员工持股更易解决财富不均？

    在开国元勋那个时代，资本意味着土地。今天，它还包括股票，房地产和其他投资。我们已经从一个基于劳动的经济，发展到一个基于金融的经济。制造业步履维艰，华尔街则高歌猛进，其规模已经成倍扩大。布拉西认为，要想让普通人参与其中，唯有给予他们索取经济成果的权利。

    “我们必须找到一种方法，让公民在一定程度上成为未来技术的主人，”布拉西说。在他看来，随着越来越先进的自动化机器人即将蚕食越来越多的工作，大多数美国工人阶层有可能面临两种未来。“要么是技术创造一个低等的封建农奴阶级，普通民众的工资低下或者停滞不前，结构性失业高企，”他说。“要么，每周的工作日减少，公民广泛拥有更多的资本所有权。”

    员工持股和类似计划也不是没有问题。常见的批评是：股票是有风险的，尤其是相对于冰冷，坚硬的现金工资而言。比如，安然公司(Enron)当年曾鼓励员工动用其退休金账户购买该公司股票，大量财富后来彻底蒸发。布拉西构想了一个解决之道：他要求公司创建类似于401k计划（养老基金），与工资脱钩的员工股票或股权计划，以对冲员工的风险。另一种担心是：很难说服公司做出这种改变。虽然许多美国企业出于公司自身和避税方面的原因，已经让员工参与某种类型的所有权或利润分享计划（这本书的作者说，有一半的美国企业这样做），但这类计划往往仅局限于少数人，涉及的资金规模不大。要是扩大员工持股真的对改善企业收益有好处，工商界肯定已经开始这样做了。

    为了说服他们，布拉西等人建议政府在税收方面给予广泛的利润分享、员工持股或股票期权计划足够大的激励。（几位作者声称，这样做的公司已经获得了生产率和利润提升等方面的好处。）在你提及选择性激励机制和漏洞恰恰是这个国家需要清除的体制弊端之前，请考虑一个事实：根据一些智库估计，这种税收激励每年已经导致数十亿美元的税收损失。《国内税收法》（the Internal Revenue Code）第162节允许公司抵扣向少数高管发放的数额不限薪酬，如果这种薪酬是“基于绩效”的话——这种薪酬主要表现为股票期权（就技术层面而言，这类薪酬是根据绩效确定的，因为它们跟公司的命运相挂钩）。一想到用公众资金补贴直冲云霄的高管薪酬，你肯定气不打一处来。

    但这种体制跟布拉西希望扩展的员工持股计划并没有多大不同，它只是局限于少数人而已。布拉西和公司需要做的事情是，让这些高管特权和福利扩充到剩余99%的员工。相较于皮克提的全球财富税，这理应是一个更容易兜售的建议。（财富中文网）

    译者：叶寒

    When the founders were around, capital meant land. Today, it’s stock, real estate, and other investments. We’ve moved from an economy based on labor to one based on money. Wall Street has expanded exponentially even as manufacturing has floundered. The only way for the Average Joe to get in on the game, Blasi argues, is to give him a real stake in the outcome.

    “We have to find a way for citizens to have some ownership of the technologies of the future,” Blasi says. As increasingly advanced robotics automate away more and more jobs, he sees two possible outcomes for the majority of working America: “We could have a future where technology creates a low feudal serf class—people with low wages or flat wages or high structural unemployment,” he says. “Or, we could have a future where we have a smaller workweek and citizens broadly have more capital ownership.”

    Employee ownership and similar programs are not without problems. The criticisms are thus: Stock is risky, especially compared to cold, hard cash wages. Look at Enron, where workers’ were encouraged to buy company stock in their retirement accounts, and many fortunes were completely wiped out. Blasi wants to get around this by asking companies to create employee stock or ownership plans not tied to wages, as they are with 401ks, to hedge the employees’ exposure. Another worry: it could be hard to convince companies to make this change. While many U.S. businesses (the authors of this book say half of them) already give employees access to some type of ownership or profit sharing plan, for reasons both corporate and tax-related, it’s often limited to a few people and not much money. If expanding employee ownership were actually great for the bottom line, corporations would already be doing it.

    To convince them, Blasi and his co-authors suggest large government tax incentives for corporate broad-based profit sharing, employee stock ownership, or stock option plans. (That’s in addition to the benefits to productivity and profit the authors argue already exist for companies going this route.) Before you say selective incentives and loopholes are exactly the kind of thing the country needs to purge from the books, consider the fact that we already have a form of this, which according to estimates from some think tanks, already cost taxpayers billions per year. The Internal Revenue Code Section 162(m) allows corporations to deduct an unlimited amount of compensation for a few top executives if the compensation is “performance-based”— this winds up being granted mostly in the form of stock options (which are technically performance-based because they’re tied to the fate of the company). Cue outrage at the public subsidization of sky-high executive pay.

    But that system is not so dissimilar to the extension of employee stock ownership Blasi wants—it’s just more limited. All Blasi and company need is to get those executive privileges and perks extended to the rest of the 99%. That should be an easier sell than Piketty’s global wealth tax.