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
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
A central finding of scholarship on employee ownership (EO) is that EO has the strongest impacts on employee outcomes when implemented with other management practices that are typically associated with high-performance work systems (HPWS). However, our explanations for why these complementary practices matter remain underdeveloped. In this paper, we examine whether the extent to which … Read More
The U.S. government captures information in federal surveys, enabling the measurement and study of employee share ownership nationally. The Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing carefully tracks all of these federal data sets.
This is a working database of purpose trusts in the United States published in partnership with Common Trust, Broughton Consulting, and Liminal Advisors. It is maintained by the DCII Research Cluster on Employee Ownership and Workplace Democracy (www.eowd.org), with initial funding from the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers … Read More
This short brief provides updated statistics and analysis regarding workers’ participation in employee ownership plans, and the wealth and job quality benefits those workers realize from their participation. The brief was presented as part of the 2023 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum cosponsored by Aspen Institute and the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and … Read More
This book is a collaborative effort of academics, researchers, and professionals from US, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, France, Spain, and Colombia. Its pages contribute to the construction of an economic democracy while promoting a movement that stimulates growth, strengthens businesses, contributes to improving wages and savings whilst dignifying workers and building social progress. Employee Ownership in … Read More
This research presentation was hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in partnership with the Ford Foundation. The event explored how some companies are seeking to increase low- and moderate-income workers’ wealth through investments in ownership and employee benefits. Focus was on how efforts to improve the wealth of low- and moderate-income workers … Read More
This presentation explores two growing employee-owned companies in Africa, Sokowatch and mPharma, through dialogue with the companies’ CEOs. The presentation was delivered at the 2021 Beyster Symposium.
Even before the pandemic, many workers struggled to build wealth. Divisions between men and women, and between white households and households of color, are particularly striking. The pandemic has exacerbated and heightened awareness of these inequities, and there is a mounting sense of urgency to find practical solutions. Increasing participation in business ownership can help … Read More
This is a survey course that explores the variety of ways that businesses can compensate employees with shares of equity, profits, or gains and the human resource management, employment relations, organizational and individual motivational issues that such practices raise. The class will use the Harvard Business School case study method where each class will be … 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
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
At the center of the ongoing debate about the causes and cures of inequality in America today is the vast difference in wealth between owners and workers. As many have noted, that gap was not nearly as large in the middle of the twentieth century as it has become in the first two decades of the 21st century, where owners and other executives make many multiples of what workers make – largely through grants of stock in lieu of salary.
Research linking broad‐based employee stock ownership (BESO) with firm performance continues to receive considerable attention both in and outside the field of management. Despite the evidence being generally positive regarding the BESO–firm performance relationship, there has been a relative dearth of research providing insights into the circumstances surrounding the effectiveness of BESO. With this research … Read More
This 2019 presentation shows the great degree of support among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents for employee ownership. Nearly three-fourths of respondents in a national survey said they would rather work for an employee-owned company than for shareholders or the government. That view transcended ideological and partisan divides, with 74 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of … Read More
A major theoretical objection against employee ownership is that workers become inadequately diversified and exposed to excessive financial risk. Recent theory concludes that 10-15% of a worker’s wealth portfolio can be prudently invested in employer stock provided the rest of the portfolio is properly diversified. This paper analyzes employee share ownership in U.S. family financial … Read More
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to review the historical background for broad-based ownership in the USA, the development of forms of employee ownership and profit sharing in the USA, the research literature on employee ownership and profit sharing and related employee participation, the development of policy and options for new policies. Design/methodology/approach It … Read More
In recent decades, workers’ paychecks have remained stagnant, despite increases in productivity. At the same time, returns to wealth have increased. Strategies that transform workers into owners, such as employee share ownership strategies, have the potential to give working people a stake in our growing economy and include them in the nation’s prosperity. With employee … Read More
This handbook investigates ‘member-owned’ organizations, whether consumer co-operatives, agricultural and producer co-operatives, worker co-operatives, mutual building societies, friendly societies, credit unions, solidarity organizations, mutual insurance companies, or employee-owned companies. Such organizations can be owned by the consumers, producers, or employees—whether through single-stakeholder or multi-stakeholder ownership. ‘Employee-owned’ business means businesses where a significant proportion of the … Read More
When Workers Become Owners Professors Joseph Blasi, Richard Freeman, and Douglas Kruse explain how sharing the ownership or profits of a company with workers can improve productivity, pay, and work life quality – all while reducing economic inequality. Bonus – Jump on the Bandwagon Professors Blasi, Freeman, and Kruse stay post-interview to discuss why trade unions, business schools, and … Read More
This article analyses the linkages among group incentive methods of compensation (broad‐based employee ownership, profit sharing and stock options), labour practices, worker assessments of workplace culture, turnover and firm performance in firms that applied to the ‘100 Best Companies to Work For in America’ competition from 2005 to 2007. Although employers with good labour practices … Read More
The idea of workers owning the businesses where they work is not new. In America’s early years, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison believed that the best economic plan for the Republic was for citizens to have some ownership stake in the land, which was the main form of productive capital. This book traces the development … Read More
Even the rich are admitting that inequality is bad for business…