Employee Ownership Blog
Corey Rosen

Corey Rosen

Pro-Employee Ownership Legislation Passes the First Hurdle in the European Parliament

Thanks to Kosta Juri, director of operations at the Institute for Economic Democracy (IED), and Rachel Bachmann, head of strategic initiatives at IED, for helping draft this post.

Last week, the European Parliament (EP) plenary adopted (by 492 votes in favor, 144 against, and 28 abstentions) a resolution with recommendations to the European Commission to propose a harmonizing directive aimed at creating an EU-wide unified legal framework (the “28th Regime,” referring to an additional legal framework alongside those of the current 27 member states) for innovative companies.

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Corey Rosen

DOL Removes ESOPs from National Enforcement Project List

The Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) at the US Department of Labor (DOL) announced today that it removed ESOPs from its national enforcement project list. ESOPs had been on that list since 2005 as one of five items on the list, which also included improper handling of various health plan issues, criminal abuse of defined contribution plans, plan investment conflicts, and benefit distribution violations.

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Corey Rosen

Grand Rapids Becomes the First City to Provide Preferences for Employee-Owned Businesses

Grand Rapids, MI, has become the first city to provide purchasing preferences for employee-owned businesses (PDF). Businesses can be employee-owned through an ESOP, an employee ownership trust, or a worker cooperative and must be certified by a recognized third party, such as Certified Employee-Owned or the NCEO.

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Corey Rosen

The Five Largest Majority and Broadly Employee-Owned Non-ESOP Companies

The vast majority of US companies owned broadly by employees have an ESOP. We recently released our yearly update to the Employee Ownership 100, the 100 largest companies owned by an ESOP or a worker cooperative. By the nature of these plans, most or usually all employees meeting a basic service requirement can become owners.

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Corey Rosen

Employee Ownership Prominent on Most Ethical Companies List

A new survey of more than 3,000 people by MarketBeat listed 9 employee-owned companies on its list of the 118 most ethical companies in the US. The survey asked people to name the companies that most closely align with their personal and moral values. All but two of the employee-owned companies on the list (H-E-B and Wawa) are majority employee-owned, and all but two (H-E-B and Edward Jones) are employee-owned through ESOPs.

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