Non-paywall link: https://archive.ph/fx3ug
Such a damningly poor and out-of-touch judgment from Starmer.
3 in 10 Britons own shares directly (i.e. not counting the many more who own them via their pension funds), the vast majority of them being very much working people who bring home most of their income through their salaries. The ISA system directly incentivises people to invest up to £20k a year tax free.
Most generally, at a time when the government claims to interested in boosting investment in the UK, it is a mad decision for the prime minister to come out against share ownership at a time when he should be encouraging Britons to invest more in shares and less in cash savings products.
For real, this doesn’t even make sense.
Even outside my own personal investment accounts, I’ve worked at companies that offered shares as a benefit. It’s fairly common, too. Does that somehow mean everyone at that company is now not a worker?
Owning voting shares at the company you work at is different from owning voting shares in other companies
Yes, in many ways it’s so much dumber. If I’m taking home a salary from Company A, my livelihood is dependent on Company A, and then as part of my pay package I get given $1000 of shares in Company A, then I would cash them in as soon as l could and buy a diversified portfolio of shares in Companies B, C, D, E, etc instead.
Keeping all your eggs in one basket is a bad idea. But keeping all your eggs in a basket whose performance is directly correlated with your risk of getting made redundant seems an exceptionally bad idea!
Also, you realise that everyone who has a pension is an indirect owner of shares in hundreds of different companies? Part of the problem of Starmer using this sort of idiotic language is that it willfully plays on and exacerbates voters’ lack of awareness of the world they live in and where their pension savings are going…
My personal view is the following
You’re working class if
- you only own small minority percentage of voting shares of an employing corporation or non-voting preferred shares
- are an employee or you are individually or jointly self-employed as in a worker cooperative.You’re employing class if you hold large percentages of the voting shares in at least one company
There are two dual risk reduction strategies one of diversification and one of commitment
How do you define ‘large percentage’? Musk owns 22% of Tesla shares whereas small business owners may own 100% of their business. Do you think Musk is more working class then the latter?
Shares are just an asset just like cash. Some people choose to hold their savings in cash. Some people choose to hold them in bonds, some in shares, some in property, and so on.
When I was younger and poorer than I am today, I owned a larger value of shares than I do now because I was still saving up for a deposit on my house. Then I took out my mortgage, bought the house and the value of my ISA dropped to almost nothing as I sold most of the shares to fund my deposit. Do you think I was a capitalist when I was poorer and didn’t own a house, but working class now that I have a mortgage but fewer shares?
The form in which you hold your assets is irrelevant. It’s how much assets you have that counts.
Enough of a percentage where you could get the ball rolling on a worker coop conversion, but choose not to.
Musk has 79% voting control over SpaceX.
Employment-based corporation’s executives potentially aren’t working class.
From a worker coop perspective, managers are working class. However, from a union perspective, management is not working class.
The form matters since some forms are unjust and involve appropriating the positive and negative fruits of other people’s labor
