Now, many people probably sell that stock as soon as they can, so the employee ownership isn't cumulative over the years. But it would be quite hostile to employees to stop them from doing this in an effort to make the company more employee-owned.
[1] https://abc.xyz/assets/52/88/5de1d06943cebc569ee3aa3a6ded/go...
This seems entirely rational to me - I've bet a significant part of my career on the success of the company I work for, why should I also bet my savings? Diversification has real value, and going all-in on one company is just a bad bet.
And lots of people would rather just be that supplier, who gets paid a specified amount of money for a specified provision of service, and not be forced to bear short-term risk or to hold out for a long-term upside that depends on lots of stuff they have no control over working out for the best.
Mechanically it's pretty similar to if the company had just paid out cash as salaries (cash leaves the corporate treasury and enters the employee's brokerage account at market values), but the market is the intermediary, and the tax and accounting treatment is pretty different.
Also, the majority of employees in a company other than small startups do not have the ability to shift their company's success materially to make it a worthy incentive to own and hold employer issued stock.
That is, you should treat them like receiving cash and convert them into whatever you would normally do wisely with extra cash you received.
Plus it's bad to have your investments and job in the same place. If the company fails you lose you job and savings at the same time.
Yes, there are non-financial reasons to have "shares in the place where I work". But financially it's a bad investment.
(If the shares come with management rights, responsibilities, obligations, decision making, that's different.)
Note that if you run the math on the company in the article, they're considerably less generous than that. They say they have 1500 employees, $1B in revenue, and the average employee makes about 8-26% of their earnings. Figure that's maybe $20K/employee * 1500 employees = $30M in stock compensation on $1B in revenue, so they spend 3% of their revenue on stock compensation. If you figure the company is valued at $4B, they're giving away like 0.75% of the company per year, a bit less than Google and way less than a tech startup.
This is probably a PR hit for Central States Manufacturing anyway, to help their recruitment efforts.
