Today, the Government approved the starting points for the drafting of a new Employee Cooperative Ownership Act, which will regulate employee ownership in our country. Employee ownership is already present in Slovenian companies, but it is not regulated in a systematic way, which is why shares in companies are bought individually and often transferred outside the company when employees retire or leave.

The new legislation aims to regulate the system for creating and maintaining employee ownership through the purchase of shares from outside owners or owners who retire and leave the company, and the system for integrating new employees into the ownership of the company. The new law will also make it easier for all other companies that see added value for themselves and their employees to set up an employee ownership system. The introduction of the ownership cooperative as a new legal entity will also provide a mechanism for dealing with business succession, i.e. businesses whose owners are retiring but have no successors to take over the business, thus ensuring that it remains locally owned and continues to pursue a business policy that supports the preservation of jobs in the local area.

The core of the law and its purpose will be various forms of incentives that will encourage the development of the proposed scheme of employee ownership, following the example of other developed countries (USA, Great Britain (UK), Canada), which already have this area regulated and this type of business ownership is much more developed and widespread.

"Owners' cooperatives can be a good alternative for building a more solidarity-based and democratic future. All the more so as they respond to the development challenges that our economy will face in the future. In the next 5 to 10 years, around a quarter of owners of small and medium-sized enterprises, where around 70% of employees work, will retire. As we are now on the threshold of a new transfer of ownership, we do not want to repeat old mistakes. We are all familiar with the negative stories of privatisations from the independence and denationalisation periods. We want to give business owners a model for succession where employees take ownership of the business. For workers, the advantage will be that they will not have to spend their savings to enter into ownership, but will gain ownership through their work and belonging to the company," explains the purpose of the new law Simon Maljevac, Minister for a Solidarity Future.

 "In drafting the law, we are taking inspiration from the best practices abroad, which are based on the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) model, as similar laws are in place in the US and the UK. Perhaps surprisingly, in the US, almost a tenth of private sector employees work in companies that have been operating successfully under this model for decades," he said, recalling recent developments in the sale of food companies: "Recently, there have been a number of public concerns about the transfer of food companies to foreign ownership. The ownership model, the starting points of which have been adopted today by the Government, provides a good response to these challenges. Practices from abroad show that employee ownership, as envisaged by our law, increases the involvement of companies in the local environment and their greater social responsibility. At the same time, it increases the productivity, predictability and stability of companies' operations and employment in local areas, especially in times of crisis, which are becoming more and more frequent. The law can therefore be beneficial for the enterprises themselves, for their employees, for capital and labour, or for employees and employers," the Minister added when adopting the Platform for Action.

The Ministry for a Solidarity Future will coordinate the text of the law across ministries and coalitions and send it for public consultation by autumn. The law is expected to be adopted towards the end of the year or early next year.