Evidence

Sharing the fruits of labour with workers has led to initiatives of both profit-sharing and worker ownership. Several decades of research shows that firms with worker ownership and profit-sharing tend to do better on average. A variety of studies, those comparing firms before and after they initiated worker ownership, those comparing workers in the same firm with and without worker ownership, and those looking at combinations of worker ownership and profit-sharing, find the same results. Evidence from large groups of firms and large samples of workers show that a supportive corporate culture is generally necessary for worker ownership to function best. Cash profit-sharing in the short term tends to strengthen the economic performance edge.