Imagine a world where workers share in the fruits of their own labor. Now imagine that this world is within our reach. While the Harvard Business School is just starting to consider new economic paradigms beyond capitalism and its incessant exploitation of workers, Colorado state officials and residents are taking bold action to create the world that we want to inhabit—one marked by thriving worker-owned businesses and a far more equitable distribution of wealth.

Employee ownership can take many forms, including worker cooperatives, employee stock option plans (ESOPs), “hybrid” employee-owned LLCs and corporations, and employee-ownership trusts. While the National Center for Employee Ownership defines employee ownership as “any arrangement in which a company’s employees own shares in their company or the right to the value of shares in their company,” in a worker cooperative, ownership means not just sharing profits, but having a direct voice and vote in the workplace.

The benefits of employee ownership are demonstrable and manifold. According to NCEO, employee-owners have higher wages and net worth, receive better workplace benefits, and are less likely to lose jobs during a downturn compared with workers who do not have an ownership stake in their place of employment. A recent study found that employee-owned businesses, defined as employee ownership of at least 30 percent of business shares, which all employees having access to owning, are more productive, grow faster, and are less likely to go out of business than non-employee-owned businesses.

In short, broad-based employee ownership can help to preserve businesses and sustain quality jobs. Depending on the ownership structure, it can also bring democracy to the workplace.

According to NCEO, as of December 2021, the US was home to 6,482 ESOP companies with 10.2 million active employee-owners. This number is somewhat deceptive since it includes large public companies where the only employee benefit is stock ownership. But included in that number are 5,880 privately held ESOPs with over 1.5 million employee-owners, many of whom play a significant role in helping to run the company. Additionally, though they form a far smaller sector (about 10,000 people), worker co-ops are growing at a rapid pace of 30 percent per year.

Read the full article about support for employee ownership models by Yessica Holguin and Jason Wiener at Nonprofit Quarterly.