While there were only a few hundred employee owned firms in the US in 1973 with a few thousand employees, there are now more than 11,000 employee stock ownership plan companies employing 9.5 million employee owners. Globally, most high technology companies provide stock options to employees. Approximately 100 multinational corporations now provide employee ownership to all their employees world-wide. Employee ownership has broad and shallow support from right and left, so it is politically viable in many countries and political systems. It also has great gut appeal to most people.
Many business owners feel it is the right thing to do.
There is great diversity of experience and opinion on the effects of these programs on local economies and the relative benefit provided to workers in various economic strata. Practitioners and participants in this global phenomenon have created the COG network to evaluate and promulgate best practices from this experience and to develop new policy proposals. Ownership for All is a global anthology of experiences with employee ownership policies, practices, policy proposals and related debates. It summarizes the first six COG discussions. These ideas have been discussed in a variety of forms in the COG Homestead group.