Would it be fair to say that companies like AMZN or GOOG have "employee ownership" because of the stock options? If so, it means many tech companies meet this definition.
(and possibly Sundar?)
Beyond that, stock _options_ aren't stock, and stock _grants_ to employees are often in restricted classes... they're not meaningful employee ownership because they're structured to ensure that they don't represent any kind of employee control over the company.
Makes no sense to me.
Case in point example: SpaceX shares are very illiquid but also very very much up since SpaceX was founded.
If that company is a co-op in which only employees are allowed to own shares, the only people I can sell my shares to are other employees.
In general, more willing buyers (who in turn know they can they sell those shares unrestricted in the future to any buyer), increases the people willing to bid on those shares at any given moment in time. (It’s the same basic reason that you’d rather have $100 in cash than $100 gift card for Starbucks.)
That sounds like plain old profit sharing, not ownership.
Worker cooperatives are organizations that are governed by their workers for their workers, not owned as property to be traded or sold.
1: Lower liquidity usually goes hand in hand with higher transaction costs, which means a bigger gap between how much the buyer pays and how much the seller walks away with.
2: Time value of money: Suppose some liquid asset can be exchanged for $X right now, and an otherwise equivalent illiquid asset can be exchanged for $X by, let's say, a month from now. $X today is more valuable than $X in a month, so no one is going to buy the illiquid asset today for $X if they could get the liquid one instead.
Rank and file aren't really "shareholders". We hold an utterly insignificant stake compared to funds and other corps. They can take a board of directors and bend their beaks all they way back to their rectums, force them to act against a company's best interests.
Employee ownership means the employees decide what they do with the profits derived from their labour. The company itself tends to benefit as well, in terms of stability, quality of work life, and long-term profitability.
Stock options in small percentages are a form of profit participation but a weak contributor to the question on if a business is a co-op.
Of course, any publicly-traded company can be 'employee-owned' to whatever degree the employees buy shares. But this term usually indicates something else.