Buttigieg Gets 🤏 This 🤏 Close 🤏

Who's going to tell him?

2020 and 2028 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is edging closer to becoming an advocate for employee ownership. On this week’s Pod Save America, he said:

We already have a level of concentration of power and wealth in this country that, as a general rule, is hard for a democracy to survive. And it could soon get much more concentrated, because so much wealth and value accumulates to the handful of people who own these AI models and the associated infrastructure—the chips, the processing, the data centers.

For that reason, as well as the fact that many people are going to experience economic disruption, we need to find a way to get people dealt in, ideally with some share of the value being created. Universal basic income was kind of the 1.0 answer to this. It was very fashionable about ten years ago, but we’ve learned a lot about why it wasn’t delivering the value as advertised…

I think there’s a way to do this where business still gets to be business, but Americans get a piece of the pie. [edited for clarity]

This isn’t the first time Buttigieg has flirted with employee ownership. In August 2024, Buttigieg and Jon Stewart were only a frame away from naming the stakeholder economy:

Stewart: There’s no question that equities and the investment market have done unbelievably well since the ’80s, while labor has fallen much further behind. It’s a shareholder economy. Why is it so difficult to get workers—even forgetting about unions—a place at the table in companies? If these companies have done so well for their shareholders, why can’t the workers share in that prosperity in the same way? Why can’t they be shareholders?

Buttigieg: I think that’s right. One thing unions are increasingly doing is giving employees a chance to participate in profit sharing for exactly that reason, and getting that seat at the table. [edited for clarity]

Buttigieg isn’t alone in circling employee ownership:

• Political signals: The White House hosted its first Convening on Worker Ownership in 2024 (Dr. Hand was invited!)

  • A bipartisan mix of legislators—Bernie Sanders, Bill Cassidy, Tammy Baldwin, Blake Moore, Nydia Velásquez, Chris Van Hollen, and Lori Trahan (now at DOL)—back employee ownership

  • In April 2025, the Employee Ownership Ideas Forum featured speakers from Brookings, American Compass and AEI

• Policy infrastructure: Last month Project Equity released a comprehensive database of employee ownership policies [desktop only]

  • The ESOP Association, ESCA, EOX and Expanding ESOPs are all lobbying for expanding employee ownership

  • Last summer, The Stakehold and Common Trust published their policy recommendations on purpose trusts

Kamala Harris’s “opportunity economy” was not specific enough to resonate with voters in 2024. Perhaps the 2028 Democratic (or Republican) nominee will be able to put forward a new economic story, one with deep theoretical roots and proven benefits for workers.