Building Community at Terra Nova Consulting
This case describes the challenges faced by the president of an engineering and environmental services consulting firm (Terra Nova Consulting) as it seeks to address deep internal cultural divisions…
Trust in the Digital Age
Trust in all organizations is a key to cultural cohesiveness and teamwork…
Doing Well and Doing Good: Pioneer Employers Discover Profits and Deliver Opportunity for Frontline Workers
A new study of business practices reveals powerful ways to create strategic and financial gains. Lower-wage workers, when supported by effective policies, boost productivity, quality, innovation, and revenues from new markets…
The Age of Autonomy
Why is Southwest so uniquely able to succeed where others can’t? The thing that makes Southwest employees a powerful force for success is that they are autonomous workers working toward a common goal…
Somewhere Between Complacency and Fear
Cecil Ursprung, the former CEO of Reflexite Corporation, once described his ideal organizational culture as being a permanent ‘state of mild dissatisfaction.’ You may not agree with the word ‘dissatisfaction,’ but I expect you would agree that innovation flourishes when employee owners are constantly seeking ways to improve the company and that happens when employees are not satisfied with the status quo. Creative energy flows when people refuse to walk away from situations that are ‘good enough.”
Sustainable Jobs, Sustainable Communities: The Union Co-op Model
The United Steelworkers, Mondragon International USA, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center created this detailed model for developing sustainable jobs through a combination of worker ownership and unionization. This model, or template, for unionized cooperatives seeks to implement principles and values of the Mondragon model in combination with collective bargaining. The model is intended to … Read More
Worker Ownership for the 99% Press Conference
The United Steelworkers, Mondragon, and the Ohio Employee Ownership Center Announce a New Union Cooperative Model to Reinsert Worker Equity Back into the U.S. Economy. View the published model within CLEO.
Client Profile: Dini Partners, Inc.
Dini Partners, Inc. became an S-Corporation as of Jan. 1, 2012. ‘It was clearly a way to define an ownership transition. The ESOP provided a path to an orderly transition of ownership. Also, as some of our senior members of the staff transition into retirement, we needed a vehicle to incentivize the younger, talented professionals to have a long-term stake in the firm.’
The 2012 Election Cycle: An Embarrassing Circus, Perhaps, but a Great Opportunity for Employee Ownership, for Sure
It is time to make the case that employee ownership is a solution to a lot of what is wrong with our country, and we need to continue to promote the concept until we have 30,000 or 40,000 employee-owned companies rather than the static 10,000 we have had for the last decade or more. If we can do that, we will have put a large part of the country on a much stronger footing, and moved toward solving some fundamental economic and social problems…
Creating a High-Performing Workplace
Beyster Institute Senior Consultant Martin Staubus is teaching a course entitled ‘Management 269: Creating a High-Performing Workplace.’ In this interview, Professor Staubus describes the course’s five themes.
Employee Ownership, Democratic Control, and Working-Class Empowerment
Organizational scholars and workplace equality advocates have largely dismissed the ability of democratic employee ownership to deliver power and autonomy to working-class employees. This chapter addresses this gap by investigating how two 100% employee-owned and democratically governed worker-owned cooperatives (businesses where employees are both the owners and the directors of their workplaces) succeeded and failed … Read More
How to Level the Compensation Playing Field: Employee Ownership
Outrage over pay differentials between company workers and directors is making political waves in Britain. One solution? Employee ownership.
Starting Over in Lexington: Taking Ownership
The folks at our Lexington, Ky. plant are well on their way to becoming owners of their company, all part of our plan to turn the operation around and make it profitable again.
Employee Ownership: A Topic for the Entrepreneurship Curriculum
This Teaching module shows four areas in the entrepreneurship curriculum where teaching about employee ownership can 1) put a needed spotlight on this widespread and useful practice and 2) add conceptual value and rich examples for the course topics being taught…
Corporate Governance and Labor Relations
I view corporate governance as a process of designing and implementing various implicit and explicit contracts among capital providers, corporate managers, workers, and other important stakeholders. In my talk today, I will expand the scope of the typical shareholder value focus to consider the design and implementation of contracts with other stakeholders, particularly employees and organized labor.
The Carris Companies: Doing the Next Right Thing
Presented in this case is the Carris Companies’ movement towards 100% employee shared ownership and governance with an emphasis on and investment in education; focus on ‘quality of life’; economic, educational and social accessibility provided by the company for its employees, many of whom are unskilled at the time of initial employment; encouragement of employee wellness; employee involvement in corporate decision-making and philanthropy; companies’ increased efforts to reduce waste and energy use and the overall positive effects on the companies’ profitability…
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.
A Positive Movement Forward: Carris Companies Employee-Governance
This chapter presents William (Bill) H. Carris’s distinctive organizational design for a positive and practical model of 100% employee-governance in the movement toward 100% employee-ownership of the Carris Companies, a manufacturer of wood, plastic, and metal reels in six United States locations and one in Mexico…
Unions and Employee Ownership: A Road to Economic Democracy?
In the relationship between unions and employee share ownership, neither threatened the other, and their combination led to benefits for employees, particularly where unionized employees were majority owners.
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.
Shareholder Value and Employee Interests: Intersections Between Corporate Governance, Corporate Law and Labour Law
It has been observed that corporate law and labour (or employment) law are in essence separate fields of legal scholarship and regulatory policy. This separation does not mean that there has been no interest by company lawyers in labour law or vice versa; nor does it mean that the two fields do not have relevance to one another. Clearly both corporate law and labour law have provided certain fundamental starting points for analysis which have helped shape the regulatory scope of each other.
Strategic Stakeholder Perspective to ESOP Negotiations: The Case of United Airlines
Employee stock ownership programs (ESOP) may become a source of competitive advantage but a threat to a firm’s survival as well. Strategic stakeholder negotiation, on the other hand, is a process through which an organization negotiates with multiple stakeholders in order to achieve a strategic goal. Such perspective helps to illustrate the importance of understanding, balancing, and managing stakeholder demands in ESOP-related negotiations. The airline industry provides an interesting arena in which to study this process.
The Strategic Use of Individual Employment Agreements: Three Case Studies
In light of varying outlooks on the process of individualisation in the hitherto collectively regulated industries, it was thought worthwhile revisiting the three disputes (those involving CRA Weipa, BHP, and the Commonwealth Bank) and thoroughly documenting them with a view to discovering what light they shed on the objectives of the individualisation process.
Working Toward Transparency and Accountability: Carris Companies Governance
This conceptual paper based on a case examines some of the devastating impacts of the recent spate of corporate wrongdoing, noting the widespread interconnectivity and interrelationships these demonstrate; revisits the roots of capitalism and the underpinnings of corporate citizenship; and explores the efforts of the Carris Companies as they implemented their plan for 100% employee ownership and governance, working toward full transparency and accountability in their decision-making.
Carris Companies’ Practice of Employee Governance
Distinguishing the Carris Companies’ transition to 100% employee ownership was its more unusual movement towards 100% employee governance. This paper examines the Carris Companies’ practice of governance and the process used to prepare stakeholder citizens for their changing roles and relationships.