There's nothing special about the region or the culture, if you artificially favor a certain type of business structure then you will get more it. Mondragon is a classic case of incentives at work.
Mondragon Corporation
81–90 of 291 posts
Re: Mondragon Corporation
#82So some thing that are a bit less glamorous than described on the article is that one reason this works so well is because of the conditions of the place it runs in. This coop comes from the basque country, a northern autonomous region of Spain. It is a fairly rich area, with a huge port and industrial past and a pretty tight knit community. This generates an environment that allows for certain things to happen. One…
Re: Mondragon Corporation
#83I co-founded one, Sassafras Tech Collective, in Ann Arbor. It's been an amazing journey. I don't think I could ever go back to working in a non-democratic workplace.
Re: Mondragon Corporation
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comment history? Left wing groups terrorists? Please enlighten us with your research.
You're an investor, it says so in your profile. Most of your comments have a fairly standard pro-markets anti-regulation view point. I was extrapolating that to be conservative but you could also be a liberal pro-markets type. So, my bad. After doing some cursory googling, it looks like you were probably referring to the ETA. I would like to hear more about the terrorism and corruption, if you feel like going into it…
Re: Mondragon Corporation
#85In France, in the game industry, there is Motion Twin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Twin "Motion Twin is run as an anarcho-syndicalist workers cooperative with equal salary and decision-making power between its members." Also, this is where the Haxe programming language was created.
Spawning more small cooperatives when faced with financial success is a pretty nice alternative to a traditional growth strategy.
Re: Mondragon Corporation
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a difference between pay so poor no one is willing to take the job and pay good enough to get top talent. Clearing the first hurdle doesn't say anything about the second.
The myth of top talent is overrated, especially in managerial positions for companies where the workers have more say in decisions.
Re: Mondragon Corporation
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it matter if it's large? I was just talking to a friend who started a small company, merged with a bigger company and thought he had done everything right. After a few years, he regretted selling the company. Small is beautiful. We learned this as children. Challenge the mantra of size and growth.
it matters but not in the sense that everybody should aim for a super large corporation. It matters because it validates that cooperatives can grow very large, and refutes the claims such as "yes it's nice, but of course it works only for small ventures and could never grow)
Re: Mondragon Corporation
#88The reason why Mondragon was able to grow to its current size is their credit union Caja Laboral. Under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco "people's savings banks" were allowed to offer higher interest rates than competing banks. Therefore local citizens would deposit their funds in Caja Laboral, which would fund more cooperative businesses. There's nothing special about the region or the culture, if you artificial…
Re: Mondragon Corporation
#89From the article: At Mondragon, there are agreed-upon wage ratios between executive work and field or factory work which earns a minimum wage. These ratios range from 3:1 to 9:1 in different cooperatives and average 5:1. That is, the general manager of an average Mondragon cooperative earns no more than 5 times as much as the theoretical minimum wage paid in their cooperative. For most workers, this ratio is smaller…
> Does anyone know of any sizable examples of this ownership-model in tech? There is a tech-aligned version of the worker co-op called a platform co-op, with some examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative#Examples .
Re: Mondragon Corporation
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know exactly what OP is referring to, but the Basque country in Spain is a region with certain separatist political actors that advocate/push for the independence of the Basque Country. In the past this included ETA which was a separatist terrorist group from the Basque region. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETA_(separatist_group) ETA was most definitely a terrorist group, infamously known worldwide for thei…
ETA was a terrorist group, but they publicly announced an end to violence in 2011. They began the process of deescalation after 9/11. It should also be mentioned that the UN had said that the Spanish occupation of the Basque region violated human rights.