Findings of 2010 General Social Survey (GSS)
The February 1, 2012 Employee Ownership Update is online and discusses the following:
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Employee Ownership in the 2010 General Social Survey
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Survey Shows ESPPs Remain Key Part of Equity Strategies
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Principal 10 Best Companies for Employee Financial Security
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Employee Ownership and Charity
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Employee Ownership Conference Filling Up
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A New Approach to Stock Ownership
The Update discusses the employee ownership takeaways from the 2010 General Social Survey. The level of employee ownership has remained constant since 2006 and that employee ownership results in lower turnover and less layoffs:
The 2010 General Social Survey, one of the largest and longest-running national surveys, found that the percentage of employees saying they have ownership in the companies where they work has been stable since 2006 at 17.5% of the private sector workforce. Among those who work for organizations that have stock, 36% report owning shares. The percentage of respondents saying they have stock options declined slightly, from 9.3% of the private sector workforce in 2006 to 8.7% in 2010. The GSS also examined voluntary and involuntary turnover. Less than 3% of people who say they own stock in their companies reported being laid off in the last 12 months, compared to 12% of those who do not own stock. In addition, while 24% of the non-owner employees intend to look for new jobs in the near future, only 13% of employee-owners do.
Here is a link to a tool that will allow you to search the results of the General Social Survey (GSS) data from 1972 - 2010
To put the information in perspective, here is our discussion of the 2007 results:
According to an ESOP Association press release, the Employee Ownership Foundation released data on shared capitalism programs in the US. The press release defined shared capitalism as "broad-based employee, current or deferred, stock compensation programs, such as ESOPs, stock purchases, stock options, gainsharing, profit sharing, and bonus programs." The data was collected from the General Social Survey (GSS), which is a survey that is conducted with a face-to-face interview by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The press release summarized the findings as follows:
"According to the results, out of 114 million people in the US who work in the private sector,17.5% of employees own company stock, about 20 million employees, and 9.3% hold stock options, approximately 10 million employees. The number of employees who reported profit sharing, gainsharing, owning company stock or holding stock options was 46.7%, which is an increase over the 2002 GSS finding of 43.1%. While the data reflect a slight drop from the 2002 results which showed that 21.2% of employees owned company stock and 13.1% held stock options, the numbers are still impressive when one takes into consideration that almost 50% of the individuals working in the private sector are involved in some sort of shared capitalism program."