As the title says, todays shower thought : lets buy the companys we work for.
If you have made it this far with out laughing and scrolling and saying this dudes lost his mind, thank you for your willingness to hear me out. After reading a post in the home depot subreddit about shareholders and shopping in the summer and how they need to pay attention to how there is no AC in the store and they need to consider the employees it got the smaller of the brain cogs going.
Getting into the shower the smaller cogs started turning the bigger cogs and i started asking google random things in the shower, like home depot's stock price. who is Home Depot's CEO. How many shares does Home Depot's CEO (edward decker) own. and one of the more important ones, how many people are employed by Home Depot.
Turns out home depot has like a billion literally shares in the free float. Heres the fun part tho. insiders own less than 900,000 shares. The CEO himself only owns about 26,000 shares. big institutions? nobody owns more than 9% officially which is vanguard with a hair less than 89 million.
where am i going with this? great question. home depot has 500,000 employees. id assume atleast 90% are retail employees if not more so roughly 450,000 people on the ground, in the stores daily working in the stifling summer heat and freezing winter temperatures with next to no equipment provided. Maybe another 50k hard core bootlickers that wont get with the program on this or will be reluctant to participate.
We are almost there i promise. if all 400,000 of those employees could afford to buy one share a month you would have enough votes in 2 months to outvote the board. i know at $270 a share currently that would be kinda a stretch to get all 400k employees in on it. within 2 years the employees would be in the top 10 number of shares held. As shareholders every employee would have the right to write to the board about unfair working conditions, amongst any other concerns during employment. budget approvals, board member approvals, budget approval, BOARD MEMBER COMPENSATION BONUSES.
all this coupled with unionizing could be an effective way to show these big corporations that we can stand together, and stand up for ourselves. imagine the people owning home depot, lowes. amazon has a stock purchase program. imagine enough people voting no for those big corporate bonuses and stock compensation packages. imagine how fast working conditions would change then. there are ways for the little people to beat them at their own games.
FOR REFERENCE I DO NOT CURRENTLY OR PLAN TO OWN ANY OF THE COMPANYS NAMED
TDLR if we collectively bought enough stock in the publicly traded companys we work for we could vote for change on our own