So I've been a leftist-left leaning my whole life. (the joke to me is that I was told I'd be conservative by my age, but I went from a moderate leftist in the Clintonite mold in the late 90s to a few degrees off of Communist in the last six or seven years)
And I was always the guy who would ask the awkward questions during work meetings where they would announce how happy they were that we hit X goal or stuff like that, and encourage others to make sure they held the bosses to making sure we got more of our fair share.
In the last month, I moved back to my hometown to help/take over the family business. Without going into a huge amount of detail, its ~10 people, with a small manufacturing element and shipping, with a couple people for office support. My father is well past retirement age, and the guy who wanted to buy him out was offering incredibly shitty offers for it.
And I struggled before I did this, because I never wanted to be the boss, because I didn't want to be in the position of exploiting anybody. But the guy who was putting my father against the wall is almost a caricature of a capitalist scumbag (he used the excuse for a little spat he and I have that “he's an alpha” unironically), and he's the kind of boss that just sneers at the idea of physical labor, which I've been doing in various forms my entire life. (Apparently I don't have the 'executive mindset', and still think like a worker. I don't think he meant it as a compliment, but I took it as such)
So I debated this, and I finally decided that it was better that I do this, who actually believes in the right things, than to inflict another unfeeling asshole boss on the world.
And at this point, after going through things, I'm going to have to do a lot of work personally to get the company healthy. Relatively speaking, the wages aren't bad for the rural area I'm in (and my own pay is less than I was making as an engineer), so I'm not having too many guilty moments.
But I want to kind of poll the group here for things I can make sure to keep in mind. I can't solve everything, but I want to be willing to put my money and my time where my mouth has been for years.
Example: I've already decided that the maximum ratio of pay for anybody in this company is 4:1. (We are well under that now). So no matter how well I do, I'm not taking more pay than four times the lowest paid worker we have.
I'm trying to be very flexible with work from home (and I've gotten my father a little on me about approving an extension of a half/half office policy for one person who is a new mom until the end of summer. In fairness to him, it was mostly that I didn't even discuss it with him before approving that).
So aside from incredibly radical options (I can't convert it to a cooperative, I'm just running it, not owning it. At least not for years), I want you guys to give me some ideas to keep me honest and decent.
I'm honestly a little scared of waking up in ten or twenty years as somebody that I would despise now.