HN user
oh sorry to be unclear. u highlighted something i said. but to clear, i def use LLMs to help with bad writing and code. i am all for people using tools that help them. ill try to be cleaner about it
that's me saying "this crowd" like.. you guys... and you guys are pushing back... heh should have left the typos in
I agree, if you think you're being cheated you should thinkg about starting your own company. Startups are much better on this. I definitely disagree with the idea that workers don't take on the risks. Workers get fired, relocated, their compensation gets changed, etc etc.
I admit I'm trying to be a little provocative here. But to be clear, that's not what the tool is arguing. It doesn't say companies should do what you are saying. It takes a big abstract number and puts it on a per-person scale so you can actually feel the size of it. I don't know how much profit should go to buybacks an dividends and workers, but we need the numbers to have the discussion.
"$22 billion in profit" means nothing to most people. "$10,000 per employee" does. That's it. The tool is a framing device, not a policy proposal.
What you do with that number is up to you. Maybe you think the current split is fair. Maybe you think you should ask for a raise. Maybe you just find it interesting. All fine.
Good catch, thanks! That was a locale bug. If your browser is set to a European locale, the number formatting was using periods instead of commas. Just pushed a fix, should be live in a minute or two.
You're right that the per-employee share is the same regardless of salary. That's the point: it shows what the company made per head, and then what your salary would look like with that added on top. The salary input just personalizes it.
Yeah, I'm not sure either! I'm pretty new to HN and don't have much activity on my account beyond the worker-owned co-op directory I posted a couple weeks ago, so I'm guessing that's what triggered it. Totally my fault for not being more of an active community member first. I emailed the mods to ask. Just psyched about these projects and wanted to connect with people who might find them interesting.
I built the worker-owned co-op directory that was on here a couple weeks ago (https://workerowned.info). This is the other side of that coin: what do workers actually generate for owners at big public companies?
You type in your company and your salary. It pulls net income and headcount from SEC 10-K filings and shows what each employee's equal share of the profit would be, and what your salary would look like with it added on.
I know equal-split is a simplification, not a compensation model. It ignores capex, R&D, risk-adjusted returns, and a lot else. But "Walmart made $22 billion" is abstract. "$10,000 per employee" is not. That's the whole point.
You can also browse all ~940 companies ranked by profit per employee (https://yourfairshare.info/browse), or by industry (https://yourfairshare.info/industry) which breaks out buybacks and dividends per worker alongside it.
Static site, no accounts, no tracking. All from SEC filings.
The site is called "Your Fair Share," which is provocative, I know. But the point isn't to tell you what your fair share is. It's to give you a simple calculation that makes you start wondering what it should be. That's a conversation worth having, even if reasonable people will land in very different places.
Some caveats since this crowd will rightly push on them:
1. Net income is after taxes, interest, and a lot of accounting choices. It's not "profit the company hid from workers." It's what they reported to the SEC after everything else.
2. Equal split is a hypothetical that puts the number on a per-person scale. Nothing more.
3. Capital-intensive industries (airlines, utilities, manufacturing) look less dramatic because margins are thin relative to headcount. Most interesting for high-margin businesses.
4. I've verified the top ~200 companies against primary sources (10-K filings, press releases, EDGAR XBRL). The long tail has gaps. There's a data feedback link on every result.
heh i made something that you might the call the opposite of that: https://yourfairshare.info/
Enter your US employer's name or stock ticker symbol (e.g. Amazon, Apple, JP Morgan Chase) and your compensation to see how your pay compares to company-wide financials. Basically, you can see how much more they could have paid you. Also shows stock buybacks and dividends, so u can see how much more they could have paid you instead of the stock market.
great idea, i changed the browsing to be categories of products, not of stores. the stores still there but this is way better. thanks!
yeah still lots of cleaning up. it's a little like wack-a-mole and i'm hoping users will find stuff and submit it.
Appreciate the feedback and the info. I included REI in the directory (labeled as customer co-op not a worker co-op) but not in the search results but now I realize that's lame. I'm just gonna take them off entirely.
totally. we can badger people to buy from better companies but that seems so tough. better to just make it easier for people to buy from better companies :)
good idea. i can do this :)
I wanted to buy from worker-owned cooperatives but there was no single place to see what they actually sell. So I scraped the product catalogs from ~60 worker-owned co-op stores and made them searchable.
22,000+ products: coffee, chocolate, clothing, books, home goods, etc. You search, find something, and click through to buy directly from the co-op's store. Nothing goes through me.
There's also a section for finding worker-owned coffee shops, restaurants, and bars by city (110+ listings, mostly US).
Static Next.js site, JSON-backed search. No accounts, no tracking, no ads.
Happy to answer questions about the data or how I identified which businesses are actually worker-owned. Please reach out if you want to add your co-op!