New Report Details Employee Ownership in Europe

The Annual Economic Survey of Employee Share Ownership in European Countries, 2024 (PDF) from the European Federation of Employee Share Ownership shows that while the number of employee share plans has increased, the percentage of employees participating in these plans has decreased somewhat. The report is primarily focused on large publicly traded companies in Europe. Most of the plans that are broad-based are some form of stock purchase plan. The report says that 6.7 million employees participate in employee ownership plans in Europe, or about one in five employees in all large public companies. Nonmanagement employees own an average of 1.7% of the shares in these companies.

The report notes that since 2014, when the European Parliament passed legislation that provided a tax exclusion for sales to employee ownership trusts (EOTs), 2,100 EOTs have been set up, including 600 in 2024 alone. These companies employ about 150,000 employees. That means the rate of EOT formation in the UK is growing several times as fast as ESOPs are in the US when the relative sizes of the two countries are taken into account. The UK EOT model has simpler rules than the US ESOP model. Employees participating in EOTs are not owners in the conventional sense of the term, however. Instead the trust is designed to be a permanent owner, with employees getting dividends or profit sharing from the company.

The report also finds that there are 762 privately held companies that have more than 100 employees and are employee-owned, 261 of which are UK EOTs and most of the rest of which are worker cooperatives across the continent.