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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

#201

Post by s1artibartfast »

nextos wrote: post #164
nyssos wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. Galois employees are beneficiaries of the ESOP trust that owns the shares, rather than direct owners as in a prototypical cooperative.

Sure, my understanding was that Galois is not exactly a co-op. Why this structure? Is it more advantageous in the US?

One of the main challenges for co-ops is navigating the entry and exit. If you had Direct employee ownership, you have to buy in when you start and sell your stock back when you leave.

A trust with the employees as beneficiaries solves a lot of these problems. It also prevents the co-op members from taking the company public for a huge payday.

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

#202

Post by TheGamerUncle »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #156
nullhole wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also maybe do it across a few more industries.

Also maybe move whatever other goalposts you can find until the Marxist theory begins to make sense.

Lmao this is not marxism this is much much closer to falangism and Catholic Syndicalism. Also answering to your comment "How is it an attack? What would be a more accurate descriptor for someone who appears to subscribe to the idea of an oppressed class and an oppressor class?"

Nobody talked about that or said that they just asked to replicate the model in more industries, and seeing the sorry state of many products, that seems wise.

As someone that escaped a socialist country, I can and will have to ask you to take five minutes to enage with people comments instead of blindly barking.

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

#203

Post by lsaferite »

sokoloff wrote: post #168
bboygravity wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Suppose I own 0.01% of the company I work at. If that company is publicly traded, I can sell those shares to anyone. If that company is a co-op in which only employees are allowed to own shares, the only people I can sell my shares to are other employees. In general, more willing buyers (who in turn know they can they sell those shares unrestricted in the future to any buyer), increases the people willing to bid on t…

Are you even allowed to buy/sell shares in an employee owned co-op? I understood that share ownership was part of employment with the company. It entitles you to a share in the profits and a share in the decision making, but I didn't think it was a tradable instrument itself.

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

#204

Post by greenie_beans »

rybosworld wrote: post #127
greenie_beans wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

ok, well you have no idea what you're talking about, so if you think that a coop is capitalism, then i'm gonna use that ignorance to my advantage, and convince everybody that coops are capitalism. psyop coops on the capitalists. thanks for the great strategic idea!

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

#205

Post by s1artibartfast »

xeromal wrote: post #197
s1artibartfast wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds different than a co-op. The interesting and tricky part about a co-op is navigating entry and exit.

Isn't a coop just an employee owned company?

Worker co-ops are employee-owned companies, but not all employee owned companies are co-ops.

The point that I was highlighting was that it comes down to the Articles of Incorporation and how ownership is managed on an ongoing basis. What happens when someone retires or you hire someone new.

If I were to retire and simply give my company to my 10 employees, Nothing would stop them from hiring new employees and not sharing ownership, leaving the company and keeping ownership, or selling their ownership to a third party.

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

#206

Post by dv_dt »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #2

This seems to be fairly unique in its breadth of different enterprises. Most co-ops seem to stay in a single industry e.g John Lewis with 80,000 employees in UK retail or the many agricultural/distribution co-ops owned by farmers. Wikipedia page is a clearer read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

In the US a lot of the ag coops seem to be marketing oriented with maybe some capital equipment sharing (regional packing shipping facilities, etc).

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

#207

Post by mvc »

dexterdog wrote: post #99
tossandthrow wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we factor in not just C-suite but the entire middle to top management, then I definitely think there is something to come for. Though, in the end, the US is extremely adversarial. So these people standing to loose out on the competition would do anything to stifle such innovations.

So in this utopia does the organization run with no management at all or does management all work for $0?

Unlike some of these executives, we're not animals. We won't make them work for less than the living wage.

But there will be fewer perks.

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

#208

Post by xeromal »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #205
xeromal wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't a coop just an employee owned company?

Worker co-ops are employee-owned companies, but not all employee owned companies are co-ops. The point that I was highlighting was that it comes down to the Articles of Incorporation and how ownership is managed on an ongoing basis. What happens when someone retires or you hire someone new. If I were to retire and simply give my company to my 10 employees, Nothing would stop them from hiring new employees and not sha…

I appreciate the extra information and that's exactly what I was looking for with my question. Makes total sense.

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

#209

Post by oldpersonintx »

sangnoir wrote: post #182
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.

REI competes with corporates just fine in the US, a country so capitalist they still ask everyone it they ever were associated with Communism before they let them visit - more than 2 decades after the fall of the USSR.

[dead]

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

#210

Post by TeMPOraL »

jancsika wrote: post #152
TeMPOraL wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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),…

> graphics department (PowerPoint) You started the paragraph with the word "workload," but here the load is about as close to zero for the average employee as one could get without being pedantic about it. People aren't using virtual brushes and learning color theory to digitally paint their PowerPoints, or even composing their slides effectively in the visual space provided as a graphic designer would in Photoshop.…

Maybe I named the department wrong, but my point is, back before PowerPoint, in the era of more analog presentations, large companies had a separate group of people you would ask to prepare charts and graphics for your presentation. Nowadays, you have to do it yourself.

My point is that all of us are constantly distracted by random, intermittent tasks outside our specializations, which previously were done by dedicated specialists - people who could afford to become proficient at that work. This is a huge productivity hit for everyone.

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