Are Shareholders Evil?
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Having missed Monday through illness, I feel a real cynical tinge about me today, following on from my other post today about illness and disease, I thought I would touch on a subject which is really close to my heart and has affected me in the past, this fantastic subject is shareholders!
What pains me a lot today about big business is the role of shareholders, these invisible people, whose only affiliation with a company is primarily to make money.
In my opinion any true company should consist of two shareholders, or perhaps stakeholders. Those two stakeholders would be the companies staff, and its customers. Each dependant upon the other, and linked in such a way that one cannot survive without the other.
In a true business with only two stakeholders there are real benefits for both parties. If a company is successful and generates significant profit, then it should be both the staff and customers who benefit from that profit. Staff should be rewarded for their hard work, through better pay, increased bonuses, or just a bonus in some cases. Alternatively, to give something back to the customers, the company could reduce the costs of its products, alieviating some of the financial burden.
This system would become a true co-operative, it is a real relationship, built on trust and responsibility with benefits available to both stakeholders. Staff can take pride in their work and truly feel a part of the company, sharing in its success.
So when did shareholders become so evil?
Shareholders break the tight relationship in both of those parties. Shareholders are only interested in making money from a company, yet what work, or skills do they put into the company to help improve its performance? By bringing shareholders into the equation, they effectively drive up the costs for customers/consumers, whilst applying direct pressure to keep costs down - effectively trying to increase profit margins. This results in less wages and smaller bonuses for staff. The bigger the profits in one year, the bigger the pressure to increase profits the following year! And of course if profits are not increased, then the share price is effected.
What is sad about the influence of shareholders, is that they are given far greater consideration than both the staff at a company and the companies customers, in fact they have a far bigger say on how the company is run than the staff who gave their all, but cannot afford to become shareholders. It seems in recent months that the shareholders of Australia’s major banks have been given far too much consideration, take the following article http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24168153-36418,00.html - I struggled to find anything relating to St Georges Staff or Customers. How would they be affected by any deals, would staff be laid off? Will customers get a worse deal? All in the name of greed, all driven for the benefit of Shareholders.
It seems sad that in todays modern world, we still live in a society determined by class or money. Benefits only go to those with money, not the people with the skills. And it is only those people with money who have influence, not the people who can do the work.
Shareholding is Evil and I believe the pressure for increased profits has led Google to create KNOL. By all accounts KNOL is a direct competitor to wikipedia, which although has its faults is considered one heck of a valuable resource. So what benefit is there to create a competitor? Only to leverage marketshare, ultimately resulting in bigger profits for Googles Shareholders.
I won’t even mention public resources being handed over to private firms. How on earth should a valuable resource such as water be managed by a company, whose main aim is to please share holders? Governments should be managing such resources on behalf of the people who voted them into power. Any profits generated from such resources could then be ploughed back into community projects, decreasing taxes or building better environmentally friendly energy systems. There are a lot of problems in the world, and shareholders are one of those problems, created to increase individual finances, with little or no concern for the greater good.
Roll on tomorrow, perhaps I will be a better mood 
