Though only five years old, employee-owned St. Luke’s Communications has become one of the most talked about advertising agencies in the United Kingdom, increasing its profits eightfold.
Prior literature suggests that the impact of employee ownership on employee behavior may depend on the financial rewards associated with ownership. As the financial value of ownership accounts increases, employee attitudes become more positive, which, in turn, improves organizational performance. In this paper, we explore this financial perspective of employee ownership by examining the relationship between stock price and operating performance of ESOP firms.
Capitalism may have taken over the bulk of the modern world, writes highly regarded government and industry consultant Jeff Gates, but in its current incarnation it has created such dramatic inequities of wealth and power that more individuals than ever now feel detached from its inherent benefits and distrustful of its potential goals. In his revolutionary new book, The Ownership Solution: Toward a Shared Capitalism for the 21st Century, Gates outlines a wide-ranging plan to reverse this increasingly universal condition–and the result is a specific blueprint that, he argues, could easily be adopted around the globe.
This article examines the employee buyout process and industrial relations under employee ownership based on the case study of the Karabuk steel mill.
In mid-1993, representatives of Rhone-Poulenc, a leading nationalized French firm, worked with the French government to plan the imminent privatization of the firm.
Employee ownership in U.S. companies has grown substantially in the past 20 years. This paper reviews and provides some meta-analyses on the accumulated evidence concerning the prevalence, causes, and effects of employee ownership, covering 25 studies of employee attitudes and behaviors, and 27 studies of productivity and profitability (with both cross-sectional and pre/post comparisons).
This study compares the corporate performance in 1990/91 of two groups of public companies: those in which employees owned more than 5% of the company’s stock, and all others.
A perennial issue is the study of organizational behavior is the impact on productivity of participation by workers in a firm’s decisionmaking. The question has returned to the foreground is the recent debate over policies to increase U.S. productivity growth.
Using a sample of production workers from union, nonunion, producer cooperative, and employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) wood products mills in the Northwest, we test the general proposition that work alienation, defined as low job autonomy, low use of capacities, and lack of participation in decision-making in the workplace, is associated with heavy drinking and negative consequences from drinking.
In global competition, where investment increasingly determines a company’s capacity to upgrade and innovate, the U.S. system does not measure up.
Employees, always considered important stakeholders in American corporations, are today emerging as a key shareholder group.
Based on a sample of three employee-owned and seven conventional companies, this study empirically tests the theoretical claim that employee ownership and management reduces inequality at the firm level. Inequality is broadly defined as the unequal distribution of income, wealth, power, prestige, and privileges, as well as the existence of social boundaries between classes.
This study examines data on French producer cooperatives for the years 1970-79 to test the widely accepted theoretical prediction that employee-owned firms either will fail as commercial undertakings or degenerate into capitalist firms as the proportion of hired workers who are not members of the cooperative firm increases.
There are a number of ways to have workers’ remuneration linked more readily with firms’ commercial performance. One is to link wages to profits by using cash-based profit sharing (where workers are made cash payments which vary with employer’s profitability). A second is to have workers paid partly in their firms’ own shares. A third, and more extreme alternative, is producer co-operatives where workers participate in profits, ownership and decision-making. In this article we examine both the theoretical and empirical evidence in support of such schemes.
The aim of this article is to investigate the recent emergence of worker cooperatives or “people’s factories” in South Africa. The development of South African worker co-ops is situated in terms of key aspects of the restructuring of the economy and society during the 1980s. New production forms such as producer cooperatives are linked to … Read More
The Global Equity Organization (GEO) provides a forum for an open exchange between members, regardless of position or affiliation, of the latest information as to the strategic, financial, cultural, legal, tax, communication and administrative issues involving the use of equity-based employee compensation in the global community.
The concept of workplace democracy has long been vitally important to theorists and activists of the democratic Left. The author here tests some of the claims made for this system, asking: Do such alternative forms of work organization really decrease workers’ sense of alienation? Does participation in a democratic, cooperatively run business encourage political participation? Does such a workplace foster class consciousness as a strategy for superseding capitalism?
Why do the rich get richer and the poor stay poor? How can we privatize publicly owned capital facilities so that employees and users own the stock? How can unions win ‘more’ for their members without rendering American employees uncompetitive? What steps can the government take to make every American economically independent? ‘Democracy and Economic Power’ aims to answer these questions and many more like them.
Douglas Kruse’s carefully executed study of two companies owned by the workers through Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), examines the hopes and anxieties that have been articulated by many of the participants in one of America’s fastest growing types of work experiments.
Presents findings of a survey of corporations in the United States which show that employee ownership may be associated with better attitudes and higher productivity and profits.
This essay, devoted to explaining the financed-capitalist plan, is an attempt to advance our practical thinking about capitalism. It does not add anything except evidence of feasibility to the theory of capitalism as outlined in our earlier book.
The Capitalist Manifesto is intended to replace the Communist Manifesto as a call to action, first of all in our own country, and then, with our country’s leadership, everywhere else in the world. It is our industrial power and capital wealth, together with our institutions of political liberty and justice, that make America the place where the capitalist revolution must first take place to establish economic liberty and justice for all.
Shows that current elitist theories are based on an inadequate understanding of the early writings of democratic theory and that much sociological evidence has been ignored.
This book aims at nothing less than the creation of a society free from poverty, war, and toil, and the authors argue that these goals can be achieved through such policies as the extension of property- holding and the reduction of taxes and government spending.