In Europe, employee ownership (EO) is increasingly identified as one of the most operational
and effective economic alternatives to the dysfunctional economic system of the 21st century.1
This is understandable since the Western counterparts are exemplary cases of excellent
practice in the field of EO. Over the Atlantic, the American Employee Stock Ownership Plan
(US ESOP) was introduced already in the late 1970s and now there are about 7.000 ESOPs in
the US covering about 10 % of the private workforce. More recently and closer to the EU, the
UK has passed the Employee Ownership Trust (EOT) law, which offers very similar buyout
mechanism and has very similar features with some notable exceptions.2
Just last year, the
Canadian government committed part of the national budget to establish employee ownership
based on the US and the UK examples in order to address the business succession problem
in small-and-medium-sized enterprise.
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