A recent report by the New America Foundation calls attention to worker-owned cooperatives and employee ownership of corporations as a means of expanding economic prosperity.
Heath McCulloch writes:
Economic downturns typically galvanize interest in alternative economic models, and this one is no exception. Employee ownership is one such alternative that has, in recent months, captured the attention of the mainstream media including CNN Money, The New York Times, Time Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, The Economist, and Business Week. Employee ownership leaders and asset-building practitioners share a common goal of broadening access to ownership opportunities, but these strategies are still off the radar screen of the asset-building movement. It’s time to give them the attention they deserve.
Asset-building advocates have long included investment strategies – home and business ownership, in particular – as critical steps along a path to financial security for low-income working families, but we have typically focused on individual ownership strategies. Notable exceptions include recent Ford Foundation investment in the exploration of shared equity homeownership as a way to enable low-income families to build home equity while preserving public subsidies and keeping housing affordable over time and the Annie E. Casey Foundation has supported a national work group focused on the asset-building value of shared business ownership.
Today, there are new windows of opportunity to bring funders, investors, advocates and practitioners of shared business ownership strategies into the broader asset-building movement. Two common employee ownership strategies are a logical place to start—
Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and worker-owned cooperatives. These strategies have long supported U.S. workers – across the wage spectrum – to build financial assets through ownership of an equity stake in the businesses where they work. ESOPs are one type of employee benefit plan that buys and holds company stock on behalf of workers. Worker-owned cooperatives are companies that are owned and democratically managed by their employees.
The National Center for Employee Ownership reports that more than 10,500 ESOP plans cover almost 13 million workers and over $900 billion in U.S. company assets. ESOPs hold great potential as asset-building vehicles for U.S. workers, at all wage levels: the average ESOP participant has $47,000 of savings in the ESOP alone (the majority of ESOP companies offer additional, direct contribution retirement plans, typically 401(k)s).
Worker cooperatives represent a small segment of the U.S. economy: According to a recent federally-funded study, 223 worker coops in the U.S. employ 2,380 full-time worker-owners. But they are particularly relevant to asset-building advocates because they are increasingly being established in low-income communities, targeting low-skilled and/or immigrant workers. For example, the Cleveland Foundation, City of Cleveland, business and university leaders have established the Evergreen Cooperative Development Fund to create a network of coops targeting low-income community residents. In the San Francisco Bay Area, two nonprofits – WAGES and Teamworks – are supporting networks of worker-owned cleaning cooperatives owned by immigrant workers.
http://assets.newamerica.net/blogposts/2010/shared_business_ownership_an_asset_building_strategy-32264
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont introduced legislation last year to expand employee ownership and worker-owned cooperatives. The text of the bill introduced by Senator Sanders reads as follows:
United States Employee Ownership Bank Act - Directs the Secretary of the Treasury to establish the United States Employee Ownership Bank to foster increased employee ownership and greater employee participation in company decision making throughout the United States. Authorizes the Bank to make loans, on a direct or guaranteed basis, and which may be subordinated to the interests of all other creditors, to employees to purchase a company through an employee stock ownership plan or eligible worker-owned cooperative which is at least 51% employee owned, or will become so as a result of Bank assistance. Authorizes the bank also to allow:
(1) a company that is less than 51% employee owned to become at least 51% employee owned; and
(2) allow a company that is already at least 51% employee owned to increase the level of employee ownership, expand operations, and increase or preserve employment.Amends the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act to require the employer, if it orders a plant or facility closing in connection with the termination of its operations there, to offer its employees an opportunity to purchase such plant or facility through an employee stock ownership plan or an eligible worker-owned cooperative that is at least 51% employee owned. Exempts from such requirement an employer that orders a plant closing:
(1) but will retain the plant assets to continue or begin a business within the United States; or
(2) intends to continue the business conducted at such plant at another plant within the United States. Amends the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 to authorize the appropriate federal financial supervisory agency, in assessing and taking into account the record of a financial institution during an examination, to consider capital investments, loans, loan participation, technical assistance, financial advice, grants, and other ventures undertaken by the institution to support or enable employees to establish employee stock ownership plans or eligible worker-owned cooperatives that are at least 51% employee-owned.
http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-s2914/show
A very interesting history of the role of labor unions in creating worker cooperatives is provided by the Worker-Ownership Institute:
The concept of employee ownership in North America dates back to the settlement of the continent by men and women breaking the land to establish their farms and building their own stores and workshops. Unlike Europe, where peasants were bound to the land and ownership of productive property was concentrated in the hands of the few, in North America a society of relative equals who owned their own productive assets was built: farms, tools, workshops, stores, etc.
The independent farmers, shopkeepers and artisans who populated revolutionary North America yielded in the latter part of the 19th century to the rapid growth of the large corporations and increasing concentration of ownership. The farmers set about establishing cooperatives to buy their supplies…seed, fertilizer, etc….and to process and market their products jointly. The co-ops were owned by the farmers who bought from them and supplied them. Today family farming in the United States and Canada is sustained by an elaborate network of purchasing, processing and marketing cooperatives that provide the economics of large scale production within family ownership of land. Even electricity in large parts of rural America is provided by co-ops.
Consumer co-ops took hold in town and country. Credit unions, mutual savings banks and mutual insurance companies are owned by their depositors or policy holders, not by large companies, and provide lower rates and patronage dividends to their owners.
The early unions, such as the Knights of Labor in the 1870s and 1880s, and the craft unions in the 1880s and 1890s, sought to do the same by sponsoring worker cooperatives in which workers pooled their tools and resources to compete with the growing corporations.
For the better part of a century, the growth of worker co-ops was stymied by a structural problem. Those co-ops that failed in the market disappeared for the obvious reasons. But those that succeeded disappeared also. The problem lay in the design of ownership: each member owned one equal share. If the co-op did well, all shares appreciated in value. When founding members wanted to retire, new workers could not afford to buy the retiring members’ shares. So success was as fatal as failure because retiring members sold to outside buyers, and the cooperatives were converted into conventional corporations.
Despite this difficulty, the concept of co-ops was revived regularly in crises as a means to put the unemployed back to work. The Depression generated hundreds of co-ops; the oldest surviving worker-owned businesses of any size in the United States, the plywood co-ops in the Pacific Northwest, were purchased by their employees to avert shutdowns beginning in the 1930s.
But cooperatives gradually disappeared from labor’s agenda as industrialization advanced. While setting up co-ops was realistic in the traditional crafts, it was hard to see how it could work in mass production. How do you start up a cooperative steel mill or auto plant? After the turn of the century, radicals in the labor movement, like the Industrial Workers of the World before the First World War, or the CIO unions in the 1930s, focused on fighting the bosses instead of replacing them. The real economic gains from collective bargaining so far outweighed the hypothetical benefits from production cooperatives that, by the 1950s, the concept had virtually disappeared as a subject of union interest.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060112230115/www.workerownership.org/history.html
Unions have once again embraced the concept of worker co-ops. In October 2009, The United Steel Workers Union, North America's largest industrial trade union, announced a new collaboration with the world's largest worker-owned cooperative, Mondragon International, based in the Basque region of Spain.
Worker co-ops and employee owned companies contribute to restoring opportunity and security for the American middle class. For one thing, employee owned enterprises in the USA are going to be far less likely to outsource, lay off workers and move to China.
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