Some CEOs favor expanded ESOPs

[ucbalumnus]

Better than 401(k)?: There's a move to get workers real long-term ownership...

@Ian Thomas in CNBC

Pete Stavros, co-head of global private equity at KKR, said that when he meets with CEOs and asks them how their employees are feeling, it often results in vague responses: “There’s not a tremendous amount of insight,” he said.

When KKR runs its own set of worker surveys across the companies in its portfolio, “The results consistently surprise CEOs to the downside. They’re like ‘Wow, yeah, I didn’t know it was that bad.’”

Stavros has been championing a strategy that he believes can solve some of these issues, born out of his own decades of experience across hundreds of private equity deals but also his father’s career journey working for a small construction company in Chicago: employee stock ownership.

However, this page does not mention the obvious concentration of risk – if an employee has a substantial amount of savings and investments in their employer’s stock, then the employer doing poorly can cost the employee both their job and their savings and investments (that they most need when they do not have a job).

[HImom]

Yes, Enron employees didn’t have any security when their world collapsed.

[BunsenBurner]

Hahaha. You beat me to that.

[HImom]

I’m sure greedy companies think this is a great idea—they don’t actually have to pay staff more, just given more stock with lots of strings attached—“golden handcuffs,” where employees can’t afford to leave behind all their benefits with the strings.

[oldmom4896]

One of my local supermarkets has posters at the entrance stating that they are employee-owned as well as being a union shop. I believe that employees at most NYC supermarkets (mostly local chains of stores run as coops with store-by-store ownership) have union representation.