Ramona Rodriguez-Brooks
The heart of the NCEO is its members. Representing a wide variety of employee-owned companies, service providers, and other interested parties and stakeholders, we exist to serve our members and make employee ownership thrive. In an effort to better serve our members and further expand our membership offerings, we are expanding our membership team.
Corey Rosen
Forty-six of the 78 companies that have stock on the recently released Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list for 2020 have some form of broad-based employee ownership plan, the highest percentage yet. Twenty-two of the companies on the list are law or accounting firms, nonprofits, or a consumer cooperative and have no stock for employees to own. This is the highest percentage yet on the list of such firms with no stock, but normally about half the companies on the list do have employee ownership plans.
Corey Rosen
Based on data from Forbes calculated 11 months after the onset of the pandemic, the country’s 679 billionaires saw their wealth increase by $1.3 trillion since the official start of the pandemic in March 2020. That number is almost as much as the total asset value of the 14 million participant accounts in ESOPs, and one-fourth as much as the total assets in 401(k) plans. Looked at another way, if the increase on value had been evenly divided among the 164 million people in the workforce, it would come to almost $8,000 per worker. The combined wealth of the billionaires is now $4.3 trillion.
Jordan Boone
The NCEO is expanding our event and executive teams. We are currently seeking to hire an event and executive assistant, who will play an integral part in the success of events like our Fall ESOP Forum and support our executive director, Loren Rodgers.
Amanda DeVito
First and foremost, I am on the board for the NCEO, so I may be a bit biased! But hands down, one of my most favorite events is their Employee Ownership Conference. Connecting with everyone, sharing stories, and being part of the ownership tribe is an uplifting experience. And now, as we are less than two months away from the 2021 conference, I again start to feel uplifted.
Corey Rosen
Pete Stavros, a partner and co-head of private equity for the Americas at KKR, the third-largest private equity fund in the world, told the Wall Street Journal that he and his wife plan to contribute $10 million to launch the Center for Shared Ownership. The organization will focus on employee ownership through funding research, providing resources for companies to help set up plans, and possibly pushing for legislation and government support. Stavros told the Journal that “Giving ownership to lower-level employees better aligns their interests with those of shareholders and managers, makes them more engaged, and creates a stronger culture. And at a time when rising inequality has led to populist uprisings and geopolitical instability, awarding shares to blue-collar workers can lead to great social cohesion by helping lower income workers—many of whom are racial minorities—build wealth.”
Corey Rosen
An NCEO analysis of Glassdoor ratings of companies on the Employee Ownership 100 list shows that they tend to be more highly rated by employees than their competitors. The study looked at the three main Glassdoor ratings:
Loren Rodgers
The next term of the NCEO's board of directors begins on April 1, 2021, and I am delighted to announce who will be joining our board of directors for this term.
NCEO
Ashleigh Walters, the president of Onex, Inc., will detail the story from her new book Leading with Grit and Grace at two upcoming NCEO events. This story recounts how she and her husband converted their family-owned manufacturing company to ESOP ownership in the middle of a global health crisis.
