CSR management, Employees

Ooops. Having lost their jobs, their life savings and their pension fund, many Enron employees will have a different perspective, to put it mildly, on whether it makes sense to encourage greater share ownership among the workforce. (Many Railtrack employees have had a similarly painful experience too.) Of course the causes of the Enron collapse go deeper and its ramifications will go much wider, but it's a timely reminder. Indeed if employee ownership is self-evidently such a great idea, why do governments in the UK and in the US feel they have to encourage it through tax incentives? The key objective is to make real the stake employees already have in their firms, to whom they devote most of their waking hours. As the small print of the Tomorrow's Company report shows, it is the broad range of participatory measures that makes the difference, not ownership per se; such as open governance, transparent conduct, honest management, sharing profits genuinely created? all the things apparently lacking at Enron.

Corporate Citizenship Briefing, issue no: 62 - February, 2002