Oct. 15, 2012.

The First Conference on “The Stockowner-Employee(SOE) Partnership Project” was held at the Joongmin Foundation Seminar Room.

The starting point is the recognition by a company’s long-term stockowners of the fact that their investments were successful due in part to the hard work and efforts of the company’s employees – and thus, stockowners have a sense of gratitude towards those employees. In particular, the act of giving back stocks to each individual employee breaks the conventional separation of the two groups. However, this method has no precedent and is rather complicated, and thus is a rare find.

 There are cases where corporate management redistributes a portion of profits as performance incentives to employees or implements employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), but there are no previous examples of majority stockowners sharing their profits from rising stock prices with the employees. As the Occupy Wall Street protest and similar social movements show, we are more familiar with the image of greedy and covetous capitalists. Amidst this social climate, the voluntary action of an individual stockowner with no control over actual management practices is a fresh stimulation. This project, through social science analysis, will investigate the unspoken standards of fairness and justice among employees and assert that the efforts to share profits and gains will contribute towards cooperative coexistence between the middle class and ordinary citizens. This can pioneer the desirable directions for the development of Korean society in the future.

Program  

I. Opening Ceremony

Moderator: Han, In-Sup (Professor, Seoul National Nuiversity)

Welcoming Speech: Han, Sang-Jin (Board President of the Joongmin Foundation)

Thank-You Speech: Lee, Young-Jo (CEO, Ssangyong Materials)

Congratulatory Speech: Chung Un-chan (former Prime Minister of South Korea)  

 II. Seminar

1) “Stock Owner-Employee (SOE) Partnership Project from the viewpoint of Joongmin(中民: middling grassroots)”

   -by  Han, Sang-Jin (Prof. Emeritus Seoul National University, Board President of the Joongmin Foundation)

   -Discussant: Chang, Duk-Jin (Professor, Seoul Nation University) 

2) “Influences of the Worker's Awareness of Organizational Fairness on Job Satisfaction”

    -by Kwon, Soonwon (Professor, Sookmyung Woman University)

    -Discussant : Oh, Gye-teak(Research Fellow, Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education ＆ Training)

 3) “Noblesse Oblige and Development of Korean Society”.

   -by  Nam, Eun-Young (Senior Researcher, The Institute of Social Development and Policy Research)

  - Discussant: Kim, Bong-Seok(Lecturer, Sungkyunkwan University)