2014
Through stock ownership Microsoft is estimated to have created 10,000 employee millionaires, many multi-millionaires. Stock was a major part of their compensation in the early days and the potential rewards their motivation to succeed.
Can sharing company ownership help share the wealth without having government take from some to give to others? Maybe. Large corporations do this today for high level employees who receive a major part of their compensation in stock options and grants in an attempt to tie personal gain to the success of the organization.
I participated in such plans, including ESOPs over many years and since it was found money so to speak I held many of the shares and reinvested dividends for more growth which today provide a supplemental source of income. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about millions of shares or even thousand at a time, I’m talking about a few hundred periodically over thirty years. And yes, I used some of those shares to fund college costs as well. Of course there are risks too, as with any investment.
Now the idea of ESOPs is being revived. Here is an interesting opinion piece from the New York Times on the subject.
Have you benefited from employer-based stock ownership plans? Do you think stock ownership can align workers with the success of their employer? Do you think such plans can help “spread the wealth”
Robert Hockett, a law professor at Cornell, wrote in 2006 that ESOPs had expanded employee ownership of firms, but that “there is indeed a gap to be filled — that firm ownership remains nowhere near as widespread as home and human capital ownership.”
Now, three prominent labor policy experts have taken up Long’s cause. They are convinced that a major expansion of employee ownership is the most effective tool available to remediate inequality. The three experts — Richard B. Freeman of the economics department at Harvard, and Douglas L. Kruse and Joseph R. Blasi, both professors at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers – have been promoting worker capitalism in numerous papers and books. Together they edited “Shared Capitalism at Work: Employee Ownership, Profit and Gain Sharing and Broad-Based Stock Options” and last year they released “The Citizen’s Share: Putting Ownership Back into Democracy.”
In “The Citizen’s Share,” Blasi, Freeman and Kruse make a broad, ideologically cross-cutting case on behalf of profit sharing and employee ownership:
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