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This chapter and case study examine how and which structured elements of an employee-owned business contribute to building the economic security and asset wealth of the lowest-wage and skilled employees of the firm. It paves the way for greater understanding about how intentionally structured workplaces can address wealth inequality and economic security through income and non-income opportunity systems.

The study draws upon qualitative interviews with four members of management, two plant managers, and 12 low-income employee-owners. Company documents and confidential employee data were provided for direct research analysis. Interviews took place at company locations, and covered employees from all shifts.

Employee ownership structures provide an important tool for advancing policy support and management practices to rebuild the wealth building benefits of work for low-income workers.

To ensure confidentiality, the study is anonymized and does not directly draw on the worker-owner interviews. This limits the opportunity to demonstrate the effect of structure on workforce; nonetheless, the empirical data tell an important story.

Expanding wealth inequality and economic precarity among low- and moderate-income workers has raised broad debates about how shifts in the structure of work, through new business, capital, and ownership structures, may be contributing to these social problems.

The employee benefits of employee ownership are not fully studied. This case contributes to understanding how employee ownership may reduce gender and racial wealth gaps, build family well-being, and become a model for structuring opportunity for those traditionally left out of the economic mainstream.

Job training, as traditionally conceptualized, is intended to improve the employment and earnings of disadvantaged individuals. Both theory and practice have approached the problem by segmenting the roles and responsibilities of the key stakeholders: the individual, the employer, and civil society. Such segmentation is problematic because it removes stakeholders from their contexts, and ignores the holistic and complex nature of the underlying problems and their remedies. Reframed as a form of business and community development, job training can focus on capacity building, stakeholder involvement, and expanded notions of skill achievement and geographic scope, thereby addressing stakeholder interests in context. The three cases presented in this chapter describe such reframing: from increasing human capital to building human capacity; from a partnership or individual business focus to a multi-stakeholder approach; and from job and employer-specific skill development to that which is multi-phased and geographically dispersed. Complexity theory will be used to explain these developments.

Contemporary labor economics has a ready explanation for the role of job training in the labor market. The human capital framework pioneered by Becker (1962, 1993) and Mincer (1962) and now extended by many, many others sees training as an investment in productive capacity that benefits both workers and employers. Employers enhance the productivity of their firms by investing in the skills of their workers, and these productivity gains are passed on to workers in the form of higher wages. Key to all of this is the distinction between general and specific skill. According to the theory, employers will not pay for or provide general skills (i.e. those that are transferable and hence valuable to other employers), because they are averse to being “poached” by more high-wage employers. They will, however, invest in workplace-specific skills, which assure them a return on their training investments.