Interesting question, indeed. Every system maintained some redistributive mechanisms that tied the majority of the population to the interests of the ruling class in such a way as not to challnege the control of the ruling class over the means of production.
For example, in pre-modern societies of Europe, such mechanisms were direct charity, church or the state. Charity was a nontrivial redistrubutive meachnims which nonetheless reinforced the dominant position of the donor and provided some form of appeasment to the recipients. The church performed the role of a charitable intermediary (ths getting immensly rich in the process), but also by providing alternative venues for social advancement for lower classes. Finally, in countries where nobility was challenged by relatively strong peasantry (e.g. in France), it used the state as both a mechanism of social control and redistribution. This is precisely the function of the welfare state in the US - which is now under attack because the ruling class feels relatively strong and secure.
>From that point of view, the existence of secondary redistributive
mechanisms, such as employee stock ownership, further supports the
class-based model of a society rather than contradicting it. Specifically,
it is the token nature of the control of the means of production they offer
that betrays the class division of the society that produced it. That
tokenism would not exist if the power and control were distrubuted more or
less equally, as the pluralists maintain.
Stated differently, you do not have, say, a Rhode Island Investor Stock Ownership designed somehow to "balance" the power of the investors from the neighboring Massachusetts precisely because RI and MA investors have more or less euqal power as a class, despite any differences in the size of these two groups. They do not need tokens of control, they have the real thing.
That, however, is not the case with the working class. Since their control of the means of production is virtually nil (otherwise we would not have the "outsourcing") - they must be given illusory means of that control to maintain their allegiance to the ruling class. By non-allegiance I do not necessarily mean a revolution, but much more mundance acts such as shirking, theft or sabotage. Such acts can be far more threatening to the captains of industry than any armed rebellion in this country, hence need for appeasement.
wojtek