The associate concept promotes a non-competitive family atmosphere. Associates help each other in times of professional and personal need. For example, this unity prompted partners to take pay cuts rather than lay off associates after the 1987 stock market crash. Associates' ties to the firm also are strengthened through ownership, specifically general and limited partnerships. General partnerships, now at 201, are available to investment representatives and senior managers who perform well and are leaders.
Limited partnerships are available to any employee based on their contributions.
About 30 percent of all the firm's nearly 5,580 employees are limited partners. This ownership structure is from Ted Jones' blueprint of employee-ownership. He threatened to quit the company in the 1970s when his father and firm founder, Edward D. Jones Sr., wanted to make his daughters partners. Ted Jones told his father that the employees should reap the rewards and that the firm needed partners to share the work, not just the profits. Others created it.