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

141–150 of 311 posts

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

#141

Post by saalweachter »

_mlbt wrote: post #41
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…

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…

> The problem is that socialism doesn't scale without force.

Eh, not a problem unique to socialism, or devoid from capitalism.

The history of labor in the United States is rife with both socialist (well, maybe anarchist) bomb-throwers and rich capitalists hiring private armies to gun down striking workers.

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

#142

Post by FrustratedMonky »

_mlbt wrote: post #89
harimau777 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Capitalism is very much like Democracy. It's the worst system other than all the others that have been tried. There are other systems that we've tried which work much better than the corporate Capitalism that we have in the United States. Most notably democratic socialism/social democracy/mixed economies (with the exact dividing lines between those three depending a lot on who you ask).

I completely agree that capitalism as we know it is highly flawed, but history has proven that socialism is not the answer.

Think you are mixing up Communism and Socialism.

Socialism is alive and well and working.

Every major capitalist society today (including US) has a percentage of Socialism sprinkled in to keep it functioning. Pure capitalism leads to a brutish tragic world, so some socialism is added to at least keep people from outright starving and rising up in revolution.

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

#143

Post by bboygravity »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #137
dbingham wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The tradeoff is that requiring all shares be worker-owned devalues the shares owned by workers, due to massively reduced liquidity. This situation does not necessarily benefit the workers since they have an interest in maximizing the value of their share.

How does reduced liquidity equal lower share value?

Makes no sense to me.

Case in point example: SpaceX shares are very illiquid but also very very much up since SpaceX was founded.

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

#144

Post by xeromal »

Quarrel wrote: post #136
eatonphil wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Quite a few construction companies too.

Seems to happen once the founder retires. My little brother's tile laying business is going to distribute ownership to the employees based on years + skill once the founder retires. They're already highly paid and treated well (they even have a 401k match which is surprising for a little 30 employee construction company). I think it's the way to go unless you have heirs that you want to run the company.

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

#145

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Quite, and encouraged by the USDA, see e.g., https://www.usda.gov/topics/rural/co-ops-key-part-fabric-rur...>.

Producer co-ops generally are at least somewhat prevalent.

Two notable former examples are Visa and Mastercard (they've since reverted to publicly-traded corporations, in the aughts). Both were originally formed as co-operative ventures among member banks, effectively a producer co-op.

I've looked into worker co-ops previously, and noted that most examples seem to have relatively simple organisational needs, with typical sectors being food-service (restaurants and cafes), publishers, acting troupes, and if memory serves, a political party. Mondragon is notable for being an industrial manufacturing company.

There are also worker-owned (though not necessarily co-operative) businesses, such as Bob's Red Mill (milling and cereal products).

Consumer co-ops saw popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, but have largely faded from view. A niche they had occupied, "natural food store" is now dominated by Amazon through its Whole Foods subsidiary, though there are some independent co-ops still extant, often in quite unexpected locations. Three Rivers Market in Knoxville, TN, comes to mind.

Credit Unions are another often overlooked case of co-ops --- both in terms of being neglected over commercial banks and not being recognised as co-operative businesses.

The Nonprofit Quartery ran a recent article on recent trends in co-ops in 2022:

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/where-are-new-co-ops-emerging...>

News of a 2015 list of the top 100 US co-ops:

https://www.thenews.coop/list-top-100-co-ops-usa-released/>

And the 2023 listing: https://impact.ncb.coop/hubfs/Co-op%20100%202023%20Report%20...> (PDF)

Breakout:

- Ag: 47 firms, $187.6 billion (59%)

- Finance: 17 firms, $39.1 billion (12%)

- Grocery: 8 firms, $33.1 billion (10%)

- Energy: 22 firms, $26.8 billion (8%)

- Hardware: 3 firms, $18.6 billion (6%)

- Other: 3 firms, $13.4 billion (4%)

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

#146

Post by FrustratedMonky »

adolph wrote: post #92
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…

> Hunter gatherer bands in the Amazon live the way they have for 50,000 years As much as “noble savage” is a comforting story, the truth is likely more complicated. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67940671 https://www.npr.org/2011/01/12/132853997/Amazon-Once-Was-Hom... https://davidgraeber.org/books/the-dawn-of-everything-a-new-...

Technically everything is more complicated. In threads like this, people play fast and loose with terminology.

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

#147

Post by nextos »

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.

Galois.com, pretty famous in the software correctness area, is kinda a co-op right, as it is employee owned?

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

#148

Post by dllthomas »

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.

Yes, but note that those are typically neither worker co-ops (like Cheese Board or the components of Mondragon) nor consumer co-ops (like REI or a grocery co-op), but a cooperative association of businesses that are themselves typically very much not co-ops.

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

#149

Post by FrustratedMonky »

namlem wrote: post #114
_mlbt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Capitalist internally or externally?

Do Kibbutz have highly paid CEO's that earn much more than the members, and subject them to pay cuts?

As pointed out in this thread, a Co-op is socialist internally by sharing wealth across more of the labor. But capitalist externally since it sells to a capitalist world.

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

#150

Post by dredmorbius »

cmurf wrote: post #128
eatonphil wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One of the challenges of a co-op school is that people tend to be "in the market" only whilst they have school-aged children, roughly ages 5 to 18. In much the same way that student involvement in higher education tends to focus strongly on the few years such students are actively being educated, which means that faculty, staff, and corporate influence in higher educational institutions tends to overwhelm student power.

That said, yes there are co-op schools, with the Co-Op School in Brooklyn, NY, being prominent: https://thecoopschool.org/>

Post reply on HN