UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Proposes "Shares for Rights"

In a speech on October 8, George Osborne, the United Kingdom's Chancellor of the Exchequer and a member of the Conservative Party, proposed a new tax incentive for employee ownership, but with a catch. Under his proposal, employers could grant shares worth 3,000 to 80,000 USD to employees, and employees would not be subject to capital gains tax on the increase in value. In return, employee would waive their protections against unfair dismissal and redundancy and would agree not to request flexible working arrangements or time off for training. The Guardian quoted Osborne as saying, "Workers: replace your old rights of unfair dismissal and redundancy with new rights of ownership... Workers of the world unite."

An editorial in the Financial Times concludes "the question of how to liberalise the labour market should be kept separate from that of how to encourage employee share ownership. Neither objective will benefit from mixing the two." The FT also ran a follow-up article extensively quoting the NCEO's Corey Rosen, who said, "It simply does not make sense for an employee to give up rights that could potentially be worth a great deal of money or job security in return for saving a few thousand pounds in possible capital gains taxes."