Using data from an extensive study of employee-owned companies in Ohio, where employee ownership is a well-developed trend, this book offers a strong empirical portrait of firms with Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs). It describes how these plans work and places their emergence and change in a historical context. John Logue and Jacquelyn Yates examine firms that have succeeded in employee ownership and those with failed plans. Some companies, they find, are committed to the concept of employee ownership, and others merely use ESOPs as a financing tool.Detailed information resulting from multiple surveys allows the authors to draw well-grounded conclusions regarding the question of why some employee-owned firms outperform others. The bottom line, they find, is that employee-owned firms that "do it all," implementing features such as employee participation and communication about finances, training, and cultural change, systematically outperform their conventional competitors. They also have an advantage over firms that understand employee ownership incompletely, if it all, and yet claim to adopt its methods.

No detailed description available for "Understanding Employee Ownership".

From the back cover: The billions of dollars in Canadian pension funds belong to the workers for whom these funds were established. The money, in effect, is their "deferred wages", but, even though these vast sums now constitute the largest source of capital in the country, it has only been in the past few decades that workers, through their unions, have started to play a role in how, when and where their pension money is invested. This informative and fact-filled book examines the growing involvement of labour organizations in the management--and more often the co-management--of pension funds. It looks at the duties and rights of union trustees on pension boards, at their "fiduciary responsibility", at the crucial issues of social and ethical investments--and it also explains the success of progressive labour-sponsored investment funds.