The April 30, 2009 Employee Ownership Update is online and discusses the following:

• Employee "Ownership" at Chrysler and GM?
  
• What Stories Do People Tell About Your Company?
  
• ESPPs in a Down Market Pose Special Challenges
  
• Carey Center Essay Contest
  

The Update discusses The Chrysler and GM Proposed Restructuring:

Under the terms of the government's bailout of the two troubled automakers, union workers at Chrysler will gain 55% ownership in return for reducing by half the automaker's $10.6 billion obligation to the United Auto Workers' retiree health-care fund. Similarly, UAW members will own 39% of General Motors through a deal that allows GM to use stock instead of cash to fund half of its $20.4 billion obligation to the UAW's retiree health-care fund.

What happened at United over the following decade could provide valuable lessons to the workers at Chrysler and GM. The biggest key? Whether management at the automakers motivates workers to buy in to the turnaround and gets them to act as owners. "If the [companies] see this as just financing engineering and don't adapt their management style, then [unions] are just going to behave the way they always did," says Charles O'Reilly, the Frank E. Buck Professor of Management at Stanford University…

These experts do say that GM and Chrysler can learn from the United debacle—namely, that labor-as-owner arrangements work only when the management team truly brings workers into decisions and can communicate well about the ongoing trade-offs and sacrifices that owners sometime have to make. "Managers must have an 'open book' policy with high employee involvement," Rosen says. "For most companies, this is a huge shift in culture."

Experts concede that ESOPs work best when a company is thriving; the risks are much larger at companies that are struggling. That's because recriminations between management and workers rise if the turnaround doesn't take hold. "When business is bad and the outlook for the company isn't great, an 'I-told-you-so' attitude starts to form among workers," notes Michael Keeling, president of the ESOP Assn., a Washington-based trade group whose membership consists of companies that have done ESOPs.

Then again, it worked once before in Detroit: As part of the government's 1979 bailout of Chrysler, workers traded concessions for a 15% stake in the company, which paid off handsomely when a turnaround bloomed. But now it's up to the next generation of workers and managers to demonstrate that they can learn from history.

The Update also discusses a different way to quantify your ownership culture:

At the NCEO's recent annual conference, Southwest Airlines President Emeritus Colleen Barrett said that people are always lining up to her to tell her their favorite Southwest stories, usually about how employees went out of their way to help customers, make people laugh, or otherwise go well beyond what people expect from airlines. One of the attendees got up and told his own story about how a colleague who was lip-synching to the safety message at the start of the flight was asked to do it out loud on the P.A. system (he did it flawlessly) and then later given an apron and told to help pass out nuts. Barrett said that most airline employees would not be thrilled with the idea of people coming to tell their stories as they usually would be of some dreadful experience.

It also discusses the issues facing employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs) during the recent downturn due to the significant decrease in value of the stock, the annual ESPP limits, and the possibility that plans will become oversubscribed.