Employee Ownership Blog

TWA, which continues to advertise itself as "employee owned," has received approval for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization that it and its unions believe will lead to a recovery. As part of the agreement, however, employee ownership will drop from 45% to 30%.

Within the next few weeks, the IRS will issue a revenue ruling indicating that trustees can vote shares for which ESOP participants do not provide directions.

The IRS is looking into the tax status of corporate owned life insurance (COLI), which many employee ownership companies now use to handle repurchase liability.

Efforts to trade concessions for ownership at USAir have broken off. Both sides say they are too far apart to reach agreement and will not revisit the issue until contracts expire in 1997.

A new study estimates the amount of employer stock held in 401(k) plans to be higher than previously reported.

Leaders of the Chinese State Commission on Economic Restructuring recently completed a three-week tour of the U.S., including meetings with U.S. employee ownership experts.

Malaysia, one of the world's fastest-growing economies, is now exploring employee ownership. Workers at its state-owned petroleum firm are being given the first shot at buying shares in the company, which is about to be privatized.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has proposed privatizing its Investigation Service office by transferring the operation to employees. The 700-employee service does background checks for security purposes.

A delegation of Chinese officials, including the director of the State Commission on Economic Restructuring and several directors of its provincial counterparts, recently completed a three-week tour of the U.S. that included several visits with employee ownership experts and companies.

The pilots at Delta Airlines have become the latest union group to ask for stock in return for concessions the company wants the pilots to accept.

In late August, a conference will be held in Kuala Lumpur to discuss employee ownership as a business and privatization strategy in Malaysia. Malaysia now joins Jamaica, Argentina, China, and Zimbabwe among non-Western counties looking at this option.

Several recent reports have noted that during the last decade, real total compensation (wages and benefits) have been stagnant while returns to capital have soared (remember the Dow in the 1980s and how analysts wondered if it could ever top 3,000?).