Employee Ownership Blog

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?).

The Clinton administration promised to give a high priority to privatizing government operations through employee ownership. The first such effort is now underway for the Office of Federal Investigations (OFI) in the Office of Personnel Management.

We reported recently that the Department of Labor had withdrawn its valuation guidelines. That information was based on reports from several ESOP consultants, but it turned out to be a misunderstanding.

Most state-owned enterprises in Russia were sold to their employees in the first few years of the 1990s.

Most economists have long argued that as productivity goes up, so do wages and, ultimately, employment. Therefore, if technology increases productivity, more people will be working for more money. Since the industrial revolution, this notion has been well confirmed by actual experience.

We received a letter from a company that wanted to include employees in ownership, but was reluctant to set up an ESOP because of its cost and complexity. It also wanted to keep its 401(k) plan.

Kiwi International Airlines is the only major airline started as an employee-owned firm.

A new survey by IOMA, a newsletter on defined contribution and pension plans, finds that 40% of the allocations in the largest defined contribution plans are in company stock.

Friendly Takeover: How an Employee Buyout Saved a Steel Town is a new book on the employee buyout of Weirton Steel Corporation.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has issued proposed rules for footnote disclosure of stock options. The new proposal should be made final in July.

A new study by Steven Huddart at the University of Michigan and Mark Lang of the University of North Carolina concludes that employees often exercise their options early, thus failing to maximize the theoretical value of the grant.