Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 311 posts

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

#111

Post by namlem »

asimpletune wrote: post #95
_mlbt wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that socialism doesn't scale without force. Eventually you'll run out of people who willingly go along with doing things for the greater good. Looking at history, once you get larger than a commune or coop it all falls apart. You need force to seize the means of production, and the leaders of this force never give up their "temporary" powers. You also need force to get people to do the necessary but un…

Well, for what it's worth democracy doesn't scale without force either. Somebody, i.e. the state, has a monopoly on violence, to protect our property. In any case, you're just talking about state based socialism, like marxism. But there are other forms of socialism that do just fine and are alive today, like syndicalism. They work because they don't rely on a government to exist, correctly recognizing their power in…

Syndicalism in practice is closer to capitalism than socialism, and the syndicates are the de facto state.

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

#112

Post by Arkhaine_kupo »

wwarner wrote: post #74

I visited Bilbao a few years back and the claim then was that Basque Country had the highest average income in Spain. Today Wikipedia [0] lists it as second. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_lists_of_Spanish_autono...

Its the highest median income in that table.

Its second only in GDP per capita because a number of big corporations moved to Madrid. There has been a slow but fairly unstopable centralisation in Spain, specially since the Catalan independence debalce a few years ago, more and more companies have moved their headquarters to Madrid. Which has raised the GDP of madrid a ton and moved many jobs there.

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

#113

Post by hawk_ »

Kalium wrote: post #57
enraged_camel wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, now combine the salaries of the entire C-suite. That’s what the parent comment is referring to.

OK. Let's assume that the rest of the C-suite combines to give that number a solid 5x multiplier. How accurate that is is left as an exercise to the reader, but be aware that the CEO is almost always the highest-paid member of a C-suite. That would turn $116 into $580 per year. Spread out, that would be approximately $22.30 per paycheck if biweekly, or $24.16 if twice a month. All before taxes, of course. Real life-c…

> instead of dreaming of us all dining endlessly on the the fat of the C-suite.

I thought the issue with such high/concentrated C-suite compensation isn't the envy (though that may be the case for some). The issue is that just by squeezing $116 per employee such a CEO can pay herself. Like if removing armrests from all employee chairs nets you a few additional millions of dollars, the temptation to do so exists.

If there was no such C-suite, there would be less incentives for pennypinching over basic employee wellbeing.

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

#114

Post by namlem »

_mlbt wrote: post #87
feedforward wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire world was socialist from the time of the Lubang Jereji Saleh cave paintings 40,000 years ago until 10,000 years ago. Societies with different classes only sprung up 10,000 years ago. They only scaled with force, and the literature from 4000 years ago to now attests to this. > Capitalism is very much like Democracy. It's the worst system other than all the others that have been tried. Hunter gatherer bands…

That's not scale though. Socialism works great in small loosely organized tribes, but fails at nation scale every time.

It doesn't even work that well at the local level. The Kibbutzim in Israel were socialist for like 70 years, but now are almost all mixed market capitalist in some form or another.

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

#115

Post by mamonster »

Scoundreller wrote: post #100
mamonster wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the yearly complaint in French politics that CAC40 companies are paying monstrous dividends, to which the answer is always: If they are so monstrous then surely you should simply buy the shares yourself? You could just be an Amazon or a Walmart shareholder by logging into your Robinhood account, unlike the feudal regime where to become an aristocrat you would need to be some sort of famous knight,…

Do the CAC40 companies have fixed-percentage-of-profit dividend yields? Dividends (can be) just writing cheques to yourself with your own money.

I mean depends on if they are mature or not, but the complaints in France are about the absolute amounts in euro, not the %s paid out(for example this year the complaints are about Total making a lot of money from oil and banks making a lot of money from higher interest rates, the proximal causes of both being completely outside their control).

>Dividends (can be) just writing cheques to yourself with your own money.

Well, yes, since as a shareholder you technically "are" the company.

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

#116

Post by Anon1096 »

semanticist wrote: post #86
xhkkffbf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be fair to say that companies like AMZN or GOOG have "employee ownership" because of the stock options? If so, it means many tech companies meet this definition.

Most people working for Amazon don't get stock options, most of Amazon's employees are doing stock management in warehouses, delivery, etc. Beyond that, stock _options_ aren't stock, and stock _grants_ to employees are often in restricted classes... they're not meaningful employee ownership because they're structured to ensure that they don't represent any kind of employee control over the company.

In many tech companies like Microsoft and Netflix, there is only 1 stock class and SWE employees get stock grants that aren't restricted on vest. You just conveniently picked the FAANG company where most of its workforce are warehouse employees.

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

#117

Post by asdasdsddd »

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…

[flagged]

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

#118

Post by greenie_beans »

rybosworld wrote: post #91
greenie_beans wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how is "socializing" the ownership of a business not socialist?

The business ownership in a coop is not "socialized". It's still privately owned. The definition of socialism is not, and never has been, "workers owning the means of production." A coop still meets all the characteristics of capitalist entity: - privately owned - for profit, with profits going to shareholders If you think coops are socialist, then you must also think any company that has more than 1 shareholder is s…

your opinion about the semantics of "coop" and "socialism" is wrong. most semantic debates are worthless anyway.

every socialist i know and have read agree that a coop is a socialist organization, and we will keep creating these enterprises as an alternative to capitalism, until one day, ideally, the capitalist corporations won't be able to compete in the job market with the coops, forcing them to socialize their ownership and power structures. despite whether you think it's socialism or not.

here are the 7 cooperative principles. please explain how this is capitalism? https://www.electric.coop/seven-cooperative-principles%E2%80...

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

#119

Post by Nasrudith »

Dibby053 wrote: post #66
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #3

Co-ops are fascinating to me as an alternate evolutionary branch of capitalism. Like the marsupials to the placentals. Also like the marsupials, in most cases where co-ops compete with regular capitalist businesses they go extinct.

>in most cases where co-ops compete with regular capitalist businesses they go extinct After seeing time and time again the success of workers of bankrupted companies pulling up their compensations and unemployment benefits to rebuild the company in a co-op model, I wonder if it's not the opposite. "Money attracts money", and I don't think it's too crazy to think that if everybody had access to low-interest credit un…

"Everyone has access to low-interest credit under the same conditions as the big players." just sounds like a fantastic (in the fantasy sense) recipe for inflation as the underlying capital and goods sought remain constant but the monetary supply increases. In addition to potentially creating something resembling another 2007 financial crisis worth of mispackaged bad debts.

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

#120

Post by greenie_beans »

gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #75
greenie_beans wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"capitalism" is simply a way to organize an enterprise. an enterprise can participate in a market without structuring the organization as a capitalist enterprise. free market != capitalism. american-style capitalism consists of a political system that supports the capitalist enterprise structure.

Definition of capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit. The private owner here is a co-op. Not socialist.

this is wrong. see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40145796
Post reply on HN