A Firm of One’s Own
Why a low-cost program to educate employees about company ownership could produce huge financial benefits for the country.
Effective Onboarding and Mentorship: Cooperative Home Care Associates
This two-page Business Action Guide describes the nation’s largest worker owned cooperative, Cooperative Home Care Associates, and its approach to effective onboarding and mentorship.
Firm Foundations for Democracy? Worker Ownership and Control in Advanced Capitalism
This chapter maps existing patterns of broad-based worker ownership and control in contemporary advanced capitalism and considers future possibilities for expanding democracy within firms. Section one discusses worker ownership and control arrangements in relation to different theories of the firm and shows how these arrangements map onto different national systems. Section two compares Germany, which … Read More
Impact Investing and Employee Ownership
The benefits of employee ownership as a strategy for achieving broad-based prosperity are well documented—but the growing field of impact investing has yet to fully recognize the key opportunity employee ownership presents for tackling economic inequality. In this Fifty by Fifty research brief, Mary Ann Beyster explores the existing landscape of employee ownership opportunities for … Read More
Employee Ownership and Economic Well-Being: Household Wealth, Job Stability, and Employment Quality Among Employee-Owners Age 28 to 34
The National Center for Employee Ownership has released results from the first phase of an ongoing research project that compares the economic well-being of employee-owners early in their careers with that of other young workers.
Stronger Together? The USW-Mondragon Union Co-op Model
In 2009, United Steelworkers (USW) and Mondragon signed an agreement to promote union co-ops: firms that combine democratic worker ownership and union membership. Eleven U.S. initiatives now seek to implement the USW-Mondragon union co-op model, prompting a debate about whether unions and worker cooperatives are stronger together. This article draws on a case study of … Read More
Ceding Control: An Experimental Analysis of Participative Management
We use an experiment to evaluate the effects of participatory management on firm performance. Participants are randomly assigned roles as managers or workers in firms that generate output via real effort. To identify the causal effect of participation on effort, workers are exogenously assigned to one of the two treatments: one in which the manager … Read More
Governance and Decision Making at Carris Reels
Synopsis Carris Reels, a reel-manufacturing company headquartered in Vermont, had long-standing goals of being employee owned and governed. They also had a strong organizational (ownership) culture. The Corporate Steering Committee (CSC), a committee composed of representatives from management and non-management employees, and the board of directors had a decision to make about adding two new … Read More
How Did Employee Ownership Firms Weather the Last Two Recessions?: Employee Ownership, Employment Stability, and Firm Survival in the United States: 1999-2011
Employee ownership is a situation in which employees have an ownership stake in the firm where they work, through holdings of firm stock. It is a channel through which employees share in the profits of the firm and can vote on important firm decisions and otherwise have increased participation in workplace decisions.
Employee Ownership: Building a Better American Economy
This easy-to-read guide to employee ownership introduces what employee ownership means and how it works, interspersing information with company profiles. Also see the companion website at www.esopinfo.org.
Down Home Capital Report
This 28-page report details the benefits of employee ownership in North Carolina as a way to preserve jobs and enhance community impacts.
Special Section Democracy 2.0
This special section of The Sociological Quarterly, edited by Joyce Rothschild includes the following articles: The Logic of a Co-Operative Economy and Democracy 2.0: Recovering the Possibilities for Autonomy, Creativity, Solidarity and Common Purpose by Joyce Rothschild When Freedom is Not an Endless Meeting: A New Look at Efficiency in Consensus-Based Decision-Making by Darcy K. Leach “Plan … Read More
CH2M Hill: A Private Firm in a Public World
CH2M Hill was an employee-owned and controlled professional engineering services firm providing engineering, construction, consulting, design and design-build, procurement, engineering-procurement-construction (EPC), operations and maintenance, program management and technical services to customers all over the world. A large portion of the company’s project business was funded by governments. With 5.9 billion in sales in 2015 and … Read More
California Center for Employee Ownership Update: CCEO Comes Online
Last May, we introduced you to a new effort aimed at spreading the word about employee ownership at local and regional levels throughout the country. Building on pioneering efforts in Ohio and Vermont, the idea of proliferating state centers throughout the U. S. was initiated by the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO)…
The ESOP-Owned S Corporation: Bringing Ownership to Life with Synthetic Equity (2016)
The “ESOP-Owned S corporation” structure offers truly remarkable advantages that can transform a business into a tax-exempt, for-profit entity. An S corporation whose stock is held in an ESOP, of course, pays no federal income tax (and little or no state income tax) at the corporate level…
Worker-Owned and Unionized Worker-Owned Cooperatives: Two Tools to Address Income Inequality
This article evaluates worker-owned and unionized worker-owned cooperatives as alternatives to the conventional corporate structures for businesses in the United States. With their focus on democratic governance and shared ownership, worker-owned cooperatives offer an antidote to the extreme inequality of income and deterioration of working conditions that workers are experiencing. These are inequities for which … Read More
J. Robert Beyster Papers: A Legacy of Employee-Owners’ Journey for Innovation
In December, my family finalized a very personal, and we hope impactful, gift titled, J.R. Beyster Papers, to UCSD Library’s Special Collections. After about one year of pre-processing, the collection includes more than 200 boxes of documents covering more than 50 years of hundreds of advanced scientific innovations, small- to billion-dollar business experiments, and discontinued to transformational government program development.
Client Profile: Gems N’ Loans
In 1993, Mack Hembree, a successful real estate businessman, was invited to invest in opening a business that he had some commonly held reservations about. The business was a pawn shop… By fostering and aligning employee satisfaction, collaboration, and commitment at every level, Mack has developed an ownership culture that differentiates Gems N’ Loans from its peers and has been instrumental in the company’s success.
The 100 Percent ESOP-Owned S Corporation
When structured and maintained properly, the 100 percent ESOP-owned S Corporation can be a powerful force of employee ownership…
This Is the Largest Employee-Owned Company in the U.S.
This Fortune Magazine video describes employee ownership at Publix Super Markets, the largest employee-owned company operating in the United States.
Employee Ownership, ESOPs, Wealth, & Wages
This paper by Jared Bernstein shows that employee ownership appears to have a small equalizing impact on wealth and wage distributions.
The Lending Opportunity Generation: FAQs and Case Studies For Investing In Businesses Converting To Worker Ownership
The opportunity to convert businesses to worker cooperatives is increasingly becoming recognized as a strategy for strengthening our local economies. The need—and opportunity—for lenders and other capital providers to participate in these sales transactions is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. But only a handful of lenders in the U.S. specialize in lending … Read More
Compensation, Funding, and Ownership (ENTR 599)
This course is presented from the perspective of the entrepreneur and employee owner. The seven week course will cover the critical steps of equity and employee ownership; founding your own company or joining a start–up, successfully navigating funding rounds, deploying your equity to incentivize employees and encourage long–term growth, or negotiating through an exit.
Diversity Regimes in Worker Cooperatives: Workplace Inequality Under Conditions of Worker Control
Two major shifts in contemporary work organizations—“employee participation” and “diversity management”—have typically been studied in isolation from one another. Building on theoretical work by Acker (2006a,b), we ask how the interaction of these two constructs has affected the pursuit of workplace democracy at two worker cooperatives in Northern California. Using qualitative methods, we find that … Read More
Does an ESOP Make Sense? Craft Beer’s Growth and Consolidation
The consolidation and sale of some beloved brands to Big Beer has raised eyebrows and piqued new questions about the industry’s identity. The good news is the industry is still expanding with more than 4,000 U.S. craft breweries, over 100 in San Diego alone, and there is an opportunity for employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) to play a larger role in the industry’s future.