> but the myth of Huawei’s employee ownership seems to persist outside of China.
Never heard of it, never thought about it, not sure why proving/disproving this is in the author's interest.
The main curiosity regarding what the structure of Huawei actually is would be interesting, edge of my seat for that one. But who cares about the employees, who would ever believe that it would be anything other than corporate speak? I would basically assume that because a shareholder who happens to be employed there at some point in time, that the company would make that assertion just to make people feel good. The profit sharing scheme the abstract suggests is good enough to align incentives and make the non-capital class feel like they "own" something. It is so improbable that a labor class is also a capital class that I would be more surprised to see a paper showing how it was true, and it would be from Harvard Business School and not randomly uploaded to SSRN.
> Never heard of it, never thought about it, not sure why proving/disproving this is in the author's interest.
It is in Huawei's interest to not be labelled as a state-owned or state-controlled actor. The perception of being controlled by the Chinese state is precisely why many western countries are leaning away from purchasing Huawei networking equipment for their up and coming 5G networks, and also (at least in the case of the US) advising against, and then banning, consumer electronics made by Huawei. Huawei has been trying to convince the public that it is in fact employee owned and therefore not controlled by the Chinese state by touting its "employee virtual ownership program", and the purpose of this paper appears to be to dispel that notion.
Proving significant state ownership should be the goal then. Doesn't have to be majority. Maybe 15-30%?
Chinese state owns some of most Chinese companies. Some passive through the central bank open market operations, some more direct and controlling.
So it is almost like trying to prove a negative, with Chinese companies, but if we really want to dive deeper on this particular issuance, the opaque trade union governance is a nice tip of the iceberg.
I just think it is such a weird assertion to start with.
>It is so improbable that a labor class is also a capital class
I do not see how Huawei isn’t any more a cooperative than how Iran or the US has popular representation.
Just because there is several layers of indirection does not prevent representation, it also requires the alignment of the represented’s desired outcomes with the representation’s actual accomplishments.
Never heard of it, never thought about it, not sure why proving/disproving this is in the author's interest.
The main curiosity regarding what the structure of Huawei actually is would be interesting, edge of my seat for that one. But who cares about the employees, who would ever believe that it would be anything other than corporate speak? I would basically assume that because a shareholder who happens to be employed there at some point in time, that the company would make that assertion just to make people feel good. The profit sharing scheme the abstract suggests is good enough to align incentives and make the non-capital class feel like they "own" something. It is so improbable that a labor class is also a capital class that I would be more surprised to see a paper showing how it was true, and it would be from Harvard Business School and not randomly uploaded to SSRN.