[...] Under ESOPs, workers are partially compensated through company shares that are held in trust until they retire or leave. A notable proponent, Alperovitz concedes that ESOPs are far from perfect but still cites them as evidence of “evolutionary reconstruction” in the advance of democracy.

Yet ESOPs were introduced to undermine workplace democracy and worker power, not enhance it. Corporations like Proctor and Gamble, IBM, Coca-Cola, and UPS chose employee stock-ownership plans for the tax breaks and to help keep unions out (or at least limit their mobilization against wage or benefit concessions by offering a partial “offset”).

As a Federal Reserve paper examining the relationship between union bargaining and ESOPs concluded, “ESOPs create incentives for unions to become weaker bargainers.” From the perspective of challenging capitalism, ESOPs aren’t prefigurative, but integrative. The stock holdings offered to workers involve no redistribution of power, and what workers generally “share” in terms of corporate revenue is merely a slice of what they recently gave up.