Journal Article

Guest editorial: Introduction to special issue of overcoming the barriers for employee ownership - part 2

Blasi, Joseph, Kruse, Douglas, Mygind, Niels

2023

Overview

The organization problem, where clear models are missing for organizing employee ownership; The entry/exit problem of employee-owners to ensure that the retiring employees give up and the entering employees obtain ownership; The start-up problem, where it is hard to organize a group of employee to be owners in the start-up stage; The capital problem, where there are difficulties to raise enough capital for start-ups and the further development of companies with significant employee ownership; The risk problem where employees can be at risk of both losing both their jobs and their owner capital. Leading researchers of employee ownership collected the data and wrote the reports of their countries in the winter of 2021–2022. Besides the countries described in Part 1, the project also included experience in the UK and the USA. In all these countries, with a relatively high prevalence of employee ownership, legislation has played an important role. [...]the last article in this special issue focuses on the policy implications. According to the authors, in July 2022, there were 1,070 employee-owned companies in the UK (not including the relatively small group of worker cooperatives with around 6,000 employees). According to Rosen, the main features of the USA ESOP to overcome the barriers have been the broad-based all-employee model of the ESOP with the shares held in the trust.

• Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing Limited
• Subject: Capital gains / Cooperatives / Employee ownership / Employees / Legislation / Startups