employee shareholders will each receive the sum of 100,000 euros

It’s the jackpot. A thousand employees of La Redoute had agreed to invest in the revival of their company, when it was sold by its owner, Kering, to two of its managers, Eric Courteille and Nathalie Balla, in 2014. A minimum investment, of the order of a hundred euros. Since then, the company has recovered nicely, its value exceeds one billion euros. And it has just been bought by Galeries Lafayette last December. Result, the thousand employees who had agreed to take a risk will share 100 million euros, or 100,000 euros each.

Different types of companies offer this possibility

Employee share ownership is the prerogative of large corporations. At TotalEnergies, for example, employee shareholding represents almost 7% of the capital. Renault or Airbus also widely offer this formula. According to the latest figures from the Ddirection of the animation of research, studies and statistics (Dares), the statistical service of the Ministry of Labour, in 2020, 600,000 employees benefited from an employee shareholding operation, i.e. 4.3% of the total. Employee share ownership “tends to grow with the size of the company” observes the Dares. 17% of companies with more than 1,000 employees use it and 10.5% of their employees benefit from it. France is above the European average, but it is overtaken by the United Kingdom, where three quarters of companies have implemented this system.