Public and Other Large Company ESOPs

  

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Should Public and/or Large Employers Have ESOPs? discusses the recent Overly Sensational Anti-ESOP Coverage. It mentions a minority opinion that the coverage is not important to the ESOP community because large ESOP companies do not provide "real" ownership and asks if this is a valid position:

So the issue arises, should the ESOP community throw, to use the hottest term in politics, "throw big companies with ESOPs, or even employee stock ownership schemes under the bus?"

From this vantage point, the answer is no. Around 50% of Americans work for large employers, most publicly traded. To say that these people cannot be owners undermines the entire philosophical reason for having employees BE owners. The Association's Vision would have to be changed, as it does not say only employees of small businesses should be owners.

Relevant Discussions in Recent Posts

• Study Asserts Broader Employee Ownership and Participation Improves Company Performance and Social Welfare and Study: ESOP Companies Have Productivity Advantage which Increases with More Employee Participation and Decreases as Firms Get Larger found that the effectiveness of employee ownership may lessen as firms get larger.
  
• Research: Shared Capitalism, Shirking, Workplace Performance, Employee Ignorance, and Innovation found that shared capitalism is more likely to exist in larger companies.
  
• The NCEO's Employee Ownership 100 contains many examples of successful large company ESOPs.