Are Athlete-Owned Leagues a Viable Alternative for Professional Sport?

Sport leagues have been critiqued for their cartel-like behavior, monopsony power, and many occupational health risks to athletes. Athlete-owned sports leagues are an alternative way of organizing professional sport that may benefit athletes and the industry. This article examines the viability of athlete-owned leagues by reviewing theory and research on worker-owned firms and applying the findings to sports leagues with athlete ownership, with a focus on the Premier Lacrosse League. Five criteria are shown to affect the viability of worker ownership: heterogeneity of interests, capital-labor ratios, time horizons, motivation and efficiency, and conflict with capitalists. When applied to the sport industry, athlete ownership is likely in sports like beach volleyball and skateboarding but unlikely in sports like American football and soccer. Athlete-owned sports leagues have some benefits when compared with capitalist-owned leagues, but they will struggle in markets with incumbents.

Overcoming the capital investment hurdle in worker-controlled firms

Purpose Both the academic literature and practitioners have long noted the need for an equity investment mechanism for worker-controlled firms that alleviates investor anxieties without undermining internal workplace democracy. The purpose of this paper is to outline one such possible mechanism. Design/methodology/approach The proposal locks together the interests of workers and external investors, via non-voting shares with dividends set by a pre-agreed value-added sharing formula. Each worker is paid a base wage, with the average across the firm being a pre-defined multiple of the national minimum wage. Any additional surplus is split into a number of equal “slices”, with each share receiving one slice as its dividend, and the average worker receiving a pre-agreed number of slices as a bonus. Findings Workers have an incentive to maximise their own incomes, and in so doing, will also automatically maximise the dividends received by investors, obviating the need for the shares to have normal voting rights. Working on this principle of aligned interests, the authors also discuss reinvestment, worker ownership of non-voting shares and possibilities for a secondary share market. The authors show how this proposal will be a significant step in aligning the interests of investors with owner-workers in a democratic, negotiated way that shares both risk and returns, thus making worker-controlled firms more attractive to equity investment. Originality/value In light of the recognised problem of underinvestment in worker-controlled firms and the risk of their degeneration, this paper will interest both academics and practitioners in employee ownership, co-operatives and various forms of workplace democracy.

Drawing Out Democracy: The Role of Sortition in Preventing and Overcoming Organizational Degeneration in Worker-Owned Firms

Fostering sustainable worker ownership and control of their organizations has long been an aspiration for many. Yet, the growth of worker-owned firms (WOFs) is often accompanied by organizational degeneration: the tendency for a small oligarchy of unrepresentative workers to control democratic structures at the expense of the participation of everyday workers. Prior research suggests that organizational degeneration occurs naturally as WOFs become larger and more complex. Building on and departing from this work, I argue in this essay that an important cause is likely to be current practice around how worker representatives are selected—specifically, the near-universal reliance on elections. As an alternative, I argue that the application of sortition—the use of lotteries—to select worker representatives in major decision-making bodies such as boards of directors and councils could help prevent and overcome organizational degeneration, while also offering additional social and business benefits for workers and their organizations.

The Social Structures of Accumulation and the Labor Movement: A Brief History and a Modest Proposal

The economic and political crisis of the 1970s undermined the postwar social structures of accumulation (SSA) and gave rise to the current globalized, neoliberal, financialized (GNF) SSA. Under GNF, we have witnessed the explosion of the precariat and the reemergence of simpler forms of labor control characteristic of earlier SSAs. This article discusses the response of the labor movement, broadly defined, to these changes, including the rise of worker centers, worker ownership, campaigns for increased state regulation, and cross-border organizing. Finally, it raises the question of whether the current national labor federation can act as an incubator for the experimentation and structural changes necessary for the labor movement to meet the challenges of the GNF-SSA.

Stronger Together? The USW-Mondragon Union Co-op Model

In 2009, United Steelworkers (USW) and Mondragon signed an agreement to promote union co- ops: firms that combine democratic worker ownership and union membership. Eleven U.S. initiatives now seek to implement the USW-Mondragon union co-op model, prompting a debate about whether unions and worker cooperatives are stronger together. This article draws on a case study of the first such initiative in Cincinnati, Ohio to put claims about the model in dialogue with aspirations and experiences of people on the ground. I synthesize six possibilities and dilemmas of union involvement in worker cooperative formation and argue that these considerations should structure the future debate.

Shared Capitalism in the USA

Already meaningful, US worker ownership can be expanded with public policies. The US spends about $1 trillion every five years on tax incentives for businesses. To expand worker ownership, the White House could develop an Office of Broad-Based Capitalism. Stock market companies should only be allowed deductions for executive pay if they have a broad-based worker ownership plan for all workers. Moreover, all Federal business tax subsidies could be conditioned on a broad-based worker ownership plan. However, worker ownership will never spread until earlier tax incentives for Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) in stock market companies repealed by the first President George Bush, are reinstated with additional encouragements for all companies to make stock grants to workers. Finally, Congress needs to make it easier for small business people retiring to sell the company to the workers and for private equity firms to spin off their portfolio companies to the workers.

Statutory Employee Stock Ownership Plans in the USA

An Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) is the most common vehicle for broad-based worker ownership in the United States. An ESOP is a legal trust that holds the shares of all the workers in a firm and thus makes it possible to have long-lasting worker ownership. Under US law existing companies can contribute stock or cash to this trust in order to buy shares of company stock to gradually establish worker ownership. Probably, unique to the United States, this workers’ trust can borrow funds to buy shares on behalf of workers in order to establish significant, majority, or even 100 per cent worker ownership in one single transaction. All company contributions to the worker trust, whether in cash or stock or to repay loans used to buy stock for workers, gives the company a tax deduction under US federal law. Also interest on the loan is deductible.

An American Historical Perspective on Employee Ownership

Worker ownership plays a significant role in the US economy today. This worker ownership takes on different forms. A large proportion of the US population (close to a fifth) owns stock in the company where they work. Meaningful worker holdings are ubiquitous in high-technology companies such as Google in the Internet area, Microsoft in the software area, Gilead Sciences in biotechnology, and Qualcomm in mobile technology. The most intensive sectors of worker ownership in the US are about 10,000 companies with about 15 million workers with Employee Stock Ownership Plans, where about 4,000 of the firms are majority or 100 per cent worker-owned, and a compact but vibrant and growing sector of about 300 worker co-operatives with about 6,000 members. Much of this chapter is based on our book, The Citizen’s Share, with economist Richard B. Freeman (Blasi, Freeman, and Kruse, 2015: 57–122).