Winner of the NYC Big Book Award in Business-Entrepreneurship & Small Business and silver winner of the Nonfiction Book Awards, this acclaimed handbook shows you how to transition leadership, implement shared ownership, and preserve your organization’s core values—setting the stage for your business to thrive for generations to come. This visionary but practical guide offers … Read More
An engaging and creative story filled with tremendous challenges, and of never giving up even in your twilight years. It’s 1975, and Misty Menard unexpectedly inherits her father’s business in Lake Placid, New York. It never occurred to her that she could wind up as the CEO of a good old-fashioned manufacturing company. After years … Read More
Co-operative enterprises, which are democratically owned and governed by their workers, customers, or suppliers, have long captured the imagination of activists and social scientists alike. In centering economic democracy and a collectivist-democratic logic, and in embodying a “third way” alternative to profit-maximizing corporations and state-owned enterprises, co-operatives offer the promise of a more sustainable and … Read More
This short video from the Union Co-ops Council of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives asks: Can you imagine a workplace where power is 100% in the hands of the workers? A workplace without bosses, where managers are elected by the workers and accountable to the workers, and where the excess profit is distributed as the … Read More
In this video, Katrina Kazda (Vice President of Home Care Innovations at The ICA Group) presents on innovations in the home care cooperative sector. She introduces trends related to the care crisis and describes new secondary cooperative initiatives in the sector. Those include Elevate Cooperative and Vivid Life.
General discussion questions about employee ownership are presented as well as individual questions on New Belgium Brewing, Namaste Solar and DPR Construction. The Discussion Guide can be used in classroom or other group settings. View “We the Owners” here: https://smlr.rutgers.edu/we-the-owners.
We the Owners: Employees Expanding the American Dream, is a 2012 documentary film about three American businesses that have embraced various forms of employee ownership. This case study offers a closer look at DPR Construction, one of the three featured companies, and was published in January 2025 by the Rutgers Institute for the Study of … Read More
We the Owners: Employees Expanding the American Dream, is a 2012 documentary film about three American businesses that have embraced various forms of employee ownership. This case study offers a closer look at Namaste Solar, one of the three featured companies, and was published in January 2025 by the Rutgers Institute for the Study of … Read More
We the Owners: Employees Expanding the American Dream, is a 2012 documentary film about three American businesses that have embraced various forms of employee ownership. This case study offers a closer look at New Belgium Brewing, one of the three companies featured in the film, published to coincide with the release of the film’s updated … Read More
Authored by a practicing CEO, this paper explores—and broadly calls for—a strategic approach to expand servanthood and servant leadership (SL) practice through focused scholarship by examining distinctive qualities and phenomena observed in the field. In order to move SL practice forward, scholars are urged to not only address conventional social science needs, but also practical implementation needs … Read More
Question : How Satisfied Are Employees with Their ESOP Plans and What Factors Influence Their Satisfaction? Summary : This research is based on the National ESOP Survey administered in 2019-2021 for ESOP workers, supported by the Employee Ownership Foundation. The survey is a non representative sample of 9 ESOP firms that offers insights on certain … Read More
Questions : What do US workers expect working at an employee-owned (EO) company is like? Are US workers attracted to EO companies? If so, what explains their attraction to EO companies? Summary : In surveys, workers express more positive than negative expectations about working for EO companies and find positive statements, such as “Workers are … Read More
Questions: What characteristics of businesses and business owners impact their responsiveness to employee ownership as a business model? Do different outreach messages influence their responsiveness differently, and if yes, how? Generally, what conditions make business owners more receptive to information about employee ownership? Summary : Analyzing quantitative and qualitative data collected as part of a … Read More
Questions : How do community-level factors contribute to the prevalence of employee share ownership companies? How do community-level factors affect the survival of employee share ownership firms? Summary : This research explores the prevalence and survival of broad-based employee share ownership (ESO) firms and characteristics of the communities where they exist. We examine ESO firms … Read More
Questions : Are employees more satisfied at employee-owned firms? What factors enhance their satisfaction? Summary : Examining workers’ reviews of their employers on Glassdoor, we compare employee satisfaction between firms in which workers own company shares through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and conventional firms in which they do not. Focusing on workers in … Read More
In this research brief, we provide back-of-the-envelope calculations showing that, as of 2022, about 140,000 firms employing around 33 million workers would have been suitable candidates for ESOP employee buyouts, and nearly 1.1 million firms employing over 25 million workers suitable candidates for cooperative employee buyouts. Collectively, these firms accounted for roughly $25 trillion in … Read More
This report presents six easy-to-read charts about differences in the average dollar value of employee ownership by the annual earnings, gender, and race of employees. As averages, this gives a snapshot from random samples from employee surveys from the US General Social Survey across the entire US population. It answers the question: How broadly has … Read More
Employee share ownership has a long and important tradition in the US. As of 2022, approximately 18% of employees or about 25 million workers across our nation have some form of ownership stake in the company where they work and 8% of employees have employee stock options. Employees participating in ownership in the US do … Read More
This study attempts to answer questions about the success of companies with employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) in getting more wealth and income into the hands of employees. By comparing retirement assets and wages in Washington State ESOP companies with those in matched similar non-ESOP firms, the analysis shows that ESOP companies provide significantly higher … Read More
Democratic member control is cooperatives’ superpower and Achilles heel. Research shows that strong governance is essential for cooperatives to thrive, yet cooperatives have lacked the data that is needed to benchmark their governance practices. UWCC launched the Cooperative Governance Research Initiative (CGRI) in response to this unmet need. Its purpose is to generate robust, longitudinal … Read More
This report is based on a study conducted during 2023 and 2024 as part of the POWER (Promote Ownership by Workers for Economic Recovery) Act. The study mandate was to consider how an Association of Cooperative Labor Contractors (ACLC), a federated worker co-op system, might “promote equitable economic development, reduce inequality, and increase access to … Read More
Unions have a complicated history with employee ownership. Prior to the institutionalization of collective bargaining, several nascent U.S. union movements in the late 19th century put worker ownership at the center of their thinking and practice. Since formalized collective bargaining, unions have often resisted participating in employee ownership plans due to concerns about worker financial … Read More
Who’s managing your broad-based equity compensation? In most firms, it’s not the person who started the program. Usually, the founder is no longer at the company; the board of directors is not involved; and the human resources department does not understand that it’s really a talent program, not a spending program. As a result, most … Read More
The importance of employee-owned (EO) organizations around the world is increasing. Countries, communities and organizations are realizing that passing profits to workers increases wealth at all levels of society. The benefits, widely known, include personal prosperity, organizational profitability and stability, and a host of economic benefits for communities in which EO companies operate. Selling a … Read More
This study focuses on Ohio companies with an Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) – the most common form of employee ownership in the U.S. Literature on the positive impacts of employee ownership at the individual and company level has grown in recent decades finding that individual employee-owners have longer tenure, more household wealth, higher wages, … Read More