Re-booting Capitalism: The Action Agenda for Business
Capitalism is living in interesting times. Politicians, academics and activists around the world are debating the merits of the capitalist system, and how and if it could be improved…
We the Owners: Employees Expanding the American Dream Official Trailer
Integrating art, business and education, this documentary film captures inspiring stories of employees and founders from three companies, each structured with distinct forms of broad-based employee ownership, who share an insider’s view of shared wealth and responsibility, high involvement culture, and their approaches and challenges in creating opportunity and prosperity through ownership.
Reimagining Capitalism
This special edition of The Nation brings together a wide range of articles on new ways to shape capitalism, and to work on economic recovery.
Employee Ownership as Creative Capitalism
Employee ownership plans transform a company’s culture, because employees adopt the mentality of owners; they work harder and become more involved in process improvement and cost management, causing their company’s net income to increase at a faster rate.
Center for Economic and Social Justice
The Center for Economic and Social Justice is a non-profit, non-partisan education and research organization dedicated to promoting economic justice on a global scale by expanding capital ownership to a broader segment of society.
The Kelso Institute
Louis O. Kelso (1913-91) was a political economist in the classical tradition of Smith, Marx and Keynes. He was also a corporate and financial lawyer, author, lecturer and merchant banker who is chiefly remembered today as the inventor and pioneer of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), the prototype of the leveraged buy-out which Kelso invented to enable working people without savings to buy stock in their employer company and pay for it out of its future dividend yield.
Diamond Foods
CEO Michael Mendes has transformed a grower-owned cooperative into a publicly traded top marketer of snack foods. Diamond’s organization, culture, product development process, advertising and promotion strategy, and specifically its marketing department have been built ‘from the ground up’ to address fundamental changes in retail structure and consumer behavior. Can the Diamond model be successfully applied to other food categories?
A Comparative Analysis of Co-operative Sectors in Scotland, Finland, Sweden and Switzerland
This study compares co-operative sectors in Scotland with those of three similar sized countries: Switzerland, Sweden and Finland. The economic contribution of co-operatives in Scotland has historically been below that of these comparable European countries. The study asks why the comparator countries are so much more successful, what we can learn about how to do co-operative development, and which of the success factors are replicable in Scotland. It aims to help Co-operative Development Scotland to understand the determinants of success, make informed decisions on how to promote the co-operative sector, and advise policymakers about what works.
Reinventing the Firm
Presenting a wide range of quantitative data alongside three new case studies of employee-owned firms, this pamphlet offers a new vision of economic autonomy where democratic companies drive a happier and more sustainable economy.
Converting Failed Financial Institutions into Mutual Organisations
There are three reasons for promoting mutual building societies: they are less prone than banks to pursue risky speculative activity; a mixed system produces a more stable financial sector; and a stronger mutual sector enhances competition within the financial system.
NHS Mutual: Engaging Staff and Aligning Incentives to Achieve Higher Levels of Performance
The report, on which EOA advised, concludes that employee ownership of the kind pioneered by Central Surrey Health has a valuable role to play but needs support from policy makers.
When Workers Share in Profits: Effort and Responses to Shirking
This paper summarizes new evidence from the “Shared Capitalism” Project on the extent to which workers’ earnings depend on the performance of their firm or work group in the US and advanced European countries and on the impact of sharing arrangements on economic behavior.
America Works: Thoughts on an Exceptional U.S. Labor Market
The U.S. labor market is the most laissez faire of any developed nation, with a weak social safety net and little government regulation compared to Europe or Japan.
Employee Financial Participation in the New Member States
This report looks at the current situation in relation to employee financial participation (EFP) and its recent developments in the new Member States (NMS) of the EU: Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
The Political Economy of Employee Ownership in the United States: From Economic Democracy to Industrial Democracy?
This study examines the development of economic democracy in the United States since the 1700s with particular emphasis on the last 30 years. The particular focus is on employee ownership…
Wages, Employment, and Capital in Capitalist and Worker-Owned Firms
The authors investigate how worker-owned and capitalist enterprises differ with respect to wages, employment, and capital in Italy, the market economy with the greatest incidence of worker-owned and worker-managed firms.
Binary Economics: The Economic Theory that Gave Rise to ESOPs
ESOPs are part of a broader approach to expanded capital ownership, broader prosperity, and economic justice known as binary economics. Binary economics was first advanced by Louis Kelso, who is also widely known as the inventor of the ESOP.
Productivity in Cooperatives and Worker-owned Enterprises: Ownership and Participation Make a Difference!
The survival rate of worker cooperatives and employee-owned firms in market economics appears to equal or surpass that of conventional firms. But they typically return a different combination of economic benefits to their member-owners than do conventional firms…
Democratic Capitalism: The Way to a World of Peace and Plenty
Democratic Capitalism combines the free-market energies of competition and private property with the enormous productivity and innovation released in an environment of trust and cooperation. Ray Carey presents the theory and practice of democratic capitalism by coupling his experience with a synthesis of the thought of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill.
Labor Markets and Firm Benefit Policies in Japan and the United States
This paper presents finding from our most recent research on the transformation of participatory employment practices of Japanese firms in the 1990s, during which the Japanese economy slowed down considerably. The operation appears to be of particular public policy interest for many countries considering participatory employment practices as a way to improve their productivity performance and thus competitiveness.
Governing the Firm: Workers’ Control in Theory and Practice
Many explanations for the rarity of workers’ control have been offered, but there have been few attempts to assess these hypotheses in a systematic way. This book draws upon economic theory, statistical evidence, and case studies to frame an explanation.
Motivating Employee-Owners in ESOP Firms: Human Resource Policies and Company Performance
The growth of ESOPs over the past 25 years is part of a general growth in compensation arrangements linking worker pay to company performance, including profit sharing, gain-sharing, and broad-based stock options in addition to the various methods of employee ownership.
Worker Participation: Lessons from the Workers Co-Ops of the Pacific Northwest
The purpose of this book is to consider some consequences of worker participation in production and to provide an accessible economics perspective on two groups of worker co-ops in the Pacific Northwest: the plywood co-ops and the forestry worker co-ops.
Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Promoting Employee Ownership at the Subnational Level
There are at least six reasons why we should be concerned with encouraging employee ownership at thesubnational level: at the level of the state, the province, the region, the municipality, or other subnationalgovernmental units or at the level of the industrial branch, cutting across governmental geographic units.
Cooperative Firms in Theory and Practice
Cooperatives are not, as everyone at this conference knows, just a peripheral or incidental or anachronistic or culturally limited form of organization. Rather, they are big business of a distinctly modern type.