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Deborah Groban Olson

Affiliation

Executive Director - Capital Ownership Group

Biography

Deborah Groban Olson is an Attorney with over 25 years experience creating and advising employee-owned companies, equity compensation plans, and cooperatives, representing companies, trusts, unions, and employees. She is Executive Director of the Capital Ownership Group (COG) and directs its Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded Fair Exchange Project. She authored "Fair Exchange: Providing citizens with equity managed by a community trust in return for government subsidies or tax breaks to businesses", Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy (2006). She is General Counsel to the American Ingenuity Alliance, assisting inventors and unions to jointly improve bargaining leverage. She is convener of the Bootstrap Detroit network, which is focused on innovating new uses of currently existing resources in Southeast Michigan to create new companies and jobs for a vibrant, locally controlled economy.

She is founding executive director of the Michigan Employee Ownership Center; founding chair of JointCities Development, a community development corporation in metropolitan Detroit; past chair of the National Center for Employee Ownership; and an advisory board member of the European Federation of Employed Shareholders and past vice-chair of the ESOP Association Michigan Chapter. She is a member of the Leadership Detroit Class XVII and the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee. Her publications are available at her website.

She practiced labor law in Wisconsin, Arkansas and Michigan from 1976-1981, when she began her employee ownership practice. She taught courses at Wayne State University Law School, and its labor studies program, University of Michigan Institute of Labor & Industrial Relations, University of Wisconsin School for Workers, AFL-CIO Meany Center for Labor Studies. She is admitted to the Bar in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois and Arkansas and holds a BA, cum laude, University of Wisconsin 1971; a JD, order of the coif, University of Wisconsin 1976; and has had aMartindale Hubbell AV rating since 1997.

Brief History of the Capital Ownership Group (COG)

COG is an international network of professionals, academics and activists that operates an on-line conference center, think tank and library from Kent State University. Its purpose is to help communities use broad ownership to abate the negative impact of globalization. It has 20 working groups with over 600 participants from 6 continents and has responded to over 5.3 million information requests from people in 173 countries. It has sponsored several international conferences and has been funded since 1999 by a variety of foundations including the Ford Foundation, the German Marshall Fund of the U.S., the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the European Union Fund, the Carey Center for Democratic Capitalism and a number of others.

When founded by North Americans in 1997, we sought to create a network including enough people from the developing and developed world that any programs we created would be acceptable to both. When our network included sufficient developing world participation, we held a conference in Washington, D.C. in 2002 entitled "Fix Globalization: make it more inclusive, democratic, accountable and sustainable". The last day was entirely devoted to strategic planning to develop our future programs. That internationally diverse group set our programmatic agenda. Since then we have pursued those programs, as we are able to get funding for them, including Fair Exchange.

Brief History of Fair Exchange (FE)

Definition of Fair Exchange

We define "Fair Exchange" as a transaction or relationship that: (a) involves a public investment in a private business and (b) provides the public, on whose behalf the investment is being made, with potential returns that are at least equal to the potential returns a private investor would receive for an investment of the same kind, magnitude and risk. In such a transaction or relationship the:

• potential returns to the public are commensurate with;
• magnitude and riskiness of the investment involved;
• returns to the "public" are in a tangible and measurable form (such as, but not limited to, cash or securities); and
• performance measures and time limits (with appropriate, tangible and measurable consequences for non-performance) are clearly defined.

COG Fair Exchange Studies

The Sloan Foundation commissioned the Fair Exchange paper (recently published by the Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy) from COG and asked COG to convene a conference to critique it. The conference was at George Washington Law School (10/5/05). Most of the conference speakers now serve on the Fair Exchange Advisory Board. The paper includes model state and federal fair exchange laws, also available in a separate document. A Power Point summary and video clips of the conference, including presentations by Bill Greider, Gar Alperovitz, Ron Blackwell, David John, and others, are also available.

We are now creating a database of Fair Exchange best practices at the state and local level and for future publication on our website. Our immediate goal is to provide a concise brochure summarizing the data by categories (like sports teams, municipal utilities, seed & venture funds, etc.), with links to more detailed information, as a resource for government leaders, technical assistance organizations, think tanks, community development and labor organizations. We also provide technical assistance to such groups.

We welcome invitations to speak about Fair Exchange at events of interested organizations.

^ Her other publications, available at www.esoplaw.com, include: “Union Experiences with Worker Ownership” 1982 Wis. LR 729; “Keeping Jobs and Capital at Home” 1984 Nova Law Journal 583; “Employee Ownership and Economic Development” 1987 NYU Review of Law & Social Change; “Unions and Employee Ownership”, ESOP Handbook (Probus, 1989); “Unions and Fair Market Value: An Argument for a Safe Harbor for Negotiated ESOPs”, 1992 Journal of Employee Ownership Law & Finance 135; “ESOPs for People, Not for Wall Street,” 1993 Journal of Employee Ownership Law and Finance 5; “Development, Growth & Experience of ESOPs and Democratic Employee Buyouts” speech at Int’l. Conference on Democratic Employee Ownership, Dublin, Ireland 1993; “Giving Employee Owners a Real Voice as Stockholders: Legislative Proposals to the Dunlop Commission”,1994 Journal of Employee Ownership Law & Finance; “The Employee Buyout Feasibility Study”, Leveraged ESOPs and Employee Buyouts, NCEO 1997 (updated 2004), “The Feasibility Study for an Employee Led Buyout” Winter 1998, Journal of Employee Ownership Law & Finance. Summary of “Capital Ownership Group Industrial Homestead Policy Proposals” Business Ethics September 2000 and Accountability, December 2000; Chap. 17 “Labor Unions”, ESOP Answer Book, Panel Publishers, July 2000.

Categories: Advisory Board