Shared Capitalism at Work: Impacts and Policy Options

For the last several decades, various companies have shared the benefit of corporate results with employees of the firm, using profit-sharing, gain sharing, bonuses, employee stock ownership, or stock options. All of these approaches have one thing in common: offering the worker a share in profits or stock appreciation when the company makes a profit on the capital that investors have provided. For the first time, a comprehensive picture of shared capitalism in the United States has become available as a result of a national random sample of all employed adults in the U.S. government-supported 2002 General Social Survey (GSS).1 This survey provides new information about the impact of shared capitalism on the experiences of workers and their companies. Since these results are statistically representative of the country at large, they are especially salient for policy discussions of these issues. Furthermore, they do not have the disadvantages of the biases introduced by nonrepresentative or small samples, surveys of companies or managers, case studies, or conceptual discussions of these issues.