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Employee Ownership Blog
Corey Rosen

Corey Rosen

Almost One in Eight of the Largest Private Companies Is Employee-Owned

Twenty-five of the largest private companies as ranked by Forbes (219 in all) are employee-owned. Twenty-one of these have ESOPs, two have profit sharing plans that work like ESOPs, one is owned by a trust for employees, and one provides phantom stock to all employees. The companies are ranked by sales. Nine of the companies are supermarket or convenience store chains, and six are in construction. Companies had to have $2 billion or more in sales to be in the list.

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Corey Rosen

Sample ESOP Plan Administration Charter Now in NCEO Document Library

ESOP plan administration committees are set up by companies to oversee ESOP operations. Depending on the committee's charter, it can appoint and monitor the ESOP trustee; resolve questions concerning allocations, vesting, eligibility, distributions, and other plan operational issues; make sure appropriate records are kept and passed on to the third-party administrator (TPA); and interpret plan provisions, among other possibilities. Not all ESOPs have these committees. These functions may be performed by the board of directors.

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Corey Rosen

Canada Moves Forward on Employee Ownership

The Trudeau government has proposed a new budget that contains an important provision to look at ways for Canada to set up employee ownership trusts following the models of US ESOPs and UK Employee Ownership Trusts. The budget states that: “Employee ownership trusts encourage employee ownership of a business, and facilitate the transition of privately owned businesses to employees. Both the United States and the United Kingdom support and encourage employee ownership through these types of arrangements. Budget 2021 announces that the government will engage with stakeholders to examine what barriers exist to the creation of employee ownership trusts in Canada, and how workers and owners of private businesses in Canada could benefit from the use of employee ownership trusts.”

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Corey Rosen

Aspen Institute Urges More Support for Employee Ownership

In its report "A Job Quality Agenda for the Next Administration," the Aspen Institute, a leading nonpartisan think tank, joined the Center for American Progress, Council of Economic Advisors member Jared Bernstein, and others to “Promote employee ownership and worker cooperative models, which have been shown to have a positive association with quality jobs, by offering technical assistance and access to appropriate financing to support transitions to employee ownership, as well as new business development that includes some form of employee ownership. Funds could be made available to state employee ownership centers, experienced nonprofit organizations, and interested Small Business Development Centers to raise awareness about different employee ownership models among small- to medium-sized businesses and to extend technical assistance and facilitate financing.”

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Corey Rosen

Fifty-Nine Percent of 2020 100 Best Companies to Work For Have Employee Ownership

Forty-six of the 78 companies that have stock on the recently released Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list for 2020 have some form of broad-based employee ownership plan, the highest percentage yet. Twenty-two of the companies on the list are law or accounting firms, nonprofits, or a consumer cooperative and have no stock for employees to own. This is the highest percentage yet on the list of such firms with no stock, but normally about half the companies on the list do have employee ownership plans.

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Corey Rosen

Billionaires Saw Wealth Increase by $1.3 Trillion in Pandemic

Based on data from Forbes calculated 11 months after the onset of the pandemic, the country’s 679 billionaires saw their wealth increase by $1.3 trillion since the official start of the pandemic in March 2020. That number is almost as much as the total asset value of the 14 million participant accounts in ESOPs, and one-fourth as much as the total assets in 401(k) plans. Looked at another way, if the increase on value had been evenly divided among the 164 million people in the workforce, it would come to almost $8,000 per worker. The combined wealth of the billionaires is now $4.3 trillion.

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Corey Rosen

KKR Partner Pete Stavros to Set Up New Fund to Promote Employee Ownership

Pete Stavros, a partner and co-head of private equity for the Americas at KKR, the third-largest private equity fund in the world, told the Wall Street Journal that he and his wife plan to contribute $10 million to launch the Center for Shared Ownership. The organization will focus on employee ownership through funding research, providing resources for companies to help set up plans, and possibly pushing for legislation and government support. Stavros told the Journal that “Giving ownership to lower-level employees better aligns their interests with those of shareholders and managers, makes them more engaged, and creates a stronger culture. And at a time when rising inequality has led to populist uprisings and geopolitical instability, awarding shares to blue-collar workers can lead to great social cohesion by helping lower income workers—many of whom are racial minorities—build wealth.”

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