NPQ – Report: Business Sales to Worker Co-ops Can Preserve over 1,000 Jobs a Year

From NPQ:

Typically, when US businesses think of employee ownership, the form that ownership takes is an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) company. The most up-to-date data (from 2015) finds that 10.8 million Americans work at an estimated 6,669 companies in which an ESOP owns all or part of the company. Because an ESOP is a federally regulated pension plan, there are costs involved. For smaller companies, especially companies with fewer than 20 employees, a worker cooperative, which is directly owned by workers and is not a pension plan, is likely to be a more cost-effective way for workers to purchase the company from the owners.

Of course, there are other reasons to use a worker cooperative other than costs, including the fact that workers can self-manage more of their own affairs. As Abello notes, “In a worker cooperative, in addition to sharing ownership, workers share collective responsibility in managing the business, often using the principle of ‘one worker, one vote’ to govern decisions like hiring manage

Get the full story here:

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/report-business-sales-to-worker-co-ops-can-preserve-over-1000-jobs-a-year/