Employee Ownership Blog

Corey Rosen

Update: New York Passes Bill to Allow Engineering, Architecture, and Land Survey Firms to Be Majority ESOP-Owned

Following a 63-0 vote in the New York Senate, the New York State Assembly passed S. 5261 with a 146-1 vote. The bill would allow majority-owned ESOPs to qualify under New York corporate practice rules for engineering, architectural, landscape architectural, or land survey firms if 75% or more of the company’s voting trustees or ESOP plan committee (often the board of directors) are members of the profession. The bill now heads to the Governor’s desk for signature.

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Corey Rosen

Update: California Employee Ownership Bill Passes Senate Unanimously

Bill now moves to Assembly

California Senate Bill 1407, the Expanding Employee Ownership Act, has passed without dissent in the California Senate. As discussed in a previous post, this bill, if it becomes law, would be the most significant step forward by a state yet in promoting employee ownership. Introduced by Senator Josh Becker, the bill would provide outreach funding, access to transaction financing, and financial support for technical assistance for conversions to employee ownership. While the bill appears to have no opposition and has been endorsed by a wide variety of groups, letters to Assembly members in support of the bill would help move it forward. California legislation often serves as a model for other states, so its impact could well go beyond the state.

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Chris Cooper, Michael Palmieri

Creating ESOP Champions Throughout Your Company

As trainers and educators, we at the OEOC spend a fair amount of time working with companies as we all try to unlock the secrets of building the ideal ownership culture. There is no magic elixir that, by just adding water, will build that ideal culture for you. But there are some best practices that can help, many of which we will cover at the upcoming OEOC/NCEO National Employee Owner Summit in Chicago on August 25–26, 2022.

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Timothy Garbinsky

Reflections on Our 2022 Annual Conference: By the Numbers

Now that a month has passed since our annual conference in Seattle this past April, my colleagues and I have a renewed gratitude for just what it means to host these events. As you likely know, this past April saw us reunited with our members and the employee ownership community in Seattle for our first in-person conference since April 2019.

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Nancy Wiefek

New NCEO Research Shows the Benefits of Being an ESOP in the Food Industry

The NCEO just completed a large grant-funded project examining whether and how employee ownership affected companies and employees in the U.S. food system during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project involved commissioning a national polling firm to collect original survey data from executives at ESOP and non-ESOP-owned companies. It speaks to important issues of workforce retention, business competitiveness, and the retirement security crisis. Namely:

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Corey Rosen

Kaiser Permanente to Encourage Vendors to Become Employee-Owned

Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest HMOs, announced that it will be encouraging its 37,000 vendors to become employee-owned. The organization said that its “Business Resiliency through Employee Ownership” program “aims to educate the health system's suppliers about employee ownership and support those firms in transitioning to such a model, in which the majority of a company's shares are owned by employees.”

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Corey Rosen

Maine Law Encourages Employee Ownership in Renewable Energy Sector

A new law in Maine, LD 1969, directs the Maine Public Utilities Commission to require that any renewable energy project in the state receiving $50,000 or more in state funding to meet certain labor standards, including paying prevailing wages. The law also provides that in soliciting bids for state support for renewable energy projects, the Public Utilities Commission should “consider whether a majority of the individuals working on an assisted project are members of an entity that is employee-owned, including but not limited to an entity that offers employee stock ownership plans.”

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