Reason Magazine’s Jesse Walker Shares His Big Idea for Employee Ownership

In this clip, Reason Magazine’s Jesse Walker 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):
Hello. So the idea I'm going to talk
about is trans partisanship. And in particular, it was
suggested to me that I might talk a bit about the nature and
history of conservative support for employee ownership, since
that's something I've been doingsome reporting on recently.
Maybe my remarks, I was not at the Sessions yesterday, So and

(00:27):
if there is a Sanders staffer quoting Reagan, maybe my remarks
here are superfluous and redundant.
But nonetheless, I did bring along this is not the actual
letter, a letter that Lewis Kelso, who was the person who
originally designed the concept of the employee stock ownership

(00:48):
plan, wrote to Ronald Reagan in December of 1980, shortly after
Reagan was elected, shortly before Reagan took office.
He says your election as president of the United States
is the only event in the Grimm national and international
economic scene which promises a glimmer of hope.

(01:10):
Now I know what you might be thinking.
Maybe he says that to all the incoming presidents.
It's a it's a great way to butter people up.
I use it all the time. But it's in fact he went on to
make a specifically conservativecase for employee ownership and
said a conservative society is 1in which the entire population

(01:30):
makes an effort to perpetuate itself and its institutions.
There has never been such a thing, only societies with
minorities who are conservative because only they have income
producing wealth to conserve, and who are therefore pitted
against a majority who do not. The object of his plans, he
said, was to spread more capitalownership to that majority and

(01:53):
therefore speedily create a conservative society.
Now, why did Kelso think that Reagan might be receptive to
this? Well, for one thing, he had met
with Reagan before, when Reagan was governor of California,
because Reagan had an aide, Peter Hannaford, who was a big
employee ownership advocate. And in fact, Reagan had given a

(02:15):
speech in 1974, which I'm prettysure Hannaford wrote, in which
at Bohemian Grove of all places,where he called for what he
called an Industrial Homestead Act, which would expand capital
ownership more broadly. And he particularly looked at
employee ownership as a way to do that.
And a year later, he issued A commentary that said a lot of

(02:38):
the same things and named Jeff Kelso specifically.
So Kelso had had reason to believe that he might be
receptive. And in fact, Reagan did do some
things as president. In 1984, he signed the Deficit
Reduction Act that included a little proviso tucked away in
there that expanded tax benefitsfor banks and others lending

(02:59):
firm employee purchases. I don't that didn't come from
the White House. That came from a left, right
alliance on Capitol Hill. But he signed it, and the Reagan
administration put out a report a little later.
It's a fascinating document, sort of putting forward worker
ownership as an alternative to state socialism in Latin America

(03:21):
and the Caribbean. And there was some discussion of
doing something similar vis A vis the Solidarity revolt in
Poland, although that made it tothe National Security Council.
As far as I can tell, it didn't make it any further.
And I'm not saying all this to try to make an argument for
Ronald Reagan as the secret champion of worker power.

(03:42):
The more important thing is thathis he was he had people close
to him who did sincerely. I don't, I don't know how
sincere or how close this was tohis heart, but there were people
around him that was close to their heart.
And it was close to their heart for conservative reasons, people
like Hannaford, people like Norman Bailey, John Mclary, who

(04:02):
was an advocate not just of employee of Esop's, but of
cooperatives and self managementwho who were.
And, and for that matter, peoplewho in in Congress, who we
ordinarily think of as conservatives or sometimes
coming from the right wing of libertarianism who have
repeatedly introduced legislation like this.
Dana Rohrabacher would be one example.

(04:25):
And what were the reasons that they have for kind of, in some
cases, it was the idea that Kelso put forward in his in his
letter that that this was a way of giving people a greater stake
in the society and wanting to conserve it.
In other cases, it was the idea that this might be a way of sort
of a socially responsible approach to privatization and

(04:46):
having a labor feeling like theyhave a stake in introducing
things to the mark. In fact, Hannaford two years
before that speech, he probably wrote, he ran for Congress and
Berkeley and and that was part of his platform sort of ESOP
based privatization. He lost to Ron Dellums, who was
also interested in employee ownership from a rather
different ideological direction.I think that's like the most

(05:08):
Berkeley race possible and ESOP Republican against the DSA
Democrat in some cases. Often, obviously there's a lot
of interest on the right and entrepreneurship and, and that
can lead people to these ideas. And there's also an interest
sometimes in devolving power. Now generally the idea of
devolving both governmental and and corporate power is something

(05:31):
that if you're thinking people outside the conventional left
that talking about, it's going to be a certain sort of
libertarian kind of on the left wing of the libertarian
spectrum. But recently on the populist
right, some of the same ideas have come up.
And in general, there are so many different motives here and

(05:51):
so many different contexts. I am, I, I mentioned the the new
right that most of the folks I've discussed are talking about
this in an open market, free market way.
In the new right, it's more likely to be in the context of
industrial policy. You have bringing the people
with their notions to or coming from the left or coming from the
center. You might have so many contexts
and so many varieties of the idea that you run a bit of a

(06:14):
risk that you can have a broad based spectrum of people who
like the idea and abstract but can't necessarily unite around a
common platform. But fortunately this is called 5
big ideas and not 5 detailed proposals for a broad based
cross ideological platform. So I'm off the hook.
I'm leaving it to you to figure out how to bring people

(06:36):
together. Thank you.