One of the problems that cooperatives face is that they do not have a standard gradual conversion mechanism but are generally established as new business startups or by an all-at-once conversion of a conventional company to a cooperative. This paper describes such a conversion mechanism.
Critical Analysis of Different Forms of Employee Ownership
November 28, 2024 by
From the 1970’s, there has been almost a half-century of development of employee-owned firms. There has been a wide variety of legal/capital structures that have been tried but too little analysis of which legal forms work or don’t work over the longer term, e.g., the transition from one generation to the next generation of employee-owners. This paper provides a critical analysis of the major forms. The emphasis is the lack of learning between the different forms. The same problems keep recurring even though solutions are known.
Trespassing against the Happy Consciousness of Orthodox Economics
June 1, 2024 by
This is Chapter 1 in my book: Ellerman, David. 1995. Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life: Essays in Philosophy, Economics, and Mathematics. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
This first chapter addresses the problems of trespassing involved in understanding the arguments presented in the first five “controversial” chapters of the collection. These chapters challenge the whole idea of the employer-employee relationship that is the institutional basis for our present version of a private-property market economy. The problems of trespassing against fundamental orthodoxy in the social and moral sciences are of a completely different order of magnitude than the problems of trespassing in the natural and mathematical sciences.
Talk Slides about European ESOP
April 4, 2024 by
These are slides from a talk about the European ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) developed by the Institute for Economic Democracy in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Worker Cooperatives and other so-called “Cooperatives”
March 30, 2024 by
Most cooperative organizations today do not exemplify any cooperative activity; non-worker cooperatives do not represent any cooperative activity of the members since the only joint activity of the organization is carried out by employees. The idea that cooperatives are democratically governed does not apply to non-worker cooperatives (based on the employment relation) since the members are not choosing the managers or governors of their own activity but of the activity of the people working in the cooperative.
European ESOP
November 24, 2022 by
The American Employee Stock Ownership Plan or ESOP is a leveraged buyout mechanism so that the employees in a company can, in effect, do a leveraged buyout of part or eventually all of their own company. ESOP is one of the most successful and unifying models for employee ownership in the world. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the main features of the US ESOP model and to define a technical description of the European ESOP, which builds on the good features of the US model and improves the flawed features.
Less-Known Supporters of Workplace Democracy
June 30, 2021 by
his paper, published as an editorial in the Journal for Participation and Employee Ownership collects together extensive quotations and extracts from 19th and 20th century thinkers who were little-known for being supporters of workplace democracy.
Reclaiming Democratic Classical Liberalism
March 19, 2020 by
The argument shows that the classical liberal endorsement of sovereign individuals acting in the marketplace generalizes to the joint action of individuals as the principals in their own organizations and associations.
Classical Liberalism and Workplace Democracy
November 20, 2019 by
This is a paper coauthored by Tej Gonza for the European Liberal Forum, the foundation associated with the Lib-Dem parties of the EU in the EU Parliament. It explores the support for workplace democracy given by democratic classical liberals such as Tocqueville, Mill, Dewey, and Buchanan.
Interview at Norwegian Thinktank Manifest (English trans.)
November 22, 2018 by
English translation of June 2018 interview at Oslo think-tank Manifest.