Employee Ownership Blog

For anyone interested in employee ownership, the first question is always how many plans there are. Unfortunately, the best we can do is to provide a very rough estimate of the number of plans and participants.

A new survey of 1,108 companies by ShareData, a provider of software to administer employee stock option plans, shows a rapid increase in the growth of plans that provide stock options to most or all employees.

One of the longest-running ESOP valuation cases is Howard v. Shay. The case has now been in court for eight years and still may not be resolved. The case revolves around a terminated ESOP at Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE). PAE's principal business was real estate.

We at the NCEO now estimate that 6 million people work for companies that offer most or all of their employees stock options. Ryan Weeden and Ed Carberry, the NCEO's stock options project coordinators, say that at least 3,000 companies offer these plans.

Worker cooperatives are a thriving sector of the European economy, albeit one that receives limited press attention.

The Daimler Benz-Chrysler merger has prompted a number of questions about whether the acquisition of a U.S. corporation by a foreign corporation (or a merger of a U.S.

Representative Amo Houghton (R-NY) has introduced legislation (H.R.

Section 1042 of the Internal Revenue Code allows sellers of closely held companies to defer taxation from any gain to the extent that they reinvest the proceeds of the sale in domestic stock and bonds.

An index of publicly traded companies with more than 10% broad employee ownership outperformed all other market indexes for 1997, gaining 32.5% for the year compared to 31.0% for the S&P 500, 22.6% for the Dow, and 29.2% for the Russell 5000.

Telecom Eireann, the Irish telephone company, will sell employees a $400 million, 14.9% stake as part of its planned intial public offering next year. The company is being privatized, with 35% of the shares already owned by Dutch and Swedish telephone companies.

A new study by Margaret Blair of the Brookings Institution and Douglas Kruse and Joseph Blasi of Rutgers University shows that publicly traded companies that are at least 20% owned by employees are more organizationally stable than non-employee ownership companies.

General Motors will provide options on between 25 and 100 shares of its stock to its non-union work force. Stock allocations will be based on seniority and grade level.