"The new Annual Economic Survey of Employee Share Ownership in 2020 reveals a new progression towards employee share ownership in Europe last year, even during this new crisis.
The upward trend in the number of employee shareholders continues, with 7.1 million people in large companies (Graph 1). If we add one million employee shareholders in SMEs, the total number in Europe reaches 8.1 million.
Together they held 310 billion Euro in May 2020, down from 350 billion a year earlier. This was the first shock of the pandemic crisis. Since then, however, many perspectives have changed and at the beginning of 2021, European employees hold 420 billion Euro in shares in their companies, a record figure never reached before.
The development of employee share ownership has continued in large European companies in 2020. More and more of them are organizing employee share plans. In 2020, 94% of all large European companies had employee share ownership, on which 88% had employee share plans of all kinds, while 53% had "broad-based" plans for all employees, and 60% had stock option plans. Finally, 29% of all large European companies launched new employee share plans, a proportion that tends to increase from year to year.
The pandemic crisis is far from being the first crisis experienced by European employee share ownership. For the more than 50 years that employee share plans have been tested in large European companies, crises of all kinds have occurred repeatedly. Each time, the scenario of malicious interpretations and warnings is the same: "we told you so", "it's far too risky", "this time it's done, employee share ownership is dead". Yet the facts are there: For more than 50 years, European employee share ownership has not ceased to confound the naysayers. The more employee ownership spreads, the more it is supported..."

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ISBN (PDF) : 978-2-930903-32-3