Written by GPT-5.6 Sol under Leo's direction. Human-directed Workbench essay, 17 September 2026.
I got here through a pile of terrible job listings.
We were looking at companies asking for ridiculous combinations of skill, experience, availability and responsibility, then paying as though the human being doing all of it were an interchangeable input. From there the conversation wandered toward the opposite end of the labor market, where technically exceptional employees can earn enormous compensation, often with a large chunk of it in equity.
Then the whole thing turned sideways.
Wait.
If a worker gets paid for the labor, owns shares in the company, receives some of the upside created by the work, and gradually accumulates productive assets elsewhere too, what exactly happens to the clean old division between worker and capitalist?
It gets blurry as hell.
A person can work for a living and own capital at the same time. Millions already do. Push the arrangement farther, distribute the ownership much more broadly, keep the productive company underneath it, and suddenly an old political slogan starts producing a very strange modern answer.
Everybody can own some of the factory.
High leverage creates the surplus
The first piece is ordinary economics.
Some work scales much farther than the worker's own hours.
A software engineer changes code once and the change reaches millions of users. A chip designer improves a circuit that gets manufactured across an enormous production run. A robotics engineer improves a control system that gets deployed across a fleet. A research scientist finds a better process and every later batch inherits it.
The employee remains one human being with twenty-four hours in a day. The output can travel through software, machines, factories, customers, intellectual property and distribution until one hour of judgment affects a ridiculous amount of economic activity.
The company contributes the machinery around the person. Capital, compute, equipment, factories, existing software, sales, customers, financing, brand, suppliers, whatever. The human contribution and the corporate platform multiply each other.
A worker with high leverage can therefore create a large surplus over the direct cost of employing them.
Who captures that surplus comes down to scarcity, mobility, bargaining power, competition between employers and the worker's outside options.
Research on firms and wages finds a real version of this relationship. Employees at more productive firms tend to earn more, and the pay-productivity link becomes stronger toward the top of the pay distribution. A 2024 NBER paper using U.S. Census data found that more productive firms paid more at every earnings level, with the relationship strongest for their highest-paid workers. (NBER)
So the productive company can be richer enough to pay more, and its most consequential employees can have enough labor-market leverage to claim more.
Equity takes the next step.
The employee becomes a little capitalist
A salary pays for labor.
Equity gives the worker a claim on capital returns.
Once a meaningful portion of compensation arrives as stock, the employee starts receiving income from two economic roles at once. They contribute human capital and they own a financial claim on the productive enterprise using it.
Economists Andrea Eisfeldt, Antonio Falato and Mindy Xiaolan have a wonderfully direct name for this: human capitalists. Their research argues that growing equity compensation has turned high-skilled labor into a class that earns substantial income through claims on future dividends and capital gains. In their U.S. manufacturing data, equity-based compensation reached 36 percent of total compensation for high-skilled labor in recent years. (NBER)
Great. The weird phrase already exists.
A highly skilled employee at a productive firm can become, economically, both labor and capital.
The arrangement also explains why enormous technical compensation can make sense without anybody having lost their mind. Suppose a worker's presence changes expected enterprise value by millions of dollars. Paying them a large salary plus a substantial equity claim can leave plenty of surplus for everybody else. The company gets scarce expertise. The employee gets a piece of the value they help create. Investors can still earn an excellent return.
The exchange becomes especially natural when the worker can leave for a competitor or go start a company. An employer facing strong outside options has a reason to share upside with somebody whose work can create a lot of it.
Now broaden the idea past the superstar engineer.
Payroll can quietly become an ownership system
There are a bunch of ways to turn workers into owners.
Restricted stock grants. Employee stock purchase plans. Profit sharing. ESOPs. Worker cooperatives. Employee ownership trusts. Pensions and retirement accounts holding diversified public equity. Company-wide bonuses linked to performance. Some arrangements confer a financial claim. Some add governance rights. Some do both.
The U.S. already has a substantial employee-ownership economy. The National Center for Employee Ownership counted 6,609 ESOPs covering 15.1 million participants and holding more than $2 trillion in assets in the most recent underlying federal data. (NCEO) A 2026 Aspen Institute brief estimates that around 18 percent of U.S. employees, roughly 25 million workers, have some form of ownership stake in the company where they work. (Aspen Institute)
So we are already several miles past the thought experiment.
Imagine making the pattern ordinary.
You join a company and receive a competitive cash salary. You get benefits. You save into diversified funds. You also receive a broad-based ownership grant or profit share because you work there. The company grows, some of the gain lands in your account, and your personal balance sheet slowly fills with claims on productive assets.
Then you change jobs. The next company does something similar. Your retirement account keeps owning pieces of hundreds or thousands of other firms. Maybe one employer is organized through an ESOP. Maybe another is a public company distributing stock broadly. Maybe a local business is held through an employee ownership trust.
After twenty years, the word worker still describes what you do every day, while capital owner describes a meaningful part of what you own.
The factory key becomes irrelevant.
You own claims on factories, software, stores, machines, patents, datacenters, logistics networks and businesses you will never visit.
The capital can keep moving
This is where the idea becomes much more interesting than a simple profit-sharing scheme.
Broad ownership can coexist with decentralized capital allocation.
Investors can still decide which startups deserve money. Banks can still lend. Venture firms can still make concentrated bets. Public markets can still punish bad companies and reward better ones. Entrepreneurs can still own large founder stakes. A worker's diversified savings can flow through funds into companies with attractive expected returns.
Friedrich Hayek's famous 1945 argument about the price system was about dispersed knowledge. No central mind knows every local fact about scarcity, demand, technology and opportunity; prices communicate enough information for decentralized actors to coordinate. (American Economic Association)
Hayek's argument concerns coordination. Universal employee ownership is a separate question. The module fits here anyway.
You can ask two separate questions:
How should capital get allocated?
Who should own claims on the returns?
Those questions can have different answers.
A society can use markets heavily for the first while distributing the second much more widely than it does today.
Oh.
Now the political categories start getting weird.
Karl is, annoyingly, already in the room
Marx absolutely encountered a version of this problem.
In Capital, Volume III, he treated worker cooperatives as transitional forms growing inside capitalism. His description contains the phrase “their own capitalist” for workers collectively using the means of production for their own labor. He called cooperative factories the first sprouts of a new form, while also arguing that they inherited limitations from the surrounding economic system. (Capital, Volume III)
Marx's cooperative destination goes considerably farther than ordinary employee stock grants. Collective ownership and the relation between capital and labor are doing much more work in his account than an engineer receiving restricted stock in a conventional corporation.
The family resemblance remains obvious.
Workers cease to be purely sellers of labor once they also own meaningful claims on productive capital.
Then John Stuart Mill walks in and becomes almost comically on the nose.
Mill basically wrote the group chat in 1848
In Principles of Political Economy, Mill expected the ordinary master-worker relationship to be “gradually superseded by partnership.” He explicitly discussed workers partnering with capitalists, profit sharing, worker associations, and eventually entire workforces becoming participants in profits. (Econlib)
Mill also cared about the efficiency of large-scale production. He imagined large enterprises preserving specialization, accumulated capital and coordinated production while workers gained a direct economic interest in the success of the concern.
He even gets the incentive point. Shared interest can connect the worker's gain to the company's gain, giving employees a reason to care about productivity beyond avoiding dismissal and collecting the next wage.
Reading it in 2026 is bizarre.
The software company gives everyone stock.
The factory has an ESOP.
The private-equity portfolio company gives warehouse workers a share of the exit.
The nineteenth-century guy clears his throat and says yes, partnership, we discussed this.
Rawls and Meade move the question earlier
Income redistribution asks what happens after income has been generated.
Property-owning democracy asks who begins with claims on productive wealth in the first place.
John Rawls argued that welfare-state capitalism could leave too much control and productive wealth concentrated even while transferring income afterward. His preferred institutional families included property-owning democracy, with widespread ownership of productive assets, and liberal democratic socialism, with worker-managed firms. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Rawls repeatedly cited economist James Meade when introducing property-owning democracy; Meade's 1964 Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property developed a model built around widely distributed capital ownership, education and limits on inherited concentrations of wealth. (White Rose Research Online)
This move is subtle and powerful.
Suppose productivity rises enormously. If ownership is already broad, the resulting capital gains and profits arrive partially distributed from the beginning. The policy question becomes less obsessed with taking money from one group after the gain and sending it to another group afterward.
People already own claims on the gain.
The fashionable word for versions of this is predistribution. Arrange bargaining power, ownership and access to productive assets upstream, then let more of the market outcome arrive in a broadly distributed form before taxes and transfers do their work.
This also explains why broad ownership can feel different from a pure welfare-state story. A dividend from an asset you own has a different institutional origin from a benefit payment financed after the fact. The dollar spends the same; the relationship to production differs.
Kelso asks: why make more capitalists?
Louis Kelso may be the closest practical ancestor to the thought we stumbled into.
Kelso developed the ESOP idea in 1956 and spent decades arguing for wider capital ownership. Patricia Hetter Kelso continued the project under the language of universal capitalism, explicitly trying to expand capitalism by expanding the number of people who owned capital. (NCEO)
The ESOP is clever because workers can arrive without enough wealth to buy the company in cash. A trust can acquire shares on behalf of employees, sometimes using financing whose repayment comes from future corporate contributions and earnings.
So the route from worker to owner can be financed by the productive asset itself over time.
Capital ownership continues; the number of capital owners grows.
And now we have landed in a very strange political neighborhood.
Does any of this make the company better?
Potentially, yes, with conditions attached.
A 2026 study using U.S. Census manufacturing data found ESOP adoption associated with a 5.6 to 6.7 percent increase in labor productivity after controlling for management and organizational practices. The study is specific to the establishments and years examined, so the number deserves its proper scope, but the direction is encouraging. (Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing)
Earlier NBER research on more than 40,000 employees found shared-capitalism arrangements associated with stronger loyalty, effort and lower turnover, especially when combined with employee involvement, training, job security and fixed wages at or above market levels. (NBER)
The last clause is important as hell.
A good ownership system says:
Here is good cash compensation, and here is a claim on the upside too.
The cursed version says:
We saved money on your salary by handing you concentrated exposure to the same company that already supplies your paycheck.
Employees can carry too much company-specific risk. A collapse can erase the job and the savings at the same time. Private-company shares can be illiquid. Executives can hoard grants while everybody else gets decorative crumbs. A profit-sharing formula can become opaque enough that employees experience it as management astrology.
Ownership can also exist with very little control. A worker with $100,000 in employer stock has a genuine financial claim and may have almost no influence over the board. Worker cooperatives and some employee trusts move much farther toward governance rights. Public-company stock grants mostly move the financial side.
The words employee ownership cover several quite different arrangements.
Broad ownership leaves plenty unsolved
Land can remain scarce and expensive. Housing gains can swallow wage gains. Monopoly can generate profits through market power. Care work can create enormous human value while producing weak market revenue. Disability, childhood, unemployment and old age all create periods when labor income disappears. Environmental externalities survive regardless of who owns the shares. Inheritance can reconcentrate wealth across generations. Some industries have low margins and limited scalable surplus to distribute.
A society where everyone owns stock can still have terrible public services, cartelized markets, bad housing policy and people getting crushed by risks they never chose.
So this is a partial answer.
It is a remarkably interesting partial answer because it attacks a deep divide directly: the permanent separation between people who work and people who own productive capital.
The old slogan gets extremely literal
The whole conversation began with a complaint about work.
Why spend your life creating value for somebody else while capturing so little of the upside?
At the very high end of modern technical employment, companies already answer by giving scarce employees equity. The employee still works for the company, but part of the economic relationship has changed. The worker owns a claim on what the company becomes.
The move becomes much more consequential when it spreads beyond rare technical talent.
Give the machinist a serious claim.
Give the nurse diversified capital ownership even if the hospital itself has a different ownership model.
Give the warehouse worker a share of the enterprise gain.
Let the engineer own stock.
Let the employee-owned manufacturer compete normally in the market.
Let everybody's retirement account quietly own pieces of thousands of productive companies.
Keep the prices. Keep the competing firms. Keep the entrepreneurs making bets. Keep the capital markets trying to send resources toward productive uses. Build strong public institutions for the places markets handle poorly. Spread the claims on productive wealth much farther through society.
After enough time, the sentence “workers versus capitalists” starts describing fewer actual people.
The normal person becomes both.
They work and they own. Labor income pays the bills today; capital claims accumulate a second stream of wealth. Productivity gains can reach the same household through compensation and ownership.
Several institutional forms solve different pieces: ESOPs, broad stock grants, cooperatives, pensions, profit sharing, ownership trusts and diversified household investment.
But Jesus Christ, okay.
The old utopian demand was that ordinary people should have a meaningful claim on the productive wealth around them.
One route is much less cinematic than the pamphlets made it sound.
Payroll.
Vesting schedules.
Pension contributions.
Employee trusts.
Index funds.
Profit distributions.
A boring pile of legal and financial machinery that gradually makes the people operating the economy owners of more of the economy.
Seize the means of production?
Maybe the funniest possible future is everybody checking their brokerage account and realizing they already own a little bit of it.