Opinion: We should be encouraging more businesses to look at worker ownership

Too much emphasis in the current Scottish government’s economic outlook is on attracting investment from overseas.

The result is that more and more of our economy, and so more of our jobs and livelihoods, rest in the hands of absentee directors in faraway boardrooms.

This can be precarious. By last year twice as many large companies that are registered in Scotland were part of foreign-owned transnational corporations than were Scottish owned.

That’s why it was uplifting to meet up recently with the people who work for a local plant hire company: Your Equipment Solutions, based in the Bankside industrial estate. They are moving from a conventional ownership structure to one which is owned by its employees.

Naturally the creation of this more democratic way of owning a business cannot be imposed from above.

And that’s why in my view there ought to be an automatic legal right for workers to have first refusal of buying the company they work for if it is being put up for sale or facing closure.

Such a law, the Marcora Law, has existed in Italy for decades and has been a great success. Similarly, local communities have a preferential right to buy land when it is put up for sale under theScottish Parliament’s Land Reform Act, so why not workers in industry?

NHS Forth Valley, Falkirk Council, Forth Valley College increasingly identify themselves as what are called ‘anchor institutions’ which help to build wealth in the local economy.

Until now all too often wealth leaks out in the form of profits and dividends to shareholders.

So, what a difference it would make if our economy was rewired so that locally owned, and democratically owned businesses were promoted and assisted by these large and stable public bodies.

There are positive alternatives out there. They exist locally, they need our encouragement and support, but they also deserve laws that positively promote their creation and their growth. That’s what I will be seeking to secure in 2024.