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

121–130 of 311 posts

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

#121

Post by dbingham »

gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #31
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.

How are co-ops anti-capitalist? They appear to me no different than a shareholder or partnership. Are most law firms socialistic in that they have partners who work for the firm getting a share of its profits?

Because labor is calling the shots and reaping the benefits, not the capital investors.

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

#122

Post by namlem »

jmyeet wrote: post #39
lanfeust6 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socialism is a big tent, by definition that's only one possible manifestation. Incidentally co-ops are not mutually exclusive with Capitalism (private property + market economy), for the same reason mixed-market economy (as practiced by most liberal democracies) represents not purely one thing or another. Co-ops are nothing new. > The Amish keep their surplus labor value. People don't want to live like the Amish. > I…

> Incidentally co-ops are not mutually exclusive with Capitalism (private property + market economy), As I just explained, that's not what capitalism is. Capitalism is a relatively new invention (~500 years) that arose from the ashes of feudalism. Exact same economic structure. Different exploiters. Consider this: markets exist in supposedly non-capitalist countries. They existed in the Communist bloc. We've got cune…

Private property under feudalism wasn't available to all. There can be no capitalism without liberalism. Property rights as a matter of law and everyone being equal under the law is essential.

Earlier partial market economies were in practice more like command economies with relatively small free markets in certain sectors.

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

#123

Post by greenie_beans »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #15
usrusr wrote: post #11

It's an amazing success story (even if surely not without any bad spots), it makes me happy just knowing that it exists. But I do wonder how much of its workability hinges on Basque nationalism rechanneled into something more useful than nationalism usually is. If that nationalism also had something like an independent state as a default outlet, the balance between cohesion and corruption creep might shift just enoug…

> But I do wonder how much of its workability hinges on Basque nationalism rechanneled into something more useful than nationalism usually is. Basically none, it does not hinge on that. If anything basque nationalism hurts the proyect more than it helps. Many of the workers in the basque country came "to disrupt" basque nationalism. So many of the old workforce in Mondragon is not basque born. there was a civil war i…

are there any books you'd recommend to learn more about this history?

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

#124

Post by TeMPOraL »

DragonStrength wrote: post #55
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was paid $36M in 2023. The company had, at the end of the year, 310,000 employees. So we can assume that if got paid zero, the company would've been able to distribute about $116 to each of them. Doesn't look very compelling to me, in that particular case.

I believe the idea is you replace individuals who solely manage across the board, with the idea management is really a part time job. That so many executives split their time would suggest that might very well be the case. With that in mind, there are many efficiencies imaginable beyond just the C-suite. And the employees now have ownership, so they have more of a reason to take up more responsibility than the curren…

Huh, that sounds like taking yet another full-time job and smearing its workload across everyone. That already happened with quite a lot of occupations - thanks to "increased productivity" brought by computers, a typical white-collar employee is now also doing the job of a secretary (calendar, mail, setting up meetings), graphics department (PowerPoint), financial department (managing and reporting travel expenses), and couple other ones as well.

And then everyone is surprised that real productivity doesn't seem to track the theoretical increase brought by technology. Well, maybe because most of that turns out to be replacing legible expense (salaries of well-defined jobs) with larger, illegible ones (everyone else doing tiny bit of extra work). Feels to me that your proposal would end up being just another case of that.

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

#126

Post by sokoloff »

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…

There was a time when paying for US-made products was paying for better quality products (among other properties).

As offshore manufacturing got better, buying American became much higher percentage “feel good” and much lower percentage “get better product”. Right now, there are some product categories where the highest-quality product in the world is not capable of being produced in the US.

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

#127

Post by rybosworld »

greenie_beans wrote: post #118
rybosworld wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 own…

There's no semantics.

> every socialist i know and have read agree that a coop is a socialist organization

Every unicorn I know thinks leprechauns are real.

A coop protects and upholds private ownership and distribution of profits to their shareholders. That's not semantics.

Socialism does not protect private ownership. Socialism does not distribute profits to shareholders (because there are none). That's also not semantics.

If you want to have a non-semantical conversation, the onus is on you.

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

#128

Post by cmurf »

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.

I wonder if it could work for public education. Perhaps even in lieu of teachers unions.

Much more narrowly, I wonder if it could work for certified flight instructors. Most CFIs are young, know little about business, marketing, tax compliance. And as a consequence are often exploited by employers who misclassify them as independent contractors only to pay them less, without benefits, and still direct their schedules, coerce them into noncompetes. A co-op would help protect their interests while raising standards, in a cost efficient way.

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

#129

Post by FrustratedMonky »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #97
JTbane wrote: post #18

C-suite salaries are so high in America I'm wondering if these sort of co-ops could be more competitive on that cost saving alone.

C-suite compensation, especially stock-based, is often in part to ensure management loyalty to shareholders vs other things. Worker board membership means management once again has competing loyalties, but now de jure . That means it is not worth it to the share holders to pay the extra "ransom compensation", in addition to workers probably outright being against it. I would thus expect C-suite compensation to go dow…

"ensure management loyalty to shareholders"

Everyone's pay is to keep them, isn't it? Nobody is loyal beyond being paid.

Do CEO's really provide so much 'extra' benefit to justify the premium? Is their loyalty in particular worth paying so much for?

I'm just not seeing how 'ransom' is needed. Isn't growing a healthy business supposed to be the goal for CEO and Board? And if employee owned, it is same.

The only reason to pay the extra 'ransom' to be loyal to shareholders, is when they want the CEO to do things that are 'not' for the benefit of the company, but only to benefit shareholders, who can sell and exit.

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

#130

Post by dbingham »

Anon1096 wrote: post #116
semanticist wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the employees don't own a controlling share. For it to be a worker cooperative it really needs to be entirely owned and governed by the people working there.
Post reply on HN