US ESOPs, worker cooperatives, and employee outcomes through an intersectional lens: a scoping review

Broad-based employee ownership is increasingly promoted in the United States as a strategy to expand wealth building and improve job quality, yet little is known about how its benefits and risks are distributed across workers with different social backgrounds. This scoping review synthesizes peer-reviewed empirical and empirically grounded research on worker outcomes in U.S. employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) and worker cooperatives, with an explicit focus on intersectionality. We examine wages and wealth, job quality, employment stability, access to benefits, and worker voice, with particular attention to the extent and ways in which studies examine differences by race, gender, class, and other intersecting axes of inequality. Findings suggest consistent gains in job quality and economic security among employee-owners, but they also reveal substantial blind spots: relatively few studies disaggregate outcomes across intersecting identities, and even fewer explicitly theorize power, racial capitalism, or gendered divisions of labor in relation to employee ownership. We conclude by outlining a research agenda for intersectional studies of employee ownership in the United States, emphasizing the need for disaggregated quantitative analyses, in-depth qualitative work with marginalized worker-owners, and research designs that can assess whether broad-based ownership arrangements mitigate, reproduce, or transformlabor market inequalities.