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On July 24, Alaska Governor Bill Walker presented the Alaska Manufacturer of the Year award to ESOP-owned Alaska Mill & Feed. President Joel Klessens said, "Our 65 employees invest a lot of themselves in their work.

Since the NCEO released The Employee Ownership 100: America's Largest Majority Employee-Owned Companies, newspapers around the country have picked up the story.

The largest 100 majority employee-owned companies in the U.S. employ approximately 594,144 people, up from 579,000 last year and 506,000 in 2005. Publix Supermarkets again topped the list with 143,000 employees.

Our Employee Ownership 100 list tracks the largest 100 employee-owned companies in the U.S. (ranked by the number of employees).

We have released the 2010 version of our Employee Ownership 100, a list of the 100 largest employee-owned companies in the U.S. (ranked by the number of employees).

South Africa held a conference on employee ownership hosted by the Industrial Development Corporation. Attendees represented many employee ownership companies, service providers to those companies, the government, and quasi-governmental agencies that support employee ownership.

Thirty-seven of the 73 companies with stock on the Fortune 2016 Best Companies to Work For list have some kind of broad-based ownership plan (27 employers on the list are partnerships, nonprofits, or subsidiaries of foreign corporations). The percentage is consistent with prior years.

Reaching a goal it had been pursuing since 2002, Torch Technologies, a technical services company in Alabama, announced that it had become 100% ESOP-owned. In an interesting twist, employees and others contributed over $1 million to charities in connection with the transaction.

As I noted in my last update, several bills to encourage employee ownership were introduced in 2009. One I did not mention was H.R. 692, introduced by Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.).

In an interview from 2016, Jennifer Briggs, then Director of Organizational Development and Human Resources at New Belgium Brewing, told the story of how one employee communicated to a new hire that employees at New Belgium “do not work for a corporation,” but rather, they “work for each other” as employee owners.