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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

#171

Post by Scoundreller »

_mlbt wrote: post #104
eatonphil wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

Sounds like my credit union. I call and someone picks up the phone pretty quickly and competently.

I got in as a minor, so I paid $5 for my startup share. (Adults are $25). They’ve been giving me a $5 dividend share every year for a few decades.

And charge me $0/month for a pretty full-service bank experience (not common at banks in Canada).

They’re on a North American network of ATMs (Exchange & Accel) so I have pretty good coverage out of town, can even deposit cash/cheques into CDN partner ATMs. In a lot of smaller towns, you can’t bank on every big bank having a branch, but a good chance of a partner credit union.

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

#172

Post by RetroTechie »

mgaunard wrote: post #27
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…

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.

Depends on how much say they have.

If employees have no say in how the company is run, CEO & board could easily run it into the ground (but jump ship with a gold parachute), then: yeah, most people will prefer a fixed paycheck.

But if regular employees are at the helm, company is more likely to do what's in the (long-term!) interest of employees.

Surely that'll make employees more willing to share in financial risks (+rewards!) of the organization. They're more personally invested in it - literally.

Let's hope this model gains more traction.

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

#173

Post by jmyeet »

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…

Every part of our economy and government is dedicated to wiping out any form of socialism.

A developing nation even thinks about nationalizing their resource extraction? Suddenly there’s a coup with the CIA’s fingerprints all over it.

NATO is a foreign policy arm of the United States dedicated to crushing any leftist momentum. Hell, we recruited Nazis to run it.

We constantly back totalitarian regimes to crush leftists.

At a more local level we do things like make municipal broadband illegal.

Our government uses eminent domain to seize property for corporate interests.

The only non-terrorist domestic law enforcement the FBI does seems to be union busting.

We’ve started wars over communism.

We had private organizations like the Pinkertons crush collective action. Look up Homestead.

It was rumored that when the UK wanted a post-Brexit trade deal, one of our conditions was privatizing the NHS.

Every level of our society is devoted to crushing collective action.

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

#174

Post by oersted »

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.

They actually have a lot of difficulty in hiring good directors for this exact reason, they have widened the gap several times and are planning to keep widening it.

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

#175

Post by sangnoir »

dh2022 wrote: post #131
skciva wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask the average American worker if they'd like an extra $2300 a year. And yes I understand thats pre-tax. But even so, thats a non-negligible amount for a lot of people.

For whom $2,300 / year is meaningful is, dare I say, hard to answer question. Most of the people for whom an additional $2,300 / year is meaningful pay little to no taxes. However, a large chunk of these people also get Earning Income Credit. These people would lose at least part of this credit if their income increases. This question I believe can be answered by the bi-partisan U.S. Government Accountability Office…

> For whom $2,300 / year is meaningful is, dare I say, hard to answer question

There were many articles written on the impact of the 2021 Advance Child Tax Credit (up to $1,800 per child over a 6 month period). The impact was very significant on lower-income families - which makes sense because for those earning less than $40,000 per year, that amount is more than the amount in one's paystub.

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

#176

Post by _mlbt »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #167
_mlbt wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you're talking about hybrids of socialism with capitalism, which are absolutely the way to go. History has shown that nation-scale "pure" socialism (which in practice nearly always results in a flavor of Marxism/Communism) is even more brutish and tragic than "pure" capitalism.

What would you say about President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania? His term in office was characterised by a peaceful transition from British colonialism to such a 'pure' form of socialism (including a full public ownership of all land and enterprise). This survived for three decades of almost completely peaceful, slow, and steady economic growth before the 90s, when it democratically voted itself into the capitalist sta…

I would say that it was one of the most successful attempts at nation-scale socialism, but ultimately still a failed experiment. As you said yourself the people themselves democratically voted for capitalism.

> Julius Nyerere's leadership of Tanzania commanded international attention and attracted worldwide respect for his consistent emphasis upon ethical principles as the basis of practical policies. Tanzania under Nyerere made great strides in vital areas of social development: infant mortality was reduced from 138 per 1000 live births in 1965 to 110 in 1985; life expectancy at birth rose from 37 in 1960 to 52 in 1984; primary school enrollment was raised from 25% of age group (only 16% of females) in 1960 to 72% (85% of females) in 1985 (despite the rapidly increasing population); the adult literacy rate rose from 17% in 1960 to 63% by 1975 (much higher than in other African countries) and continued to rise.[4] However, Ujamaa decreased production, casting doubt on the project's ability to offer economic growth.

> The most prominent ecological consequence during this time in Tanzania was due to the forced settlements by the TANU government and President Nyerere. During the time of forced settlement, TANU provided more artificial means of agricultural aid while cracking down on yield results and as a result, production yield began to decrease and land became underdeveloped. Land was not being utilized to its full potential and therefore, not only were crop yields subpar, but the biodiversity also became inferior.

> There were also internal factors that led to the implosion of the Ujamaa program. The first was resistance from the public. During the 1970s there was a resistance from the peasantry to leave their individual farms and move to communal living due to the lack of personal capital that came out of the communal farms. This led President Nyerere to order forced movement to Ujamaa villages.

Above quotes were taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ujamaa

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

#177

Post by Dibby053 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #119
Dibby053 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Central banks fought the 2007 crisis by increasing the monetary supply of a receding economy, so I don't see how removing the intermediaries and having the central bank itself allocate the resources in a fair way could make things worse than they are now.

I'm not talking about letting people borrow at 0% to spend in food and utilities. What I'm thinking of is a system where the path from business plan to business isn't determined as much by the amount of capital one already has, which is what causes the usual corporate structures to be formed in the first place: those who assume "all" the risk in turn receive "all" the benefits.

That often doesn't reflect the real stakes at play. Investors can have a diversified portfolio (and often plenty of spare capital for more tries), while workers invest 100% of their work on the same company for years or decades. The co-op model is more natural but the dynamics of money make it more rare than it should be.

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

#178

Post by mzs »

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…

I think it's more based on the schooling in CST: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_social_teaching

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

#179

Post by triceratops »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #112
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.

I might be wrong but in most unitary states, the capital region tends to have the highest GDP. I'm not aware of significant exceptions to this rule.

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

#180

Post by marssaxman »

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.

That may well be what tends to happen in the large-scale economy, but in my personal experience, co-ops crowd other businesses out over time because they are far less likely to piss me off and alienate me. At this point "co-op" has become a pretty strong quality signal: it's not going to be flashy, and it might be a little inefficient, but it will always be decent.
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