The author went on a five day study tour of the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque area of Spain. The Mondragon Cooperatives are
a 50-year-old network of nearly 120 factories and agencies, involving nearly 100,000 workers in one way or another, and centered in the the Basque Country but now spanning the globe. We're here to study the history of these unique worker-owned factories, how they work, why they have been successful, and how they might be expanded in various ways as instruments of social change.I don't think that worker cooperatives are the answer to building a sustainable planet, but they should be studied as a worker controlled alternative to capitalist enterprises.
Coops will always find it difficult to compete with privately owned enterprises, especially those associated with large corporations. To succeed they would need a politically conscious local community that would be willing to support the coop even by paying higher prices. Private enterprises can always benefit by paying low wages and buying cheap products from foreign countries where environmental and labor laws are either non-existent or not enforced.
Unfortunately, cooperatives often end up functioning much like other profit seeking enterprises. After WWII Yugoslavia used them extensively and found that they took on many characteristics of private enterprises because they competed against each other.
The main difference between a coop and a corporation is that the former is guided more by humanitarian set of principles. This, of course, makes it difficult for them to compete with strictly profit oriented enterprises. Hence coops must compromise those principles if they are to survive, and inevitably they must also act like their profit-seeking rivals.
I think that their main benefit would be a training school for people to learn various business related skills and cooperative ethics and behaviors.
(I will be posting the remaining four days of reports over the next four days.)