a. During the past decade, a number of industrial plants and other facilities located in this State have permanently terminated operations or relocated operations to sites in other states or abroad; and,

b. These terminations and relocations have had a serious and undesirable impact upon the economies of the communities in which they have occurred and upon the State as a whole, lowering the value of land and improvements which are abandoned or devoted to less intensive uses than formerly; reducing employment, business and personal income, and the resources of the State to the extent these depend thereon; and increasing claims upon those resources; and,

c. Even more important than the impact of these closings on the general State economy and the public sector are the social and personal costs to working persons and their families of confronting the forbidding alternatives of, on the one hand, permanent unemployment, and on the other, either extensive mid-career retraining or forced relocation or both; and,

d. In a small number of cases across the nation, employees have met the threat of plant shutdown by collectively establishing a stock ownership trust to purchase the facility in question and to continue its operations under the direction of a trusteeship acting on behalf of the employee owners; and,

e. These trusts can serve to save jobs, continue economic development otherwise likely to be suspended and promote within the private enterprise system the goal or worker participation in the risks and rewards of equity ownership; and

f. In view of the facts hereinabove cited, and further in view of the avowed public policy of the Executive and Legislative branches to preserve and expand manufacturing and other economic activity in the State, the Legislature finds that a high priority must be given by relevant State agencies to the provision of technical and administrative assistance to workers seeking to save jobs by forming employee stock ownership trusts.

L.1981, c. 82, s. 1, eff. March 25, 1981.