Employee Ownership 100: Largest ESOP Companies Listed

The NCEO’s 2021 Employee Ownership 100 list includes the nation’s largest companies that are at least 50% owned by an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) or other broad-based employee ownership plan. Many are 100% employee owned. See the list on pages 8–9.

The great majority (95%) of the companies on this list have ESOPs, and several of them have more than one plan. Other vehicles for employee ownership on this list include profit-sharing plans invested in company stock, stock purchase plans, 401(k) plans, and a worker cooperative.

Eight companies have been added to this year’s list, and the companies collectively employ more than 630,000 people worldwide. This year the smallest companies on the list have 1,350 employees. Several companies from last year’s list have been removed as a result of smaller employee counts or changing ownership structure, and three employee-owned companies from the 2020 list were sold since our last publication.

Among the ESOP companies on the list, an average of approximately two-thirds of employees participated in the plans. Certain categories of employees may be excluded from ESOP participation, so these low participation rates most likely reflect companies with (1) a large percentage of international employees, (2) employees covered by a collective bargaining unit in which they negotiated for benefits other than ESOP participation, (3) employees in separate lines of business, or (4) comparable non-ESOP retirement plans that they offer to other employee groups. We include ESOP companies on the list regardless of the percentage of employees participating in the plan because ESOPs are legally required to be broad-based and nondiscriminatory.

If your company should be on the list, please let us know. There are no readily available data sources for such figures, so we compile information from the companies themselves, news stories, company websites, and, if none of these are available, online data resources.

We encourage companies on the list to contact their local and trade media to tell their stories. We have sample press material available (please email Dallan Guzinski).