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Employee Ownership Blog
Corey Rosen

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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Corey Rosen

Helping Assess ESOP Feasibility for 40 Years

When I first read about ESOPs 43 years ago as a Capitol Hill staffer, I loved the concept but was discouraged by the complexity. Employee ownership was a cause I wanted to make my own, but I was intimidated by the concept and strange (to me) language. Eventually, I started to get it, but ever since have had a lot of empathy for business owners who, like me then, love the idea of employee ownership but find the process confusing.

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Corey Rosen

Biden Appointee Proposes Office of Employee Ownership

In a new report, Why Aren’t There More ESOPs: Assessing Barriers to ESOP Creation, Jared Bernstein, one of the three people Joe Biden named to the Council of Economic Advisers, urges the new administration to “set up a government office, housed perhaps in the Small Business Administration (SBA) or the Commerce Department, that provides direct assistance to small businesses that want to set up ESOPs or other shared ownership plans.”  

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Corey Rosen

Biden Nominees Have Favored Employee Ownership

President Biden’s nominees to key cabinet posts have favored employee ownership in the past. In 2019, the proposed new SBA administrator, Isabel Guzman, told the California Dream (a collaboration led by local PBS stations), that employee ownership was a good way to respond to the “silver tsunami.” "As these businesses in the silver tsunami start to retire, and look for options, we need to get this information [about employee ownership] out there," she said. NCEO staff later met with Guzman to discuss ways she could use her position as head of the California Office of the Small Business Advocate to promote the idea, and she affirmed her strong support.

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