The Citizens Share

In the largest study of profit-sharing and employee ownership in years, Joseph R. Blasi, Richard B. Freeman and Douglas L. Kruse investigated dozens of large- and medium-sized companies across all sectors of the United States' economy. The ten-year effort involved nearly 50,000 employees, and the findings were unequivocal: when rank-and-file employees - not just top executives - are given an ownership stake in their company, the result is better worker engagement, more loyalty, more innovation, and drastically lower turnover. The common notion that profit sharing creates a free rider mentality among workers proves totally unfounded. In The Citizen's Share, Blasi, Freeman and Kruse argue that the concept of employee ownership has deep roots extending back to the political and economic vision of America's founders. Thomas Jefferson, for example, conceived of the Louisiana Purchase as a path that would lead to widespread economic independence through individual land ownership. The authors discuss the founding generation's seminal ideas about personal economic independence, explain how we have strayed from those ideas, and propose practical solutions for bringing employment practices back in line with the nation's founding principles.