Published in Fortune

By Darren Walker and Pete Stavros

The American dream—that foundational promise of economic opportunity, social mobility, and lasting security—looms large in our life stories. While access to this promise has been granted slowly and unevenly, at its best, our nation has been a beacon of democracy and free enterprise.

Today, corporations remain too fixated on the latter at the expense of the former–but we believe democracy and free enterprise must go hand in hand. In a principled, democratic society, every worker should have the opportunity to participate fully in the economy. That means employers, large and small, must provide their workers with more paths to ownership.