Employee Ownership Blog
Nancy Wiefek

Nancy Wiefek

New York State Releases Report Highlighting Employee Ownership

The Office of the New York State Comptroller recently released a report “Employee Ownership of Businesses in New York State” outlining the most common forms of employee ownership, the number of such businesses in New York State from the NCEO comprehensive database, and how “employee ownership can positively impact employee compensation and retirement assets making it an effective tool to create lasting wealth and improving employee satisfaction.” 

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Nancy Wiefek

New NCEO Research Shows the Benefits of Being an ESOP in the Food Industry

The NCEO just completed a large grant-funded project examining whether and how employee ownership affected companies and employees in the U.S. food system during the COVID-19 pandemic. This project involved commissioning a national polling firm to collect original survey data from executives at ESOP and non-ESOP-owned companies. It speaks to important issues of workforce retention, business competitiveness, and the retirement security crisis. Namely:

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Nancy Wiefek

The 2022 National ESOP Database Is Now Available

The 2022 ESOP Database, the NCEO's comprehensive data source on all ESOPs in the US, is now available. The database includes plan year 2020 Form 5500 filings (or the most recent available filing before 2020) and includes company name and address, industry, number of plan participants, plan assets, age of the ESOP, publicly traded indicator, and many more fields. (Download a sample of the data).

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Nancy Wiefek

New Survey Indicates ESOPs Made a Difference to Workers During the Pandemic

A new study conducted by John Zogby Strategies on behalf of Employee-Owned S Corporations of America (ESCA), Employee Financial Health and Sentiments Amid the Pandemic, summarized in this press release, provides evidence that employees in S corporation ESOPs suffered fewer financial setbacks compared to a sample of employees at companies without ESOPs. 

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Nancy Wiefek

New Research on Employee Ownership and the Pandemic

The pandemic is a critically important time to conduct research exploring how businesses and their employees have fared, and what are successful ways to reduce the negative impacts from this crisis. Employee ownership is a key factor to be explored in this context. The challenge has always been collecting comparison data on companies without employee ownership. With funding from the Employee Ownership Foundation, scholars at Rutgers University’s Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing recently took on this challenge working with the national survey firm, SSRS.  

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Nancy Wiefek

Survey Data Shows Lower Turnover Among ESOPs

Our recent ESOP Topics Survey gathered data from 160 ESOP companies on how they’re handling the COVID-19 crisis and other issues, including questions about their turnover rates in 2019. The surveyed ESOP companies reported dramatically lower turnover than overall national averages.  This difference persisted at the industry level in each of the industries with enough data to make comparisons: wholesale trade, manufacturing, and construction ESOP companies had turnover rates less than half of national averages for their industry. See tables below for details (national data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

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