Employee Ownership Blog

Madelyn Hammack

Rutgers Launches Free Online Course on Employee Ownership

Last week, The Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing announced the launch of its first massive open online course (MOOC), titled "Our Share: Employee Ownership as a Wealth Sharing Tool." The free Coursera course, which is delivered as a series of short, engaging videos that can be viewed at one's own pace, teaches viewers what employee ownership is, how it differs from traditional business ownership models, the forms it can take, and the benefits it can provide for employees, retiring business owners, and the economy.

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Timothy Garbinsky

The NC State Center Is Hiring an Executive Director

Across the U.S. there is a burgeoning and vibrant network of state centers for employee ownership that are working to get the word out about ESOPs, worker cooperatives, employee ownership trusts (EOTs), and other forms of broad-based ownership for businesses. Dating back to the 1980s with the founding of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC), these efforts have gathered steam in recent years. The Employee Ownership Expansion Network (EOX) has been assisting in setting up and operating these centers throughout the nation, helping bring the employee ownership message to business owners, economic developers, educators, and communities.

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Corey Rosen

Promising New Employee Ownership Bills at State Level

State legislation on employee ownership is gaining momentum, with bills passed in Colorado during 2021 and in Massachusetts and California during 2022. Two new bills have attracted important support in Washington and Tennessee, and bills will be introduced soon in Texas, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. The bills in Washington and Tennessee were introduced in the past week, as described below.

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Corey Rosen

Major Wins for Employee Ownership in New Spending Bill

The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, an omnibus spending bill with many parts that was signed into law on December 29, contains major wins for employee ownership as part of the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022. (The original SECURE [Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement] Act of 2019 was signed into law in December 2019 and modified various retirement plan rules, such as changing the age for required minimum distributions from 70½ to 72.) Section references here are to the SECURE 2.0 Act, not the appropriations bill as a whole, which contains many laws (e.g., there are multiple “sec. 114” instances, and one of them is in the SECURE 2.0 Act, amending Section 1042).

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Corey Rosen

A Christmas Carol, the ESOP Version

Lots of us love Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The tale of Ebenezer Scrooge’s dream-tormented epiphany about what really matters in life has resonated deeply with people of all ages ever since it was published.

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Corey Rosen

Rosen-Case Ownership Book Wins Book Prize

Ownership: Reinventing Capitalism, Companies, and Who Owns What won the 2023 William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte Book Prize for the best book of the year on shared capitalism. The award is issued by the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership at the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations.

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