My conclusion is that it emerged out of the unique environment of already high Basque solidarity, but even more so under Franco's oppression. After a few generations, they admit that the hardcore spirit is gone and made initiatives to try to restore it, but still some of the biggest co-ops have died or been sold off (ie Fagor).
My friends from there told me: "It's where your dumb cousin works", as it's very political with a lot of patronage kinds of networks that democratic elections at that scale tend to produce. They made a startup community there, but it seemed like most of the kids were trying to get out, not stay to reform the coop.
I think the Italian Emilia Romagna region cooperatives [1] may be a less centralized model that could be better, as it does away with the big organization that eventually rots, like any big old org.
[1] https://www.yesmagazine.org/economy/2016/07/05/the-italian-p...
They are still a developing country and by no means wealthy, but the average income in this area is double what it is in the rest of the country.
Their economy is built almost entirely on cooperatives. The government provides land and seed funding to get the cooperatives going https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-social-economy-of-roja...
1 - Cooperatives excite you and
2 - You use social media
you might want to look at the social.coop Mastodon instance (or cosocial.ca if you're Canadian).
Not only has the community on both those sites been a breath of total fresh air for me, I am not worried about the server I'm on having decide between disappearing and selling ads, and I feel like I'm partaking in a social enterprise.
Just recently social.coop had an open vote on how to donate some of our surplus to the open software we use and organizations that promote cooperation. It's been so nice to see and be apart of.
- The Minneapolis/St. Paul region has so many food co-ops that there's a co-operative warehouse dedicated to serving them (and other businesses too) https://www.cpw.coop/
- New England has a multitude of 30-40 year old food co-ops (along with startups like mine) and has its own association of food co-ops to help advocate for better state policy/governance http://nfca.coop/
- National Co-op Grocers is a US-wide group that helps co-ops buy food at cheaper rates and provides a ton of great branding food co-ops who are members get to use https://www.grocery.coop/
I'd love to see more tech co-operatives sprout up someday... there is an alternative to VC that keeps ownership equal, and it's been all around us this whole time!
> The profits generated by each cooperative are put to work for the benefit of the greater whole. Each cooperative gives 14-40% of their gross profits to their division (depending on the division), and another 14% to their parent company. The rest are invested back in the cooperative (60% of net profits), distributed among their employees (30% of net profits), and donated to social organizations in their communities (10% of net profits).
> Workers buy into their cooperative when they become employees, investing up to €16,000 into a personal equity account. They pay 30% of that investment upfront, with the remainder taken out of their paychecks over following 2 to 7 years. After two years with the organization, workers become “members” and start earning interest on their investment at a rate of at least 7.5% annually. If the cooperative does well, they might earn much more than that. Workers can pull this money out of their accounts when they leave the cooperative or retire.
... so it's not ownership, right? It's profit-sharing while you're an employee (the "interest" the worker gets is out of that 30% of net profits discussed previously), but you don't own shares in the company that you can then sell, like an employee who receives an RSU or receives and exercises an option.
In some sense, corporate employees that get some form of equity as part of their compensation are more literally worker-owners. I think the problem with American companies that have an employee stock plan is that the employee stock pool is a small slice of the total ownership, and employees don't participate in any real democratic governance. Despite being shareholders, they get far less information about the financial health or strategic position of the company than investors with board seats. Real partial ownership doesn't lead to real power or access to information. And the aim of the company is still to serve the larger investors, not the workers.
Can any people from this region tell us what the downsides of working for Mondragon are? The article only touched on lower pay.
Also how much does the President of the parent Mondragon Corp get paid? The often cited 6:1 or 9:1 lowest paid worker to CEO seems to be applied to CEOs of the various corporations not the president of the parent company.
The author doesn't speculate why, but I'd guess it's partly due to Basque ethnic solidarity. Mondragon sounds a lot like the kind of late 1800s / early 1900s syndicalism that later evolved into Italian fascism and German National Socialism.
Of course, another big "collectivist capitalism" success story is China, which is also fiercely nationalist.
I don't see either of those models working in the West on a large scale any time soon.
Dude reinvented the socialist mode of production but renamed it "capitalism" instead lmao
This was recognized by everyone from Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln to Adam Smith. Smith even conceded that profit was impossible if workers retain their surplus value, which is exactly the point.
I bring this up because that's what capitalism is: draining the surplus labor value from workers to the capital-owning class. In feudalism, the artistocracy and th emonarchy extracted that value. Jeff Bezos is the new king.
Why do I mention this? Because it wasn't that long ago that this view was universally accepted. The Red Scare post-WW2 spread a lot of damaging propaganda that has led ordinary people to fight for the ultra-rich to have even more money, to their own detriment.
Walmart killing all your local businesses then leaving, leaving you in a food desert with a Family Dollar store maybe. That's capitalism. Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. Monsanto agribusiness? Capitalism. Family-owned farms? Socialism.
Something like Mondragon shows that large-scale cooperatives can work. And the reason why these sorts of things aren't more prevalent is that laws are passed to make them difficult to set up or outright illegal. Many US states outlaw municipal broadband, for example.
And any country in the last 70 years that even thinks about nationalizing resource extraction finds itself having a coup that nearly always has the CIA's fingerprints over it.
Or we simply starve them to death under the sanitized euphemism of "economic sanctions" (eg Cuba, Iraq, Venezuela). I really want people to understand that we're not doing this for any moral reason. We're doing it at the behest of Western companies who would prefer to steal the riches of these countries.
Co-operatives can go a lot further than manufacturing too. It can be a solution for housing. Housing cooperatives cut out landlords, who are rent-seeking both literally and figuratively.
I'm all for more cooperatives, it's a good model. Operating in a system which doesn't compel that form of organization is what keeps them honest. Mondragon is a profitable company, emphasis on profitable.
The article talks a bit about how, while Mondragon is a pretty good deal for basic labor, they have trouble attracting high-demand talent like engineers, which they also need. In a free-market system, a worker's collective can solve a problem like that, by offering more perks, raising the 'level' for new engineering hires, waiving some amount of the up-front investment, or just getting by through, in effect, paying some of the salary in a nonmaterial reward of belonging to something which better meets some people's sense of ethics and fairness.
That's not how it works when the company you work for is also the police and the military. It's also not how it works when every company is compelled to organize itself this way. That compulsion leads to dysfunction, corruption, cheating, and at the extreme end, gulags.
So let's pass on all that. If you believe that worker cooperatives are a social good, as I do, buy stuff from them. Work for one, found one. It's working so far.