The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the globe’s largest industrial co-operative, with workers paying for the right to share in its profits – and its losses. In return for giving more to their employer, they expect more back

When Marisa Fernández lost her husband to cancer a few years ago, her employers at the Eroski hypermarket went, she says, “above and beyond to help me through the dark days afterwards, rejigging my timetable and giving me time off when I couldn’t face coming in.”

She had a chance to return the favour recently when the store, in Arrasate-Mondragón in Spain’s Basque Country, was undergoing renovations. Fernández, 58, who started on the cashier desk 34 years ago, and now manages the store’s non-food section, volunteered to work extra shifts over the weekend along with her colleagues to ensure everything was ready for Monday morning. “It’s not just me. Everyone is ready to go the extra mile,” she says.

Such harmonious employer-worker relations are the stuff of corporate dreams, and they are no accident here: the Eroski retail chain is part of Mondragón Corporation, the largest industrial co-op in the world. As a fully signed-up member, Fernández co-owns part of the supermarket chain that also employs her. “It feels like mine,” she says. “We work hard, but it’s a totally different feeling from working for someone else.”

  • @[email protected]
    6•23 days ago

    A handful of shares don’t really mean much in terms of having a say in the company.

    With Mondragón, is the voting based on the number of individuals in a company, or is it based on the number of shares that an individual owns?

    The article didn’t go into detail in how much of a say each employee has (or maybe I missed it?).

    Even if it is votes based on the number of employees, in a company like Mondragón (with 70,000 other employees) wouldn’t you still say that a single vote doesn’t “mean much in terms of having a say in the company?”

    It feels like this would work very well in companies with a smaller number of employees, but the fact that a large company like this is successful with this model is a good sign.

    • MudMan
      4•23 days ago

      Mondragón’s founders adopted wholesale many of the Pioneers’ core tenets. In their modern-day headquarters, located in a renovated 14th-century tower with a spectacular mountain backdrop, Etxeberria counts off the group’s 10 “basic principles”. The list ranges from the sovereignty of labour and democratic organisation (one member, one vote), to wage solidarity and “social transformation” – which includes reinvesting surpluses to create new jobs, supporting local charities and community development projects, and strengthening the Basque Country’s Euskara language. Top of the list is voluntary and open membership – namely, the opportunity for everyone to have a personal stake in the enterprise where they work. As an early version of the principles reads: “The first form of elemental justice that we need to practise is to consider each other as free human beings.”

      You did miss it, although it’s a bit of a passing remark.