Employee Ownership in Italy

At a recent ESOP Centre conference on employee ownership Tiziano Treu, a former Italian Employment Minister, said the center-right government of Matteo Renzi is looking for ways to stimulate more broad-based employee ownership in Italy. There are already a number of worker cooperatives, some quite large, such as Banco Popolare di Milano, but business and union attitudes towards employee ownership have been at best mixed. Unlike the U.S. and some European countries, relatively few closely held Italian companies are larger than 10 employees. Currently, about 4.5% of the Italian workforce is in some kind of employee ownership plan, up from 3% in 1990, in large part because companies traded stock for pay cuts. The Renzi government will be proposing legislation to encourage employee ownership as part of a privatization program.