Employee Ownership Blog

Few companies, most notably CH2MHill, operate internal stock markets to allow employees to buy and sell shares. There are a number of reasons for this, but one has always been regulatory cost and complexity.

The Center for Organizational Dynamics at the University of Pennsylvania will host "the first and only program anywhere formally addressing the relationship between the distinctive nature of ESOP companies and the effectiveness of leaders." The program consists of two week-long sessions (June 15-

Triple Canopy, a Reston, VA-based provider of mission support, security, and training services, has become 100% ESOP-owned. The company has been active in a number of war zones.

The 2013 National Compensation Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that 8% of private sector employees, or 9.2 million employees, are in what the BLS defines as "stock option" plans.

The former owners of People Care Holdings Inc. have agreed to pay $10 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the Department of Labor over allegations that the ESOP overpaid for the shares when it bought it from the former owners.

The Employee Benefits Research Institute (EBRI) reports that 36% of participants in the EBRI 401(k) plan database were in plans that offered company stock as an investment. Where company stock was an option, 18.3% of participants selected that as one of their holdings.

Income inequality has become a hot topic of late. But notably absent from the debate is any discussion of employee ownership as a bipartisan, capitalist approach to the problem.

As announced in late 2013, the Global Equity Organization (GEO) is going live with the 2014 Global Equity Insights survey, together with its sponsors Computershare, hkp///, SAP, Siemens, and the University of Göttingen, and survey support partners WorldatWork, the Certified Equity Professional In

The Supreme Court has agreed to review the so-called presumption of prudence rule that has provided trustees of ESOPs and other defined contribution plans that are specifically designed to be invested in employer stock protection against lawsuits when stock prices in the plans drop dramatically.

China has announced that state-owned enterprises will be allowed to use employee ownership as part of a move to partial privatization of state-owned monopolies. Private investors would be allowed as well, but the state would retain control.

The stock price of companies traded on the UK's FTSE stock index with at least 3% of their shares owned by broad-based employee ownership plans grew 53% in 2013, compared to 21% for other FTSE-listed companies.

The world's leading organization of worker cooperatives, CICOPA (the International Organisation of Industrial, Artisanal and Service Producers' Cooperatives) identified over 91,000 worker cooperatives around the world, according to its