Corey Rosen
State legislation on employee ownership is gaining momentum, with bills passed in Colorado during 2021 and in Massachusetts and California during 2022. Two new bills have attracted important support in Washington and Tennessee, and bills will be introduced soon in Texas, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. The bills in Washington and Tennessee were introduced in the past week, as described below.
Jaymie Oviedo
The 2023 peer networking groups will start meeting soon!
Corey Rosen
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, an omnibus spending bill with many parts that was signed into law on December 29, contains major wins for employee ownership as part of the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022. (The original SECURE [Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement] Act of 2019 was signed into law in December 2019 and modified various retirement plan rules, such as changing the age for required minimum distributions from 70½ to 72.) Section references here are to the SECURE 2.0 Act, not the appropriations bill as a whole, which contains many laws (e.g., there are multiple “sec. 114” instances, and one of them is in the SECURE 2.0 Act, amending Section 1042).
Corey Rosen
Lots of us love Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. The tale of Ebenezer Scrooge’s dream-tormented epiphany about what really matters in life has resonated deeply with people of all ages ever since it was published.
Loren Rodgers
The Mondragon Corporation of Spain’s Basque region, an integrated network of more than 90 employee-owned companies plus many worker cooperatives, is the best-known example of worker cooperatives in the world. On December 15, the worker-owners of two of its largest member cooperatives voted to separate from the network, as reported in several articles, such as this one in El Pais.
Corey Rosen
Ownership: Reinventing Capitalism, Companies, and Who Owns What won the 2023 William Foote Whyte and Kathleen King Whyte Book Prize for the best book of the year on shared capitalism. The award is issued by the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership at the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations.
Loren Rodgers
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NCEO
ESOP transactions require specific knowledge from both advisors and companies, each with unique responsibilities that compel them to act according to their duty and at the right moment. Many people with responsibility for the proper design and operation of ESOPs have never had a comprehensive overview of what they need to know to be effective in their roles – and many may not even realize that there are gaps in their knowledge. Filling in those gaps can help ESOP companies avoid pitfalls (see the NCEO's Don’t Do That! book for examples) and make good decisions from the board level to day-to-day operations.
Loren Rodgers
On December 2, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, announced the creation of the London Ownership Hub, which will launch in early 2023 with the goal of creating "the networks, resources and conditions to help worker co-operative and employee-owned businesses across London develop and thrive." London contains nearly 500 employee owned businesses, 30% of the total in the UK, and the sector proved resilient through the pandemic.
