In the US, public and private pension funds directly hold about US$9.9trn of corporate equities, out of US$83trn of the publicly traded market (ignoring non-public wealth extraction which I also mentioned). That is about 12%. After allowing for pension exposure through mutual funds, we might be nearer to 20%. The Fed’s corporate-equity category also already includes ETF shares, so you can’t simply add “ETFs” on top without double-counting.

You've ignored the broader point about distribution. The Fed show that the top 1% own about half of corporate equities and mutual fund shares. So saying that shares are held by “billions of ordinary people” is quite wildly misleading.

My point wasn’t that ordinary workers own no shares through pensions or retirement accounts. But it is a limited and very unequally distributed channel for returning productivity gains to labor. It doesn’t make “shareholder profits” equivalent to “workers’ pensions.”

The key is that the wealth generated by workers makes its way into private pockets at many stages along the chain. Much of it never even makes its way to shareholders, neither through stock value increases nor dividends.