Posted by:
Steve Dubb
Colleagues around the country remember John Logue
John Logue, Founder and Director of the Ohio Employee Ownership Center at Kent State University, passed away around 8:00 PM Wednesday evening, December 9, 2009. He was 62. The cause of death was a cancer that was diagnosed only days before he died. An obituary notice from the Cleveland Plain Dealer is available here. A page set up in tribute of John Logue is available here. We at Community-Wealth.org send John’s wife Olga and his daughters our best wishes. We also pledge to be a part of the effort to continue the fine work that he started.
John Logue was many things: a family man; a Texan who made the economic revitalization of his adopted home state of Ohio his life work; and a political scientist at Kent State University, with an impressive curriculum vitae, which included being a finalist for a distinguished teaching award at Kent State (1997), winning the Kent State University Distinguished Scholarship Award (2002), and being selected by his colleagues to serve as department Chair from 2004 to 2008.
Yet for those of us in the community wealth building world and for the wide world of ESOP (employee stock ownership plan) advocates, John’s greatest achievement was the two decades-plus of labor that he put into building the institution that today is the Ohio Employee Ownership Center. Corey Rosen, founder and director of the National Center for Employee Ownership, recalls that, “About 25 years ago, John came to our office in Arlington, Virginia, a few years before we moved to California. We went to Attila’s Pizza Parlor to talk about life and employee ownership. John asked what he could do to move the idea forward. I suggested to him what I suggested to everyone who asked that--start a state employee ownership center. No one actually did it, of course. It took far too much work. No one except John.” Since 1987 the Institute that Logue founded and then directed for over two decades has worked with roughly 485 companies and employee groups employing 93,000 workers. All told OEOC over 22 years has assisted employees to buy part or all of 86 companies, creating 14,600 new employee-owners.
In a 2009 address at a community development conference sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Logue estimated that “if every cent in our budget over our 21-year history were allocated to job retention, the cost per job retained or stabilized would be $640/job.” These jobs have also generated over $330 million in employee-owner equity or about $22,600 per worker. Topping off this work, Logue was a critical partner of ours in developing the Evergreen Cooperatives — a network of green worker-owned cooperatives employing low-income residents and meeting the needs of anchor institutions in Cleveland, Ohio — whose grand opening this fall we celebrated in our November 2009 e-newsletter.
More details regarding John can be found on the tribute site referenced above. A few highlights:
Rodney North of the worker cooperative Equal Exchange writes:
I wish “there were 49 more John Logues and OEOCs for the rest of the U.S.. John was also a good friend to those of us in the worker cooperative movement and we’ll miss his support and example.”
J. Michael Keeling, President of The ESOP Association, notes, “ that John’s championing of employee ownership, and ESOPs as well, was in many ways unique. He never lost faith, as many have in the ESOP world that having employees be owners could move a business entity from the cusp of closing down, to keeping fair, equitable, and good jobs for the men and women working in the company under stress...Furthermore, John, unlike many in the ESOP world, never gave up hope that organized labor could, and would, embrace employee ownership over time, as he believed in his heart that the most powerful status given to an employee, or worker if you wish, was to create the “owner”.
Dan Swinney of the Chicago-based Center for Labor and Community Research writes:
“Among all the practitioners in the field of worker ownership, economic democracy, and transformative politics, John was the most skilled of us in identifying and securing the practical application as a link to something broader.”
John’s wife Olga requests that any donations made in John’s honor be directed to either:
(1) Ohio Employee Ownership Center/KSU Foundation; or
(2) The John Logue Memorial Employee Ownership Scholarship/KSU Foundation
Checks can be sent to:
OEOC
Kent State University
113 McGilvrey Hall
Kent, OH 44242