Introduction

Why Ownership for All?
Deborah Groban Olson and Jacquelyn Yates

How can the development of a new level of interconnection in the world's economy-that process called globalization-be a dawning of hope for the world's people rather than a downward spiral into misery? Rapid movement of capital, a focus on maximizing returns to absentee owners, and a disdain for local consequences have given globalization a bad name. But globalization has also brought paying work to desperately impoverished rural areas, cheaper goods to the developed world, and a growing sense of shared citizenship in one world. Even the protestors in Seattle don't want to go back. They just want globalization with more compassion, more concern for local communities, more opportunity, and more hope for the next generation. Our focus in the following pages is one strategy for helping that to happen: broadening ownership of productive assets.

There is no doubt that the situation is serious. Capital concentration is increasing.

Efficient manufacturing processes are flooding the world with goods, but many cannot afford to buy. Wages in some sectors seem to be on a race to the bottom. The World Trade Organization treaties and protocols focus on protecting the free flow of capital at the expense of control by local authorities, who lose the ability to protect incipient civil societies. These treaties have replicated the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, but without the protections for rights of individuals and rights of the states that the Constitution also guaranteed. Just as most of the world's countries are embracing a concept of democracy, however flawed, the largest corporations are eclipsing many of the world's governments in economic power and political influence.

We have another, more attractive, choice: to open ownership of enterprises to much more of the world's population. It is to make ownership available to employees out of capital growth, not through a program of redistributing existing wealth. Broadened employee ownership of enterprises, sharing in the risks and reaping the benefits, creates a countertrend to the concentration of wealth, which has been the worst feature of globalization.

To do this requires new thinking. Many of the ideas that could broaden ownership are already succeeding in local venues, but they need to be brought forward for many more to see and try. The papers that follow describe many ways to progress toward broader ownership -from a new agenda for international lenders to taking advantage of one-time events like privatization or governmental rescues of banks and stock markets. They propose new ideas and point out solutions to some known problems, such as how poor employees can afford to purchase an enterprise.

The five summaries which follow highlight longer papers inspired by the online discussions among practitioners and scholars since midsummer 1999 at the Capital Ownership Group website. (Full versions of the papers are available at the website www.capitalownership.org.) Topics were initially organized to focus on different levels of action-transnational, national and subnational, but events of the time required a group to focus on privatization, and a fifth group was formed around the theme of a "homestead act," modeled on the governmental distribution of land that broadened farm ownership in the U.S. Later, a group formed to discuss the ideas of Louis Kelso, who developed the concept of the employee stock ownership plan in the United States. The papers in this collection reflect the five original groups.

The first paper looks at efforts to form employee-owned enterprises at the subnational level, without any specific support from national government policy. These efforts include local and provincial legislative measures; development of employee ownership-friendly investment funds; local organizations to provide technical support and training; and actions by unions, nonprofit foundations, religious groups and existing employee-owned companies to encourage employee ownership. The second paper describes the many ways in which employee ownership has been supported and encouraged by national governments and other national-level organizations. The third paper reflects on the wave of privatization, which began with outsourcing of a few governmental functions and ended with the sale of thousands of state-owned enterprises in countries of former Soviet influence. Fourth is a look at policies to favor employee ownership at the transnational level, by corporations, intergovernmental organizations and non-governmental institutions. The concluding paper imagines new policies that could be established at many levels to promote employee ownership of many kinds.