Ramaphosa wants more business backing for employee ownership schemes

President Cyril Ramaphosa said on Tuesday that SA's employee share ownership schemes had come a long way since their early days of empowerment 20 years ago, with more than a half a million workers now participants.

Referring to a study by the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition (dtic), which noted that 551 000 workers in SA were now covered by share ownership schemes, Ramaphosa noted that efforts to introduce more of these schemes had picked up considerably over the years, but that more needs to be done.

The earlier schemes were "relatively limited at the time" in part because of the finite nature of the respective arrangements in the intervening years, said Ramaphosa, who was delivering the keynote address at the inaugural Worker Share Ownership Conference hosted by the dtic in Sandton.