Employee Ownership

Robert Oakeshott, founder of the Employee Ownership Association, (of which Trust Director Richard Wilkinson is an honorary Vice President) says that employee ownership "entails a movement from business as a piece of property to business as a working community".

In an employee owned business, the majority of the shares are held by individual employees, or held on their behalf by a trust, or a mixture of both. Ideally there will be safeguards in place to prevent shares being sold to private shareholders. When this is combined with participative management, where employees have a significant input into decision making, there are both substantial economic benefits for the business1 and growing evidence of health and social benefits for individual employees.2 

Democratic employee ownership and control also has many advantages as a way of creating a more egalitarian society. It puts earning differentials under democratic control, redistributes wealth quite substantially, prevents external shareholders taking unearned income, improves productivity, develops a sense of community and begins to free people from the divisions wrought by hierarchy and status competition. Furthermore, because employee ownership can and does exist side-by-side with conventional business, it makes successful transformation achievable, with the new society developing within the old.

We would encourage all employees to investigate ways of raising employee ownership in their businesses and in trade union or other workplace forums.

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Further information

1 National Center for Employee Ownership, Employee Ownership and Corporate Performance: A comprehensive review of the evidence. Oakland, CA: National Center for Employee Ownership, 2004.

2 R de Vogli, JE Ferrie, T Chandola, M Kivimaki and MG Marmot, 'Unfairness and health: evidence from the Whitehall II Study', Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (2007)

Wilkinson RG, Pickett KE. The Spirit Level. Penguin. 2009. Buy the book.