wage slave is far riskier than being any kind of investor. I don't think "all the risk" is even meaningful or remotely accurate anymore.
I don't understand why you can't set up your own business if you want to take the risk yourself.
Like going to the bank and asking for a loan to start a new business would be the textbook example of taking on risk.
Its referred to as barriers to entry. These are anything that prevents new startups from occuring. These can be natural or contrived.
As somebody who finally started their own business after 25 years of effort and a lot of luck I know these well.
The largest barrier is usually initial capital. Banks don't give out loans to startups without assets. So if you have overall negative personal assets like large student loans, renting, car loans, etc you are fucked in getting a bank to fund your startup. I can't get a line of credit for at least a year, probably 2. At least not one at a reasonable interest rate that doesn't eatup all of my profit. I ended up taking a draw against expected revenue from a vendor who believes in me.
Health insurance (U.S), literally the reason I didn't start my business 10 years ago & 5 years ago when I had 2 opportunities.
Business insurance: it took me 5 months to find somebody that would cover me.
Laws and regulations that create barriers to entry. These can be minor annoyance like fees and paperwork or major regulatory hurdles depending on the industry and country.
Infrastructure to conduct the business. I need highly specialized warehousing for 4 months of the year. I ended up renting from a company that is in a similar business as me that runs on a different cycle (they are empty when I need space). Building my own would require a loan... See above.
Available resources: Do competitors limit your available resources by market manipulation and anti-competative behavior. This is a huge one in industries dominated by oligarchies.
There are many more of these that are around.
Most of these can be alleviated by a fair sharing of revenue. 10 years ago I increased the companies net profit from $500K to $10million. They gave me 5% pay raise and $10k bonus out of a "Theoretical" $200K max.
Thank you, very useful to have someone who has done it in the thread. Would you agree that being born into one of the wealthy families in America would dramatically reduce the difficulty and risk of everything you've described above? All that stuff sounds so much easier if you're rich enough to pay others to do a bunch of it, and rich enough to still be fine (even still rich, usually!) if it doesn't work out.