Thomas Friedman, Progressive Policy Institute Endorse Employee Ownership

Thomas Friedman, the influential columnist for the NY Times and author (most recently) of the best-selling book The World Is Flat provides a ringing endorsement for broader employee ownership. Quoting Will Marshall, head of the Progressive Policy Institute, the leading centrist Democratic think tank (it was strongly associated with Bill Clinton), he writes:

"In addition to a simple, portable, and universal pension program, Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, proposes legislation that would make it much easier and more likely for workers to obtain stock options in the companies for which they work. Such legislation would give tax incentives to companies to give more workers more options earlier and penalize companies that do not. Part of making workers more mobile is creating more ways to make more workers owners of financial assets, not just their own labor. "We want a public that sees itself as stakeholders, sharing in the capital-creating side of the flat world, not just competing in global labor markets," argued Marshall. "We all have to be owners as well as wage earners. That is where public policy has to be focused -- to make sure that people have wealth-producing assets as they enter the twenty-first century, the way homeownership accomplished that in the twentieth century."

"Why? Because there is an increasing body of literature that says people who are stakeholders, people who have a slice of the pie, 'are more deeply invested in our system of democratic capitalism and the policies that keep it dynamic,' said Marshall. It is another way, besides homeownership, to underpin the legitimacy of democratic capitalism. It is also another way to energize it, because workers who are also owners are more productive on the job. Moreover, in a flat world where every worker is going to face stiffer competition, the more opportunities everyone has to build wealth through the power of markets and compounding interest, the more he or she will be able to be self-reliant. We need to give workers every stabilizer we can and make it as easy for them to get stock options as it is for the plutocrats. Instead of just being focused on protecting those with existing capital, as conservatives so often seem to be, let's focus instead on widening the circle of capital owners."