bobbolink

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Sun Nov-15-09 07:41 PM
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Workers getting angrier at corporations.... some looking at a new direction--Mondragon Corp.

I've been listening to people, both politically aware and not, who are seeing clearly that it is the corporations that are making their lives much more miserable than they should be. These people are liberal, conservative and apolitical, but they are pissed. There is much common ground here, if we would only listen to them, and acknowledge their anger, and help them to direct it where it belongs.

Last week, Thom Hartmann had Leo Gerard, president of United Steel Workers, on his program and they talked about the Mondragon Corporation. I mentioned this to a local friend, and finally had the time to look it up. It is indeed very interesting, and I'm glad USW is looking into this.

The building anger is sure to blow, and it will be ugly, if history is any clue. So, it would be very good to start studying concepts like this, and work to build new alternatives before that ugly blowup happens.

Mondragon Corporation

From its origins forty years ago as an employee-owned cooperative manufacturing paraffin stoves, Mondragon has grown to 160 employee-owned cooperatives, involving 23,000 member owners, with sales grossing $3 billion dollars US in 1991. Statistics show the Mondragon cooperatives to be twice as profitable as the average corporation in Spain with employee productivity surpassing any other Spanish organization. It has its own bank, a research institute, an entrepreneurial division, insurance and social security institutions, schools, a college, a health maintenance system and a health insurance cooperative. It is focused on relational cooperatives dedicated to the common good.
http://www.iisd.org/50comm/commdb/list/c13.htm
Gerard�s union has just announced a merger �deal� of its own � to help put an end to that hemorrhaging of jobs and futures. The Steelworkers will be joining with the Spanish-based Mondrag�n International, the world�s largest network of industrial worker cooperatives, in a bid to �transform manufacturing practices in North America.�

�We need a new business model,� Gerard explains, �that invests in workers and invests in communities.�

Mondrag�n may just fit that bill. The Mondrag�n network, launched 53 years ago by a visionary Basque priest, has become Spain�s seventh-largest business group and currently operates 260 enterprises in over 40 countries � making everything from high-tech tools to refrigerators.

Workers in Mondrag�n cooperatives own their enterprises. They each have an equal share and an equal vote in key enterprise policy decisions. Workers in Mondrag�n businesses, notes long-time progressive analyst Carl Davidson, �themselves decide on the income spread between the lowest-paid worker and the highest-paid manager.�

That spread, across the Mondrag�n universe, averages 4.5 times. In the United States last year, CEOs averaged 319 times the pay of average U.S. workers.

The United Steelworkers, the biggest union of manufacturing workers in the United States, will now be looking to apply Mondrag�n principles to �viable small businesses in appropriate sectors where the current owners are interested in cashing out.�

�We see Mondrag�n�s cooperative model with �one worker, one vote� ownership,� says Steelworkers president Gerard, �as a means to re-empower workers and make business accountable to Main Street instead of Wall Street.�

For thousands of workers at Black & Decker, and millions of consumers, that accountability may come a little too late.

http://blog.usw.org/
The Mondrag�n Corporation is a group of manufacturing, financial, retail and knowledge companies based in the Basque Country and extended over the rest of Spain and abroad. It is one of the world's largest worker cooperatives and one important example of workers' self-management.

The company was founded in Arrasate, a town in Gipuzkoa known as Mondrag�n in Spanish. The town had suffered badly in the Spanish Civil War and there was mass unemployment. A young priest, Father Jos� Mar�a Arizmendiarrieta, arrived in 1941 and decided to focus on the economic development of the town, settling upon co-operative methods to achieve his goals. Co-operatives and self-help organisations had a long tradition in the Basque Country but had died away after the fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1943, Arizmendi set up a democratically-managed Polytechnic School. The school played a key role in the emergence and development of the co-operative movement. In 1956, five young graduates of the school set up the first co-operative enterprise, named ULGOR (now Fagor Electrodom�sticos) after their surnames, which during its early years focused on the manufacture of petrol-based heaters and cookers. In 1959, they then set up the Caja Laboral Popular ("People's Worker Bank"), a credit union that both allowed the co-operative members access to financial services and subsequently provided start-up funds for new co-operative ventures. New co-operative companies started up in the following years, including Fagor Electr�nica, Fagor Ederlan and Danobat.

It has also extended by inviting other co-operatives to join the group and offering rescue for some failed companies on condition of co-operativization.

The group companies give preference to fellow co-operatives. Co-operative workers manage their finances through Caja Laboral, hold health insurances and pension funds at Lagun Aro and have discounts at Eroski markets and on Fagor appliances. Eroski stores are furnished by co-operative trucks. Members may have studied at a group ikastola (college) and extended studies at the Mondrago�n University while having a labor stage at a co-operative. The reference research centre is Ikerlan, which is focused on applied research since 1974.

more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation