Becoming Employee Owned is an initiative of the Democracy at Work Institute, a movement-based think-and-do tank supporting worker cooperatives to grow to a scale that creates meaningful change in the economy. The website includes resources for small businesses and company profiles.
The “A Visual Guide to Employee Ownership” website is an initiative of the National Center for Employee Ownership. It includes infographics, videos, a map of ESOPs in the United States, and other accessible but impactful visual guides.
This study by Jared Bernstein looks at why there are not more ESOPs and considers how to address potential barriers to entry. Drawing on a survey of 250 non-ESOP business owners and leaders, as well as interviews with business owners of employee-owned companies, it argues that education and awareness about the ESOP structure is key.
The National Center for Employee Ownership YouTube Channel includes webinars and videos on a variety of topics related to employee ownership. NCEO is a nonprofit organization that has been supporting the employee ownership community since 1981. Its mission is to help employee ownership thrive.
The Employee Ownership Expansion Network YouTube Channel includes informative short videos about employee ownership. EOX is a national nonprofit focused on significantly expanding employee ownership across the United States by establishing and supporting a network of independent nonprofit State Centers for Employee Ownership.
This booklet helps business owners evaluate employee ownership. Thousands of business owners have decided that employee ownership is the best way to preserve the job security of their workforces and protect the character of their companies while providing them and their families fair value. In “Who Should Own Your Business After You?,” several of them … Read More
Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecommunication technology giant that was put into the U.S. government’s Entity List from May 2019, has become a contested issue in the emerging U.S.-China technology rivalry. In particular, the U.S. government and Western academics have viewed Huawei’s unique employee ownership as an opaque structure subject to the influence of the Chinese … Read More
Despite substantial scholarly attention to workforce demographic diversity, existing research is limited in understanding whether or in what contexts firm-level racial diversity relates to performance and workforce outcomes of the firm. Drawing on social interdependence theory along with insights from social exchange and psychological ownership theories, we propose that the use of broad-based stock options … Read More
This significant new study shows that majority employee-owned companies with Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) are outperforming non-employee owned companies during the COVID-19 pandemic in the areas of job retention, pay, benefits, and workplace health safety. The study reveals that ESOPs have been more proactive about ensuring the safety of employees during the pandemic and … Read More
This report describes the role cooperatives can play in building healthy, equitable, and sustainable communities, and explains how to advance that work through federal, state, and local policy. The policy objectives presented are intended not to simply grow the field of cooperatives, but to enhance the work of cooperatives that address economic and racial disparities … Read More
In this workshop, “Research and Teaching about Equity Compensation, Employee Share Ownership and Profit Sharing in Organizations,” expert professors describe a variety of different ways they teach about employee ownership and equity compensation in their university courses–and the resources, videos, and case studies that they use. This workshop features Daphne Berry, Joseph Blasi, and Ed … Read More
This interview with Todd Leverette explores how employee ownership could address the racial wealth gap and benefit Black and brown communities. “Employee ownership gives Black and brown workers the ability to both build wealth and improve the quality of their jobs through actually having a voice in not just their day-to-day activities but in the … Read More
This is a list of datasets, all accessible to researchers, that enable the study of employee ownership.
In this video workshop, “The Sociology of Worker Ownership: New Data Sets and Research Approaches,” leading researchers introduce datasets that enable the study of worker ownership. The workshop opens with comments from Joyce Rothschild and Joseph Blasi, and is moderated by Adria Scharf. Janet Boguslaw, Laura Hanson Schlachter, Nancy Weifek, and Joseph Blasi present. Sarah … Read More
Latinx people have long been an influential and integral part of the U.S. cooperative movement. Several Latinx-led organizations, such as Prospera in Oakland and Green Worker Cooperatives in the Bronx, have strongly influenced activity and models of cooperatives in their own localities and nationally. Furthermore, individual cooperative members who identify as Latinx bring their own … Read More
Cooperatives have been central to the development of New Orleans. Anne Gessler asserts that local cooperatives have reshaped its built environment by changing where people interact and with whom, helping them collapse social hierarchies and envision new political systems. Gessler tracks many neighborhood cooperatives, spanning from the 1890s to the present, whose alliances with union, … Read More
These Guidelines for Equitable Employee Ownership Transitions are a collaborative work of practitioners and thought leaders in the fields of investment management, employee ownership, and socially responsible business who believe deeply in the promise of shared enterprise ownership to build a more just and inclusive economy.
The case for employee ownership is undisputed. As philanthropists and government leaders grapple with how to address both long-entrenched and newly-emerging forms of economic insecurity, there is no better time to look to effective but lesser-known solutions, such as employee ownership. Even before the economic crisis brought on by COVID-19, income and wealth inequality and downward economic mobility for frontline workers were truths so obvious that one could visually observe them in most communities. Now, more than ever, we need solutions that create economic resiliency for workers and local economies.
Up & Go is a digital platform where people can book cleaning services. It is also a cooperative owned by worker-owned cleaning cooperatives. This video includes voices of immigrant worker-owners, and reflections about the importance of organizing workers in the digital gig “platform economy.”
City and state policymakers across ideological divides can help raise standards for workers and boost sustainable economic growth by supporting employee ownership and broad-based profit-sharing.
The Emilia-Romagna region in northern Italy has one of the highest concentrations of cooperative businesses in the developed world. The capital, Bologna is an industrial powerhouse, where prosperity is widely shared, and cooperatives of teachers and social workers play a key role in the provision of government services.
Dr. Janet Boguslaw describes her new research on building the wealth of low income populations which focuses in particular on women and people of color.
This article focuses on worker-owned apps, specifically Up & Go, and how they are the new best thing for labor economies. It walks through what worker-owned apps are, what obstacles there might be when making one, and how to build it with the workers at the forefront of designing.
In Workers ‘ Self-Management in Argentina, Marcelo Vieta homes in on the emergence and consolidation of Argentina’s empresas recuperadas por sus trabajadores (ERTs or worker-recuperated enterprises), a workers ‘ occupy movement that surged at the turn-of-the-millennium in the thick of the country ‘s neoliberal crisis. Since then, around 400 companies have been taken over and … Read More
CFL’s app, Up & Go, is the first booking app in the United States owned by domestic workers, empowering them to increase wages, build assets, and compete in the digital gig economy. This video introduces the app as well as its owners/employees.