by
Deborah Groban Olson
COG Executive Director and Project Co-coordinator of COG/OEOC/Ford Foundation Program
We’ve created a global network and Internet communication to sustain long-term ongoing work around the COG mission.
We sought and found the resources (so far) to convene you, a globally diverse group of activists and researchers, because we wanted our strategy to reflect our inclusive values.
We’ve provided three types of groundwork:
1) the Ownership for All papers;
2) your papers describing employee ownership in your country and/ or the way that COG may be able to serve your constituency;
3) research and action proposals generated at the last COG annual meeting –some of which we’ve gotten funded and some not.
Your job over the next 2 days is to help us decide how best to utilize the resources we’ve developed, to date, to accomplish our mission and goals, to make a success of our 2002 international policy conference, and sustain an ongoing global effort to broaden ownership.
We have so many ideas and good people and so little time to evaluate complex ideas. We are experimenting with idea balloting. The ballots will help us determine which ideas are considered: 1) most useful; 2) most feasible; 3) most sustainable; and 4) who is willing to work on them. We’ll use the balloting output to create new working groups, develop programs, and inform our fundraising and to plan our 2002 policy conference. We will enable balloting on ideas to all COG participants via the web site.
We hope you’ll find this process and COG useful to you. We’d like you to become active COG participants. Please consider how our resources might enhance or simplify your work. Don’t hesitate to make self-serving suggestions!
F. Balloting and Discussion Process – How we expect it to work.
1) Write ballot proposals early and often.
There will be newsprint pads and pens around the room. Anytime, before,
during or after a presentation, any speaker or participant can get up and write
a ballot proposal on a newsprint sheet. When you see or think of a ballotable
proposal, put it on a newsprint sheet of ideas not yet balloted.
2) Quick, individual balloting after each presentation.
After
each presentation you’ll have about 5 minutes to ask questions and 5 minutes to
fill out a ballot on one or more proposals.
After all the speakers on a panel have made their presentations, you
will choose one of the ideas and join a group discussion on it. The discussion
groups will follow the ballot format and hold a more in-depth discussion on the
issues surrounding that idea. The group will try to reach a consensus on what
COG can and should do next regarding this idea. Generally, staff will lead
discussion groups, but where there are too many ideas we’ll ask participants to
help moderate discussion groups. Depending on the number of issues, these
discussion groups may have 15 to 30 minutes to discuss and issue and report to
the whole group.
G. COG is a Dynamic Network
The Ford OEOC project is the only existing funded
COG project. But the concept of COG is as a network broader than OEOC. We
encourage you to partner with us or with each other under the COG umbrella to
develop projects located anywhere in the world. Realistically, we need to
consolidate resource utilization wherever possible to enable network
activities. We also have to learn to act globally.
A. Origin and Mission
First organized in 1997, at a conference of the National Center for Employee Ownership, the Capital Ownership Group (COG) is a network of lawyers, accountants, bankers, economic development loan fund staff, government economists and economic development staff, academics, international agency staff, labor union leaders and members, investment bankers, employee owners from CEOs to workers, and community leaders, and policymakers who’s mission is to:
· Create a coalition that promotes broadened ownership of productive capital,
· Reduce inequality of income and wealth;
· Increase sustainable economic growth;
· Expand opportunities for people to realize their productive and creative potential;
· Stabilize local communities by improving living standards; and enhance the quality of life for all.
B. COG Goals
The goals created by this initial group are:
1)
Clarify the
factual case underlying our mission.
2)
Broadly
disseminate information supporting our mission.
3)
Find out what
the public knows and cares about concerning capital concentration, the problems
it generates, and the public’s perception of broad ownership schemes as a
potential solution.
4)
Find out what
opinion makers know and care about concerning capital concentration, the
problems it generates, and the opinion makers’ perceptions of broad ownership
schemes as a potential solutions
5)
Develop policy
alternatives to actualize our mission.
6)
Build a broad
coalition supporting our mission.
7)
Provide
solid data and policy proposals supporting our mission to policy makers,
opinion makers, the media and the general public.
8)
Create and
enhance examples and models of co-ordinate broad ownership systems.
9)
Develop
technical assistance capacity, materials and replication programs:
a)
To disseminate
research and policy proposals supporting our mission.
b)
To assist local
organizations create policy or programs to broaden ownership.
c)
To replicate or
improve upon models of co-ordained broad ownership systems.
10) Co-ordinate policy development in many
countries to create policies that raise the social wage floor, without
sacrificing development opportunities for poor countries.
11) Develop policy alternatives that work for common people in developed
and developing countries.
III. Accomplishments
A. COG’s Network, Website,
Outreach Statistics and Languages
With funding from the Ford Foundation beginning in April of 1999, COG has built and serves this international network. COG runs a web site conference center (virtual think tank) hosting 11 electronic discussions with 285 participants on how employee ownership and other policies and practices can help alleviate the negative aspects of globalization. COG’s library and discussion groups serve as resources for policymakers dealing with the challenges of an increasingly global economy. Discussions include description and critiques of current methods, and discussion of new policy options.
Discussion group topics
include:
1) Employee Ownership initiatives and best
practices nationally, transnationally, sub-nationally, and with privatization;
2) New policy ideas for
broadening ownership and methods of affecting policy changes (Industrial
Homestead);
3) Regional or language
based discussions: India, Spanish language, Russian language;
4) Participant generated
subject matter groups: Economics of Ownership; Organized Labour; and Ownership
Tax Policies.
The basic COG website can be navigated in English, Spanish, Russian and Chinese. There are articles in the library in a variety of languages. We are still debating the wisdom of attaching a computer translation program to the website.
Based on our web tracker, a much larger number of people are retrieving documents from the library. Since going on-line in July 1999, monthly hits on our web site have grown substantially almost every month. As of May 2, 2001, we had received 295,000 total requests for information, with 17,464 in the last week. They have come from 98 countries from Australia to Zimbabwe. Since inception 1,581 files in the archives and library have received 20 or more requests, of which the top eight received over 1,000 requests each. . We have links to 34 related web resources and are about to begin a major global outreach process to research institutions and constituency groups. (The full statistical report on utilization of the web site is available at http://cog.kent.edu/analog.)
Ownership for All is the initial compilation (approximately 150 pages) of the first 18 months of work by the Capital Ownership Group (COG) virtual think tank. It includes reports of six working groups. Each paper is a work in progress. Each discussion group is on going. There is a substantial on-line library comprised of many publications that are or have been under active discussion. Our goal is to develop policies, practices, implementation strategies and mechanisms to facilitate the creation of sound, practical means for local empowerment and economic self-sufficiency globally. Our current method is to expand the COG network to include all major organizations and policy makers concerned with those goals in working groups to develop the means to those ends.
We have created matrices outlining employee ownership law, policy and privatization practices around the globe.
They discussion groups have produced papers:
· Cataloging and discussing best practices in employee ownership policies currently used at the international, national and sub-national level; including tax, technical assistance and subsidized loan policies, and laws which merely enable employee ownership without assisting it;
· Discussing uses and misuses of employee ownership in privatization policies, toward develop best practices criteria in this much-abused area;
· Proposing new policy initiatives for governments and novel methods of structuring ownership rights for adoption by companies under present laws.
· Proposing research projects to determine the social significance of ownership patterns to the status of women, working families and the economically disadvantaged;
· Discussing the role international agencies and trade policies play in affecting ownership patterns, and the potential role these agencies and policies might play to change ownership patterns and provide working people a greater chance at economic sustenance and improve civil society;
· Creating concrete proposals for use by those critical of the international system of credit to developing countries, the IMF and World Bank
· As of the May 6, 2001 conference there are additional papers on employee ownership practices in South Korea, China, Latin America; on reaching out to the global labor movement and on how to reach policy makers with these ideas.
Each of the papers is available on the website and can be accessed directly from the COG homepage at http://cog.kent.edu.
Independent publication of the Ownership for All papers include summaries of three of the six articles in the September 2000 issue of Business Ethics magazine and requests for republication of that same material on the website of the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED). These were both based on outside requests. An organized effort at broad dissemination of these papers will begin in 2001.
The Ford Foundation refunded COG as of December 1, 2000 to do the following:
A. The network will develop 24 to 36 new mutual hot links to significant institutions and organizations. The number of countries linked will be doubled from the current 11 to at least 20.A staff person will focus primarily on wholesale outreach to create mutual links and foster joint discussions and projects with existing networks[1] of labor organizations and their think tanks, socially conscious business groups, employee owned business and non-profit groups, foundations, think tanks, university researchers, community development financial institutions, foundations and advocacy groups focusing on economic justice, civil society, environmental sustainability, globalization, ownership, local economic empowerment and the role of transnational institutions.
B. Registered network participation will increase by 75 to 100 new participants.
C. Five new discussion, policy, research or project groups will be developed with at least three of the moderators coming from outside the current COG participant group. We will be able to pay five non-staff moderators to moderate new discussions.
D. COG library will quintuple to at least 400 titles and 125 authors. The library will add an electronic subject index.
E. Requests to the website will average 8,000 to 10,000 per month in the first year and 10,000 to 15,000 per month in the second year.
F. COG will obtain funding from at least two funders other than the Ford Foundation for projects, research or policy groups developed by the network.
G. COG will itself publish, or cause existing publications to publish five articles or papers arising from its discussion groups.
H. Two conferences will be organized. The first will produce more concrete future directions for COG growing out of the papers it has produced thus far. The second will introduce COG’s policy ideas to the broader policy community potentially interested in this area and to selected policy makers and their staff.
I. COG will co-sponsor a publication or event with one of its new institutional partners bringing broadened ownership ideas to a new audience.
We need to raise an additional $25,000 to fund travel for international participants in our proposed 2002 international broad ownership policy conference. We also plan to raise funds to implement pilot projects on a number of policy ideas proposed within COG.
A. Research priorities:
a)
collect and commission research on the effects of ownership on all manner of
social outcomes including B incomes, patterns on poverty, employment,
education, democracy, environmental awareness and impact, the economic status
of women and children and minority communities, health, family cohesion,
birthrate, employment, voting behavior, income allocation, etc. For example, we
might build on the State of Washington study, which could be replicated or
expanded in Maine or Vancouver. We could also design a prototype of the type of
ownership impact analysis (similar to environmental impact studies) governments
could mandate as part of their requirements for loans or investment of their
funds;
b)
Finish the compilation of laws and regulations on employee ownership globally,
and analyze which ones have had the greatest impact on fostering broadened
ownership, and related economic and social impacts;
c)
Study the revenue implications for governments of tax policies to encourage
ownership as a substitute for redistribution and an incentive to greater productivity.
2) We plan to hold
an international policy conference in October 2002 in Washington, D.C. of
practitioners and researchers, using the final papers from our initial project
providing a broad survey showing what exists and the policy ideas we have
collected. We want these practitioners and researchers to review and critique
the policy papers we created and help with the strategic planning for next
steps around them, including development of follow-up research, demonstration
projects and policy implementation.
B. Developing Policy Proposals.
1) The best use and
obvious next steps for the papers
created by COG thus far is to:
a) perform the strategic analysis proposed at
the end of the Homestead paper (which we are doing here with the balloting
process) to focus on the best of the
ideas proposed therein and to develop an in-depth research, writing,
communication and demonstration project agenda to provide policy makers with
the case for those ideas;
b)
commission research on additional facts needed to create policy proposals;
c)
identify champions and develop research they identify as necessary to move
forward.
2) Investigate and
debate the pros and cons of direct vs. trusteed ownership as used in our other
proposals. Employee ownership (as organized in many different forms and
countries) is trusteed. The fiduciary
obligations of trusteeship have profound implications regarding how employee
owners can and cannot use their economic power for non-economic purposes. Direct ownership can be atomized and
ineffective and is easily subject to corruption. These issues must be reviewed
and considered carefully as policy proposals are developed.
3) Do a systematic
examination of the various employee ownership structures that have been
presented during the COG discussions.
These models include the American ESOP model; the British Acommon ownership@ model (e.g., Scott Bader); the Mondragon
cooperative model with internal accounts (popularized in the US by the
Industrial Cooperative Association); individual employee share ownership like
that generally used in privatization in the United Kingdom and Russia;
broad-based stock options, stock appreciation rights and phantom stock plans
which mirror the change in value of the underlying stock without actual
ownership (though they may become ownership); hybrid models which combine two
or more of the above; and new models using limited liability corporations,
etc..
4) Given the rapid
growth of broad-based stock options extending to most or all employees of the
firm (rather than just management) in the United States and the controversy
swirling around them in the Department of Labor, a policy paper may be useful
on how to modify legal and accounting practices to avoid abuse and to make them
a more reliable form of employee ownership and wealth creation.
C. Developing
Implementation Strategies
1) Run focus groups
to vet the ideas with local and national policy makers to improve their
practical appeal.
2) Hold a major
invitation-only policy conference in Washington, DC in 24 months to present
research results and policy ideas and to obtain feedback on the political
feasibility of the policy proposals.
3) Develop more
precise models, including projected economic impact, of SQPQ, OTC=s, grubstakes, and other ideas developed in the Homestead
discussion for discussion with policy makers.
4) Find or organize
focus groups of local, regional and national policy makers to review new policy
proposals generated by the Homestead discussion as well as those existing examples
compiled via the sub-national and national papers. Present data on how the
existing policies have worked, including the impact research, and get feedback
on the political feasibility of promising new and existing proposals.
5) Organize one or
more high-level policy conference(s) reporting on the policy proposals and the
outcomes of the social and economic research on the effects of broad
ownership. Hire a consulting firm with
the necessary contacts to ensure that high-level folks come to the conference
and are properly briefed.
D. Foster demonstration projects
An important
function of our network is bringing together like- minded people, with diverse
or convergent expertise and needs, and to facilitate their joint work. Their joint endeavors may include research,
policy development or organization of demonstration projects. COG needs staff resources to co-ordinate
these activities and to help them find resources.
Examples include:
1) We=d like to find financial and technical
resources for a project to help an existing community economic education center
in Mexico develop its ability to serve as a Mondragon-like co-operative
business incubator.
2) Participants from British Columbia and
Maine are interested in pursuing the Stock Quid Pro Quo for government largesse
(SQPQ) proposals with policy makers.
3) The Council for Hometown Jobs and Growth
is interested in working with us to design and implement a community and/or
consumer trust for a company with which they are working, to serve as a model
similar to the Shann Turnbull proposal of Ownership Transfer Corporations
(OTCs).
4) Organize a graduate school of management
focusing on employee owned and participative firms. Given the national
dispersal of the potential students for this program, we would explore the
possibility of running on-line courses (a non-profit version of the University
of Phoenix) together with having the courses held in a Abrick and mortar@ institution.
E.
Disseminating research results, policy proposals and information on
demonstration projects
1) Develop a multi-media educational
outreach effort to get the idea that broad ownership is a fundamental component
of global economic democracy onto the radar screen of the national and
international media and policy makers
2) Publish our papers as a book.
3) Get summaries of our research results and
policy ideas published in policy and popular publications.
4) Use the Internet to disseminate the short
versions of our papers to constituency groups.
5) Develop a speakers bureau and send our
staff to speak at conferences and events.
6) Create press packages with research
results and examples of demonstration projects and provide them to the press
and influential policy writers and policy makers.
7) Develop contacts with television and
movie media and, such as The Working Group and Hedrick Smith Productions, to
provide contents such as ownership stories for dramatization or as news
features. (There is a lot of drama involved in saving a small town with an
employee buyout, etc.)
8) Partner w/ AYes@ magazine and A
Business Ethics@ - Business Ethics is
about to feature the outcome of our Homestead discussion in its September 2000
issue.
9) Create content for public access TV.
10) Forward the Uprovisa video to PBS and cable.
11) Develop media slogan, PR strategy and
simple description of the COG mission.
Some ideas generated on this subject at our Chicago conference included:
a) formulate ideas to appeal to the values
of those in power;
b) consider the different strategies of
Singapore vs. Brazil B D. Korten=s
books;
c)
use focus groups to frame the message;
d) consider framing the issue as
-Aright to vote@ in
corporations as corporations become the new world powers; or
- Aseduced by wealth vs. up-close ownership@ or
-
the values of Singapore B performance, growth, productivity and speed
vs. the needs of democracy
- ownership is power, when combined with
knowledge of long-term self-interest
12) Develop a video lending library of
employee ownership stories, such as those of Mondragon, Uprovisa, Sharpsville
Quality Products, Algoma Steel in Canada, Scott-Bader, etc. Get permission to
distribute these and distribute them widely with texts to explain how these
examples are relevant as examples of what might be more general solutions to
the problem of maintaining communities in a global economy.
13) Hire a blue ribbon panel to provide
political feasibility analysis to proposals generated by COG and publicize the
outcome. Invite the blue ribbon panel to the high-level policy conference.
14) Become a publisher of both scholarly and
popular publications on ownership policy and practices, and their economic and
social impacts. Develop distribution channels, in all media, for these ideas
and data.
15) Take over an existing policy journal and
focus it on our issues.
16) In conjunction with (or following the
model of) NCEO develop relationships with researchers where they do the
technical research and publish in academic journals and we get the right to
first publication in all non-technical media.
[1] These include the network of labor think tanks such as the Economic Policy Institute in the US, NALEDI in South Africa, DSA in Brazil, the ILO Bureau of Employment Security, the Center for Working Capital, the CDFI network, the Heartland Industrial Forum, the Shared Capitalism Institute, Sustainable America, the Social Venture Network, the international network of employee ownership organizations creating a joint database on equity compensation for transnational corporations, International Cooperative Federation, the International Forum on Globalization, the Bretton Woods Project, CFED, ISLR and the networks of local government leaders they serve seeking new policy ideas, to name a few.