Harvard Business School Releases Employee Ownership Report

Harvard Business School’s Institute for Business in Global Society released a report, The Possibilities of Worker Ownership Engaging Employees, Boosting Profits and Combating Wealth Inequality, summarizing a two-day meeting on employee ownership held at the school in May. The meeting brought together leading scholars, practitioners, and nonprofits in the field to discuss the research on employee ownership, the various models for employee ownership, and what needs to be done to help employee ownership grow.

“The fixed-wage system has collapsed for the middle class,” Rutgers professor Joseph Blasi said during his keynote speech on the first day of the conference. “Research confirms that the families who are getting wealthy are getting wealthy because they have access to capital ownership, to capital income, to a percent of business profits, to a percent of business ownership, to dividends, to interest, to ownership of bonds. So, what we need to do is figure out a way to expand those things.”

I remarked that “there are very few ideas that are the intersection of something that really matters to people’s lives and are politically practical.” Employee ownership, I argued, is one of the few ideas to effectively address wealth insecurity that have limited fiscal impact and are supported by both parties.

The program was part of the Institute for Business in Global Society's The Ownership Project (TOP), which “explores how structuring ownership of key elements of the economy can help businesses and communities address pressing societal challenges and support human values in the 21st century." TOP was founded in 2024 and conducts research on enterprise ownership, including worker and steward ownership models, and the ownership of resources such as land, housing, water, and other assets.