According to an ESOP Association press release, the Employee Ownership Foundation released data on shared capitalism programs in the US.  The press release defined shared capitalism as “broad-based employee, current or deferred, stock compensation programs, such as ESOPs, stock purchases, stock options, gainsharing, profit sharing, and bonus programs.”  The data was collected from the General Social Survey (GSS), which is a survey that is conducted with a face-to-face interview by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.  The press release summarized the findings as follows:

“According to the results, out of 114 million people in the US who work in the private sector, 17.5% of employees own company stock, about 20 million employees, and 9.3% hold stock options, approximately 10 million employees. The number of employees who reported profit sharing, gainsharing, owning company stock or holding stock options was 46.7%, which is an increase over the 2002 GSS finding of 43.1%. While the data reflect a slight drop from the 2002 results which showed that 21.2% of employees owned company stock and 13.1% held stock options, the numbers are still impressive when one takes into consideration that almost 50% of the individuals working in the private sector are involved in some sort of shared capitalism program. “

The survey was also discussed in the following articles:

New Data on Breadth of Employee Ownership in U.S.

Data: 20M Employees Own Company Stock