Our Mission
Genesis
The Employee Ownership Group was formed in 2002 by a group of representatives from major Australian businesses. They were drawn together by a shared conviction that successive Federal Governments had missed major opportunities to transform the Australian workplace by promoting employee share ownership.
Governments, and the major political parties, have been consistent over more than 20 years in focusing on Industrial Relations as providing the sole instrument of workplace reform. The role of shared ownership in re-making the world of work is not understood, so it has been treated with scant attention.
The consequences are on display in the shape of the Federal laws that govern Employee Share Ownership Plans (ESOPs).
Employee share plans in Australia
In Australia today the chief beneficiaries of ESOPs are the employees of publicly listed companies (see our "Current ESOPs Regime" page). However, the overwhelming majority of private sector employees work for unlisted companies and private companies - and these often face insuperable barriers to implementing employee share plans.
Barriers to employee ownership
Our Federal Taxation, Corporations and Securities laws pose the chief obstacles to employee ownership in Australia (see our "Making Share Plans Hard" page). Thanks to the way they have been framed, there are few share plans and few employee owners to be found in Australian unlisted and private companies.
As for employees of publicly listed companies who can, and often do, benefit from share plans, their stakes are typically small. In listed companies employee share ownership is often widespread among employees, but very thinly allocated. This want of ownership in depth is the result, in part, of tax laws that encourage participation in share plans that deliver the least number of shares and the lowest quotient of ownership.
Given that employee ownership in-depth is what triggers the productivity effect of ESOPs, Australia's share plan legal regime acts as a brake upon increased workplace productivity.
Employee Ownership Group - our task
The EOG was set up to change this situation.
Our mission is to design and advocate laws governing employee share plans: laws which allow ESOPs to be more easily implemented and operated, in every kind of company, and for share plans to be taxed fairly (see our "ESOP Legislative Reform Measures" page).
The EOG advocates employee share plans for all private sector employees and promotes an employee ownership that is both wide and deep throughout all industry sectors.
The EOG takes the view that an employee ownership regime that cannot be easily used by unlisted and private businesses - which employ the mass of Australian workers - is a regime unworthy of this country.