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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

#261

Post by bumby »

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…

>Abraham Lincoln was a Marxist, for example.

Is this widely accepted by historians or is this a fringe theory? Marx's Capital wasn't published until after Lincoln's death, so I'm a bit skeptical.

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

#262

Post by terr-dav »

jampekka wrote: post #234
Collisteru wrote: post #224

I wonder why co-ops are so comparatively rare in the US, even though everybody seems to like them (customers and employees). It could just be tradition and the effects of history. But then why did US history create more shareholder corps while European history created more co-ops? It could be that US investors are less willing to invest in co-ops. But then, why? Is there something about them that makes them less comp…

Co-ops are of course worse for investors. There are no voting stock in co-ops, so the stockholders can't squeeze maximum profits off workers and consumers. Europe had very strong socialist/non-capitalist political movements in the 19th century. Co-ops were seen as one alternative to capitalism, and were a huge movement. For example in Finland the largest bank and largest retail chain are (consumer) co-ops, and in gen…

>Co-ops are of course worse for investors.

What investors?

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

#263

Post by enraged_camel »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #199
enraged_camel wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, imagine being the type of person who attacks anyone who criticizes ultra-high C-suite salaries by calling them a "Marxist".

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?

This has nothing to do with class warfare. We're talking about individuals who make several orders of magnitude more money than regular employees, despite the impossibility of demonstrating that they add an equivalent amount of value to the organization. The idea isn't "everyone should make the same amount", the idea is that pay should be proportional to one's value add.

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

#264

Post by jampekka »

terr-dav wrote: post #262
jampekka wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Co-ops are of course worse for investors. There are no voting stock in co-ops, so the stockholders can't squeeze maximum profits off workers and consumers. Europe had very strong socialist/non-capitalist political movements in the 19th century. Co-ops were seen as one alternative to capitalism, and were a huge movement. For example in Finland the largest bank and largest retail chain are (consumer) co-ops, and in gen…

>Co-ops are of course worse for investors. What investors?

For example banks giving loans.

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

#265

Post by dbingham »

sokoloff wrote: post #235
pineaux wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the answer to all the above. These shares give you a right to part of the profit, but cannot be sold.

What does it mean to own something that you cannot sell/assign? That sounds like plain old profit sharing, not ownership.

Ownership in the sense of governance, not of property.

Worker cooperatives are organizations that are governed by their workers for their workers, not owned as property to be traded or sold.

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

#266

Post by bobthepanda »

vundercind wrote: post #241
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…

I’ve worked for an employee-owned US business. It was indistinguishable from a normal corporation that periodically grants stock to employees, except other forms of retirement contribution were sub-par, and vesting periods for everything were LOL WTF long. Working conditions and such were worse than many places in ways that definitely wouldn’t have been the case if it were a traditional ownership structure with a uni…

big ships are generally terrible places, as a rule. places that are less bad are exceptions. but most of the time you're picking your poison, yet that doesn't mean alternative models aren't worth exploring.

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

#267

Post by solarpunk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #19
solarpunk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid I don't understand. My state is chock full of co-ops that compete with their corporate counterparts. Hell, there's (at least) 3 separate co-op grocery stores in my city, they each compete with an Aldi, and multiple local grocery chains in their respective neighborhoods.

> My state is chock full of co-ops that compete with their corporate counterparts Same, and we’re deep red. My power company is a member-owned co-op. It’s cheap as hell (6.8¢/kWh for wind) and doesn’t enjoy burning down the state as a hobby.

oh damn, I completely forgot about utility co-ops!

I'm envious of those, they're all over the state but they're only out in the sticks.

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

#268

Post by OkayPhysicist »

rybosworld wrote: post #69
orwin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is the worker owning the mean of production, so i don't think you can do more socialist than that to be honest, it's almost the definition of socialism (communism for fellow europeans). You can find some differences between western co-op and the socialist ideal (mainly, you still have hierarchy and a power structure mostly determined by how much you make), but to me it seems mostly academics.

Workers participating in ownership is not what socialism is. Socialism is about societal ownership. A coop is not societal ownership. It is still private ownership in practice. How many tech workers own shares in their company? Are those companies socialist?

This is one of those cases where subtly different definitions of technical words are being used in contradictory ways. A very common definition for capitalism vs socialism in Leftist spaces is concerned with power and economics, with socialism being when labor has the power to dictate the allocation of capital, whereas capitalism is where capital has the power to dictate the allocation of labor.

A more political definition looking at government is "socialism is when capital is allocated for the benefit of the collective, capitalism is when individuals are granted exclusive ownership of capital to allocate how they choose".

Note that a worker's co-op meets the first definition of socialism, and the second definition of capitalism.

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

#269

Post by skulk »

office_drone wrote: post #213
zbyforgotp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an interesting question why they don’t outcompete other businesses.

The simple explanation is that the actions of C-suite executives add value, even after factoring in their compensation

shades of https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

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

#270

Post by OkayPhysicist »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #77
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…

Socialism (communism?) is usually framed as "workers earning their full worth" but the dirty truth is that it is more "workers earning their preset cut of the pie, which is independent of the work they put in". So while the shelf-stocker might be earning $24/hr, their actual hard economic output is much less than this - $19/hr. The difference is made up by the salesperson making $26/hr, instead of $31/hr. Many sales…

In a real company, it would be the shelf stocker making $13/hr vs their output of $19/hr, the sales guy making $26/hr vs their output of $31/hr, and some jackass who inherited an oil fortune making the surplus $11/hr from their economic value of $0/hr.
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