Every year we release the Employee Ownership 100, the 100 largest companies that are majority-owned by their employees. Many are 100% employee-owned.
The great majority (95%) of the companies on this list have ESOPs, and several of them have more than one plan. Other vehicles for employee ownership on this list include profit sharing plans invested in company stock, stock purchase plans, 401(k) plans, and a worker cooperative.
Five companies have been added to this year’s list, and the companies on the list collectively employ more than 645,000 people worldwide. This year the smallest companies on the list have 1,400 employees. Several companies from last year’s list have been removed as a result of smaller employee counts or acquisition; one employee-owned company from the 2021 list was sold since our last yearly update.
Among ESOP companies on the list, an average of approximately two-thirds of employees participated in the plans. Certain categories of employees may be excluded from ESOP participation, so these low participation rates most likely reflect companies with (1) a large percentage of international employees, (2) employees covered by a collective bargaining unit in which they negotiated for benefits other than ESOP participation, (3) employees in separate lines of business, or (4) comparable non-ESOP retirement plans that they offer to other employee groups. We include ESOP companies on the list regardless of the percentage of employees participating in the plan because ESOPs are legally required to be broad-based and nondiscriminatory.
If your company should be on the list, please let us know. There are no readily available data sources for such figures, so we compile information from the companies themselves, news stories, company websites, and if none of these are available, online data resources. We encourage companies on the list to contact their local and trade media to tell their stories. We have sample press material available (please email Dallan Guzinski at dguzinski@nceo.org).