In an awful lot of companies, that people work at, the hierarchy of the ownership of such, is typically represented by the corporate officers owning all or a significant portion of the corporation; or if not, then these corporate executives effectively are in control of the corporate ship in regards to the most important business strategies and decisions so being made, and the direction, so taken, thereof. In other words, for a significant swath of Americans, they are employees, first and foremost, that work within the structure of the given corporation, and with the exception of possible monetary bonuses or stock options so being provided to those employees, per the dictates of that corporation, those that are employed, don’t really have much say in the corporate decisions so being made, and are often not even really in the loop of that decision making process.
There was a time, when unions, really did have a voice with management; but we so find that in the private sector of today’s enterprises, unions have been in steep decline for a considerable period of time, so for the most part, in most business enterprises, employees effectively have no voice for they have no union. This thus signifies that because employees are in essence, treated as simply being one cog in a vast machine, that what so happens, for better or worse, is almost exclusively controlled by upper management. In short, should the executive office, desire to close a given office, or close a given factory, and thereby move employment to some other city, or to outsource work previously done in-house, elsewhere, or even to contract such to an overseas’ venue, there isn’t anything or anybody that can stop corporate from being able to effect that change.
On the other hand, when workers of a given corporation, actually have some significant degree of equity in a company, they are in essence, employed at what is for all practical purposes, an employee-owned or majority employee owned enterprise, of which, we do so find that the dynamic, of this enterprise, is quite different. That is to say, that firstly, the motivation for a given employee changes for the better, when they have some meaningful equity within the structure of the company that they work for, in which, because of that equity as well as the knowledge that their success or lack thereof, correlates to their earnings, they will, more times than not, put forth a greater effort and make a greater sacrifice for the betterment of that company, because they have a material stake in it. Secondly, corporations, that are employee-owned, or that have employees with a considerable say in that corporation, characteristically are going to be the type of staff that will prefer to continue to work within the locality of that employment; which is obviously beneficial for the people that make up that community and its tax base.
There are those corporations, that play an amusing game of semantics in which they called their employees, “associates,” or things of this ilk; which might well be okay if those associates actually had a voice in that company, but alas, they typically, do not. Instead, what communities need to recognize is that locally owned business enterprises, as well as employee-owned businesses, are the very best companies to have in a community, for unlike, behemoth corporations that often have no loyalty to the community that they presently reside in; those that are worker-owners, most certainly do.