NCEO Research Spurs Chicago Effort to Promote Employee Ownership

In an August 31 Forbes article, A New Push For Employee Ownership in Chicago, Anne Field reports that the Cook County Commission on Social Innovation is working on a variety of initiatives to support more employee ownership as a result of research by the NCEO.

[The research] found, for example, that household wealth of the median employee-owner was 92% higher than the household wealth for the median non-employee-owner. And that was true for everyone from single women to workers of color. "It made us start thinking about the importance of looking at wealth, not income," [the vice chair of the commission, Mark Lane] says.

With that, Lane began looking into backing or otherwise getting involved in a series of initiatives to encourage both employee ownership and worker-owned cooperatives. "We thought that would help people to be a whole lot better off than if we only thought about jobs," he says.

That NCEO research is available at the NCEO's www.OwnershipEconomy.org website.