B Corps, Black-Owned Business and Employee Ownership

EO+WD Weekly Newsletter, Vol. 52

Happy Saturday!

Prof. Hand here, pinch-hitting on our weekend newsletter. Seize the weekend! And definitely do not spend it binging The Peripheral on Amazon.

What We’ve Been Writing 

• Tiffany profiles two employee-owned firms, Harold Beck & Sons and The Walker Group

• Dr. Hand rounds up what we know about Black-owned businesses and employee ownership

• Dr. Hand takes a first shot at putting employee ownership in conversation with B Corporation certification

News We’ve Been Reading

• There’s a new employee ownership-oriented private equity fund… in Dallas! 🤠

• The Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center has lunched its new Social Co-op Academy

• Employee stock ownership advocates are holding their breath for the next round of Department of Labor regulations

• Recent employee ownership transitions: Minnesota’s Room & Board, California’s CriticalRiver and Nussbaum Group, and the first employee ownership trust in Ireland, Wolfgang Digital

• Recent company spotlights: Chicago’s Clark Devon Hardware and South Africa’s PepsiCo Basumi Trust

Analysis and Think Pieces

• Christos Makridis explores artificial intelligence, employee ownership, and the future of work

• Ashoka’s Michael Zakaras asks what it would take to build an ownership economy

• From the left: Adam Hemingway interviews with Jacobin

• From the UK: Ian Weinfass pushes back against employee ownership trusts

What’s Next 

• NCEO’s next EOT Peer Gathering is this week

• Pete Stavros hits 60 Minutes this Sunday. Check out Minseo’s 2022 article about the conversation about KKR’s model

Nerd Alert

• On Dr. Hand’s more academic reading list this week are three papers from 2022:

  • “Democratizing Work” by Julie Battilana and company

  • “A Real Utopia” by Trevor Young-Hyman and friends

  • “Spillover effect of workplace democracy” by Irma Rybnikova

In Case You Missed It 

• The Aspen Employee Ownership Ideas Forum videos are up!

  • The Indiana Center for Employee Ownership keeps a running list of employee stock ownership plan mergers and acquisitions, one of the bright spots of ESOP growth discussed at the Ideas Forum

The Employee Ownership + Workplace Democracy Research Cluster (EO+WD) is a joint project of UT-Arlington professor Mark Hand and students at UTA and SMU.