ASU’s Dr. Christos Makridis Speaks at the 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum

In this clip, ASU’s Dr. Christos Makridis speaks at the 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum. For additional resources, visit our website: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/videos/asus-dr-christos-makridis-speaks-at-the-2025-employee-ownership-ideas-forum/ 

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The 2025 Employee Ownership Ideas Forum took place on April 9-10, 2025, virtually and in Washington DC. The Forum is proudly co-hosted by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program and the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers University.

This year’s theme, “From Workers to Owners,” highlights how the experience of ownership changes the reality of work for workers. The forum highlights companies in a range of business sectors and explores how employee ownership fits their business strategy and approach to business leadership. We also discuss the particular role employee ownership can play in supporting business success, and we consider the role institutional investors can play in improving capital access for employee ownership conversions and expansions.

For more information about the Employee Ownership Ideas Forum, including our speakers, agenda, and additional resources, visit our website: https://www.aspeninstitute.org/events/employee-ownership-ideas-forum-2025/

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
I I'll start with the just to thank you again to, to Joseph,
to Matt, to Maureen. This is wonderful to be here
again. I I heard a story when I was in
a math class in undergraduate and it began with a the lecturer
coming to the to to start the class with just like a a note
card and, and, and guess what ithad on it.
It it was to try to remind him to say hello to the class.

(00:27):
And so I'm coming with a note card, but it has a few notes on
it, not just a hello. What I want to title the next
maybe 3 1/2 minutes or 4 minutesis on the creativity of the
American worker. And so as we think about the
future of the American worker, we also have to think about the
superpower that the American worker has, which is around
resilience and creativity. So there's going to be 3 main

(00:49):
points that I make. The 1st is that just around some
of the empirical literature thateconomists have documented over
the maybe the past 20 years or so is on the rise of Labor
market polarization. So I'm going to begin with a
little bit of a a little bit of a sobering note, but then it's
going to get incrementally more optimistic and more cheerful
about the future. Perfect timing for lunch.

(01:10):
So that you you might already know some of the papers that
David Otter, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson have written about labor
market polarization, which refers to the kind of thinning
out of the of the middle class and the rise on the tail.
So a higher share of the population that's, that's low
wage and a higher share that's high wage.
And so I think that there's general agreement that we need

(01:31):
to find ways to reinvigorate themiddle class.
And then the question is, well, how do we do that?
How do workers come together? How do firms partner with
workers? And so on a recent paper that I,
I just released with two, two colleagues with Cyroneck at the
Bureau of Labor Statistics and Adam Bloomfield at the FDIC, we
use new data from the National Compensation Survey, which, and

(01:53):
the reason why I mention this isbecause a key point that came up
in this panel is that we don't want to just focus on wage and
salary. If all we do is just look at
this annual salary, you miss allthe other non wage benefits, non
wage amenities that a worker is getting.
And So what we really care aboutis total compensation.
And that ranges from things likethe culture and ranges health

(02:14):
benefits, it ranges from obviously employee ownership.
And so it's really hard to measure that because the current
population survey by the BLS doesn't have that data, then NCS
does. And so one of the things that we
actually find, and again, this is a little bit of a sobering
note, is that the increase in inequality was actually
concentrated among the higher wage.

(02:35):
So let me put it differently, the the increase in benefits was
concentrated among higher wage workers.
So if you're getting paid more in wage and salary, you're also
getting higher benefits. And so that kind of exacerbates
the rise of inequality. And so part of this discussion I
think today is around the emphasis that non wage amenities
really matter and we have to think about how to raise them.

(02:55):
Point #2 is around smart industrial policies, smart labor
policy. And there's a paper, another
paper that I have with a colleague named Juhan, which
shout out to one of the early SMLR meetings in January.
I met you at a one of the conferences at that Joseph was
organizing. And so we wrote a paper about

(03:17):
how technological change affectsthe worker using data from
Gallup between 2008 and 2018. And one of the critical factors
was the role that trust has within the organization.
So we show that there is this overall positive effect of
technology on worker well-being,which we measured using life
satisfaction indices by Gallup, but we showed that it was
heavily moderated by whether or not the workers actually trusted

(03:39):
their their management. Again, not a huge surprise, but
it was really interesting to have that born out in the data.
And so I, I think when we think about what mechanisms are going
to fuel trust, Esop's employee ownership is part of that
because then everybody thinks asa team.
And just to echo Adria's point, as, as she was kind of wrapping
up, was that you think about appreciation development and

(04:01):
training opportunities. Those are, I have a paper on
this, on this as well, showing it's the biggest predictor of
employee engagement. And so yes, pay matters, but
feeling like you have self worthand having that affirmed by
other people in the organizationis absolutely critical.
Last point to make in the maybe 1-1 and then 1 1/2 minutes that
I have is, is on the, the peoplethat are on the sidelines.

(04:22):
So there's a nice paper, I thinkthere's like 6 or 7 co-authors
on this paper. And I feel like maybe one of
them is from Aspen. But the, the gentleman that I, I
remember who, who led this up isPeter Blair.
And the, the acronym they uses stars and it, it stands for
skilled through alternative pathways.
And so a lot of people have beensaying, and I think this, this

(04:43):
goes to Chris's point, that's a lot of times people say, well,
manufacturing is gone. The middle class is, is kind of
like, I mean, they don't say, I think most people don't say
middle class is gone, but a lot of people say manufacturing is
gone. And I think where we
collectively agree is that thereare opportunities, but we have
to be very intentional about it.And So what Peter Blair and
others on this paper are making is that there are plenty of
people that are actually skilledto do the work.

(05:04):
It's just that maybe they don't have a master's in computer
science, maybe they don't have aPhD or whatever college degree.
But that's OK because to do a lot of the work that we need in
the future doesn't necessarily require those those traditional
credentialing pathways. And we need to think about new
credentialing pathways. And so their paper estimates
that there's maybe about 16 million people that are just on

(05:25):
the sidelines called stars that we could integrate into the
labor market. And so just, and then just kind
of landing the plane on on as wesee the the rise of generative
AI and AI solutions out there, just really want to double click
on the point that it can be a compliment.
And it has to be part of the design that organizations embed.
When we think about the way the generative AI can sort of like

(05:47):
break up tasks and that you could be handing your task to
somebody else. And then that kind of all comes
together through the rise of a gentic AI.
There's a lot of possibilities, but these possibilities are
going to require piloting experimentation, and it's not
going to just kind of come for free.
So we need to really work hard at it.
So let me just say thank you again for the opportunity to be
here and to listen to the panel and to be here for the rest of

(06:10):
the day as well. So thanks so much.