Ownership and governance are the structural guarantees. This is what an employee actually experiences day to day: how they get paid, and what happens to them if automation changes or eliminates their role.
How People Are Paid
Employees are paid competitive market rate for their role. On top of that, a profit-based share is added — but it isn’t an open-ended percentage of profit. It’s capped, targeted at keeping total compensation within a defined band above market rate for comparable work (for illustration, something like 10% above competitive pay, though the exact figure is a policy decision for employee-owners to set, not fixed here). Profit beyond what’s needed to reach that cap doesn’t flow into ever-larger individual paychecks — it goes to two other purposes instead: reinvestment in growth, including hiring, and support for community and charitable purposes.
Why a Cap Instead of a Straight Percentage-of-Profit Split?
Automation changes the relationship between profit and payroll over time. As more of the actual output comes from machines rather than people, profit tends to rise relative to a wage base that’s shrinking as fewer employees are needed to produce the same result. A fixed percentage-of-profit split would mean that ratio quietly inflates individual payouts over time, turning what’s meant to be fair profit-sharing into something closer to an unearned windfall — and it would require the split to be manually re-tuned again and again as automation increases. Anchoring the target directly to “genuinely competitive and comfortable, not extravagant” sidesteps that problem. The cap holds steady in terms that actually matter to a person’s life, regardless of how automated the company becomes.
This is a deliberate departure from the startup-equity-lottery model, too: the goal is for people to join because they want fair pay and believe in the mission, not because they’re chasing an outsized payout that depends on a future sale or IPO — something this company, by design, will never have.
When Automation Displaces a Role
The hardest test of any company built around automation is what happens to the person whose job the automation replaces. This company’s founding purpose commits it to a genuine, best-effort attempt to retain that employee in a new capacity — not simply reassign them on paper, but actually find or create a role that uses what they can do.
That decision isn’t made by a top-down HR process, and it isn’t outsourced to a government retraining program. It’s decided by a sortition-selected panel that interviews the displaced employee and the people who worked closest with them — people with direct knowledge of what that person is actually capable of, not just what’s on file. Severance exists as a defined fallback, but only once that retention effort has been made in good faith, documented, and genuinely exhausted — not as a first resort that’s cheaper than trying.
Retirement
Retirement is handled deliberately differently from how many traditional employers handle it. Employees are strongly encouraged (and, depending on final policy, may be required to contribute some portion of compensation) to a retirement account — but that account is self-directed, and invested outside the company entirely. There is no path for retirement savings to be invested back into the EOT itself, for the same reason employees can’t hold equity in it: there are no shares to invest in.
If employees don’t want to manage this themselves, the company would offer a small set of vetted default options — chosen to be low-cost, transparent, and genuinely in the employee’s interest, not selected because of a kickback or referral arrangement with a plan provider. But the underlying commitment is firm either way: the company itself never takes on a future retirement liability. It doesn’t promise a pension, a defined future payout, or any other open-ended obligation to a former employee years down the line. Whatever’s contributed during someone’s working years is theirs, invested externally, and their own to manage — not a promise the company carries on its books indefinitely.
This isn’t a cost-cutting position. It’s the same structural principle that runs through the rest of this project: a permanent, purpose-bound trust can’t safely carry open-ended future obligations, because those obligations eventually become leverage — a reason the company might need outside capital, or need to shrink its workforce, or need to compromise its purpose just to make good on a promise made decades earlier. Keeping retirement entirely externalized and self-contained protects both the employee (their savings aren’t tied to this one company’s fate) and the trust (it never accumulates a liability that could someday force it to break its own purpose to pay it off).