Should owning a share of your workplace be encouraged as home ownership is encouraged?

[Yo_Mama]

1. It's not a bad plan, but it can be quite risky

If you work at a company, and you have a lot of your "savings" invested at the company, then if the company gets in trouble your job (income) and capital are both gone or reduced.

Diversifying by buying shares of other companies would generally be a better risk.

Alternatively, if it is a small company and employees can collectively own a decent chunk, it might help employees to band together and keep the company running or stop the company from being run as a scheme for enriching a few executives. That would reduce risk for the employees, overall.

So I think the question really turns on whether the employees can own a big enough share of the company to be able to control at least some of the decision-making, and thus reduce risk.

As a mechanism for affecting corporate decision making, unions have in the past provided the same risk reduction with the necessity to invest capital, which basically produced a "least-risk" situation for employees.