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The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

theguardian.com

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Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#101

Post by SSJPython »

jmyeet wrote: post #20

For all the fearmongering of the Red Scare, this is what socialism looks like. Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for their labor. Capitalism is Walmart where all profits are captured by a handful of shareholders and executives, being subsidized by the Federal government through food stamps to employees and decimating local economies to the point where they're left with dollar st…

> Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for their labor.

What is "fair pay" for labor in your eyes? Is it the entire surplus being generated? Why is that considered fair?

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#102

Post by monknomo »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #33
mgaunard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, people would rather be employees paid in cash whose amount is agreed ahead of time than partners where they're paid depending on the company's profits.

I have been wondering if you could make it work in Silicon Valley for a small firm. Take 2-10 people that could be founders and give them the alternative of being the Nth partner. They’d need to bring in 1/N of the profit to earn their keep. I think it’s doable.

I have long suspected a model like this, borrowing from lawyer shops and worker co-ops, could be pretty good for software. Since software is sort of inherently project based, could have a mix of product and contracting, and could have wins both on the co-op side and whoever the co-op is doing work for/selling product to

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#103

Post by Nasrudith »

harimau777 wrote: post #52
mgaunard wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, people would rather be employees paid in cash whose amount is agreed ahead of time than partners where they're paid depending on the company's profits.

I think that could change if the workers are not living paycheck to paycheck. It would also probably be possible to develop some sort of middle ground. For example, workers could be paid a conservative salary and then profits could be distributed as a bonus at the end of the year.

It could with hierarchy of needs, but what would the gain really be of doing so? Mostly ideological. And that is putting aside any of the other 'competitive balance issues' vs other business structures.

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#104

Post by _mlbt »

eatonphil wrote: post #78
Quarrel wrote: post #25

The co-op structure is less used in the US, but there are quite a lot of significant employee owned corporations (which come with the limited liability benefits to shareholders). There are also quite a few with mixed founder / employee ownership. Publix for instance employ 250,000 people across their supermarkets and are employee / founder owned. A recent list of the largest from Oct 2023: https://www.nceo.org/articl…

Co-ops in the US seems to be particularly popular in agriculture.

Energy cooperatives are another thing I've seen work well here in the US.

A house I lived in got our electricity from a Touchstone Energy cooperative[1] and our rate was dirt cheap and they even mailed us a dividend check every year. I've even received a few checks from them after moving out of the area and no longer being a customer of theirs. They had great customer service too. They were significantly better in every way than the regional monopolies and municipal power companies I've dealt with.

[1] https://www.touchstoneenergy.com

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#105

Post by namlem »

>Pursuing a co-operative model is far from plain sailing, however. Numerous hurdles exist. For one, membership does not come cheap. To join a co-operative, workers typically put up a one-off payment of about €17,000 each. Plus, just as they are entitled to a share of any profits, so, too, are they liable for any losses. Commercial pressures can also prove acute, as Fagor Electrodomésticos’s troubled history shows. The fact that all major investment decisions have to be put to the vote can also make Mondragón’s co-operatives less agile than their conventional competitors. And finding financing can be problematic as the private capital markets are effectively closed to them, admits Fagor Arrasate’s Mendieta: “We can’t incorporate external capital into the co-operative’s share capital because we are governed by the principle of ‘one person, one vote’, which no capitalist investor would accept.”

As with any system, there are tradeoffs.

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#106

Post by namlem »

jmyeet wrote: post #20

For all the fearmongering of the Red Scare, this is what socialism looks like. Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for their labor. Capitalism is Walmart where all profits are captured by a handful of shareholders and executives, being subsidized by the Federal government through food stamps to employees and decimating local economies to the point where they're left with dollar st…

This is not socialism, it is syndicalism. Some argue that syndicalism is a type of socialism, but in practice, it behaves more like a type of capitalism.

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#107

Post by [deleted] »

namlem wrote: post #105

>Pursuing a co-operative model is far from plain sailing, however. Numerous hurdles exist. For one, membership does not come cheap. To join a co-operative, workers typically put up a one-off payment of about €17,000 each. Plus, just as they are entitled to a share of any profits, so, too, are they liable for any losses. Commercial pressures can also prove acute, as Fagor Electrodomésticos’s troubled history shows. Th…

[deleted]

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#108

Post by s1artibartfast »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #34
thesuitonym wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Co-ops are just the way that socialism can exist in a capitalist society. And while capitalist businesses can usually undermine them using all the tools of capitalism, notice that co-op workers are usually happier and paid better, co-op customers are treated better and receive better service, and the community suffers less from having a co-op in the area.

> co-op customers are treated better and receive better service I’d argue this is because a co-op can attract higher-quality workers for less than a purely profit-minded shareholder-owned business. (Similar to companies with a unique culture.) Generalise the model and you’ll get the co-op equivalent of the 70s-era UAW running roughshod where they can.

I think alternatively/additively they may be more responsive around firing ineffective staff, and a culture of productivity. When workers/managers directly pay for their co-worker's unproductiveness, they have an incentive to replace opposed to simply hire more additional staff.

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#109

Post by namlem »

losvedir wrote: post #98
jmyeet wrote: post #20

For all the fearmongering of the Red Scare, this is what socialism looks like. Socialism is an industrial co-op like this where workers are fairly paid for their labor. Capitalism is Walmart where all profits are captured by a handful of shareholders and executives, being subsidized by the Federal government through food stamps to employees and decimating local economies to the point where they're left with dollar st…

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's nothing actually legally preventing a Mondragon-type industrial co-op like this from existing in the US, right? That it's not so common is an interesting question: does it get outcompeted by your standard corporation? Would people rather generally work as employees than take on risk as owners? Something else? I think in a co-op like this, employees would still be eligible for food…

There are some large co-ops in the US. The largest iirc is CHS, a tier 2 co-op (co-op made of smaller co-ops).

Re: The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the largest industrial co-op

#110

Post by monknomo »

piva00 wrote: post #53
anon291 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socialism as practiced also implies heavy centralized planning to mandate these arrangements and then set price floors and ceilings to set production capacity. The Amish tend to reject social ownership of land so they are not socialist or communist by any means. Distributist would probably be the best description with any mention in the literature.

Heavily centralised economic planning is a feature of Marxism-Leninism, not of Socialism.

well, also the modern corporation. I think the centralized planning aspect is actual orthogonal to the resource distribution/means of production aspect
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