The owners - ie shareholders - can force elections whenever they want. The problem is really one of profit motive; why would they want to replace a CEO who's making them money? The natural trend of free markets is towards consolidation, eventually ending up with a small number of firms which can extract what economists call "monopoly rent".
The shareholders shouldn't have a say. Only the employees should have a say. The shareholders aren't the ones who are forced to spend their entire lives there.
Otherwise it's like allowing rich foreign investors to vote for the US president just because they own a lot of shares in US companies.
shrug that's capitalism - it's the price paid for having the investors fund a business in the first place, giving up control. There are employee-run businesses, co-operatives, but they can be outspent by the VC-funded businesses.
Mandating transfer of power from the owners to the workers is, very literally, Communism. A description without implying value judgements of the relative systems.
Part of what you wrote elicited a deep sigh on my behalf. Transferring power from owners to workers is not literally communism, at all. Transfers of power happen all the time when new legislation is passed to create worker protection laws or to weaken them. By your definition, OSHA would be labeled as communism since it transferred a certain amount power within a business to the workers by given them an increased amount of rights while working for an employer. And, to be sure, I've heard management also label OSHA as communist, but it's not.
Look, as you mentioned, there are many different kinds of workplace organizational structures. Corporations with a board are one, employee run companies are another, and cooperatives are yet another. However, the government does have a hand in and does set rules for what structures are allowed. That was part of the contention between VW and the state of Tennessee about the works council. It didn't appear to be allowed under law, so they tried to back walk one through a union, which ultimately failed. In my opinion, that back walking should have never been necessary and the structure should have been allowed.
That's a long way to say that we as a society do have a role in deciding what organizational structures are and are not allowed for businesses. We already do it, but the tone tends to be that a traditional corporate structure is the pinnacle and anything else that transfers power to workers is communist. That, again, is not true and we should be having a more honest and candid conversation about these structures and the kind of society that we want.
not exactly. A company could be funded by bonds instead of shares. Bonds offer the financial obligation without the control. It's a question of social contract and property law if the modern legal fiction of a "corporation" should exist.
> Mandating transfer of power from the owners to the workers is, very literally, Communism. A description without implying value judgements of the relative systems.
