The Real World of Employee Ownership

Using data from an extensive study of employee-owned companies in Ohio, where employee ownership is a well-developed trend, this book offers a strong empirical portrait of firms with Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). It describes how these plans work and places their emergence and change in a historical context. John Logue and Jacquelyn Yates examine firms that have succeeded in employee ownership and those with failed plans. Some companies, they find, are committed to the concept of employee ownership, and others merely use ESOPs as a financing tool.

Detailed information resulting from multiple surveys allows the authors to draw well-grounded conclusions regarding the question of why some employee-owned firms outperform others. The bottom line, they find, is that employee-owned firms that "do it all," implementing features such as employee participation and communication about finances, training, and cultural change, systematically outperform their conventional competitors. They also have an advantage over firms that understand employee ownership incompletely, if it all, and yet claim to adopt its methods.

John Logue was Professor of Political Science at Kent State University and Director of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center. He was coeditor or coauthor of many books and a frequent contributor to The Progressive. Jacquelyn S. Yates is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Salem campus of Kent State University and a faculty associate at the Ohio Employee Ownership Center. William Greider, national affairs correspondent for The Nation magazine, is author of One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism.