For years I have believed it on faith, and the evidence keeps stacking up behind it.
The people who do the work should own a piece of what they build.
Labor Day isn't a thank-you note. It exists because workers organized around a claim: the people who create the value have a right to a share of it. That claim was fought for, not granted.
A century later, the same argument now has a new instrument.
Roughly 25 million American workers hold some ownership stake where they work (Rutgers' Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing). Separately, Department of Labor filings show about 11 million active ESOP participants, plus 4.2 million retirees still drawing ESOP benefits.
And the performance keeps pointing the same direction. Ingersoll Rand's CEO credits more than 8x enterprise value growth since 2017 to putting real equity in the hands of a 21,700-person workforce. The research on productivity, retention, and wealth-building keeps landing in the same column.
Here's the part that still gets me: most companies still don't do it.
Not because they can't. Because it can be difficult. And sharing the upside means widening the circle of who gets to win. That's a choice, not a constraint.
Financial sponsors have always handed equity to the management team. The whole insight is asking why we stop there. Peter Stavros, Anna-Lisa Miller and the Ownership Works team have made the case and are doing phenomenal work.
We're continuing to build Greenleaf Capital Partners, LLC and Centered Partners around the answer. Broad-based ownership isn't a perk. It's the structure we now start with.
It's also a big part of why I joined the board of Ascend Safety Collective. Ascend's owner, Altaline Capital Management, structures each investment to let all workers participate in the equity appreciation of the business — and pairs the equity with education on how that value actually gets created. Underwritten at the front end, not bolted on at exit.
To the teams across our companies building: thank you. You should own a piece of it.
Labor Day honors the work.
The harder, better thing is sharing what the work builds.