A culture of cooperation
(By Georgia Kelly) In October 2008, at the beginning of the financial meltdown, Praxis Peace Institute was in Mondragon, Spain, with a group of 20 people. We were there to study the Mondragon Cooperatives, the largest consortium of worker-owned businesses in the world. We wanted to learn about their business model and how it had transformed the Basque region from the poorest area of Spain to the wealthiest area in less than 50 years. Even a reporter with the Wall Street Journal noted that today the Basque region of Spain was probably the wealthiest area in the entire European Union.
So, how did this transformation come about? How does a region go from being the poorest of the poor to the wealthiest in a relatively short period of time?
It all began in the 1940s with a Catholic priest, Don Jose Maria Arrizmendi, who was sent to oversee an impoverished parish in the small town of Mondragon. At that time, the unemployment rate in the Basque region was the highest in Spain and the area was mired in poverty. Arizmendi founded a polytechnic school that provided work skills for the unemployed men. This training allowed them to find jobs in the manufacturing plants in Bilbao. Arizmendi’s focus was to find employment for the unemployed and lift the populace out of poverty.
At the same time as he developed the school, he was educating the people about an ethic of cooperative values as a way to financial stability and independence. In 1955, three former students launched the first worker-owned cooperative in Mondragon. They made parts for washing machine manufacturers in Bilbao.
Since the 1950s, the Mondragon Cooperatives have grown into a culture of widespread cooperation. Their businesses include manufacturing, computer chips, banking (over 400 branches in Spain), education (3 university campuses), social services, research and development (the largest R&D center in Europe), and even a cooking school. Today, they comprise 120 businesses and around 86,000 worker-owners.
I first heard about the Mondragon Cooperatives when I was scheduling guests for Jerry Brown’s (yes, the governor) radio show in the mid 1990s. At the time, there were very few people in the US who knew anything about Mondragon, but Terry Mollner, the creator of the Calvert Foundation and a pioneer in socially responsible investing, had been there and knew how and why it worked. After the interview, I called Terry and asked questions for about an hour.
When I founded Praxis Peace Institute, I decided that it was time to learn more about Mondragon. Eventually, that quest led to week-long seminar/tours in Mondragon. Since 2008, we have taken five groups to Mondragon and added seminars in Italy and will take our first group to Cuba later this year. The purpose of these seminars is to learn about economic models that offer an alternative to the corporate capitalist model that so dominates our culture and caters to the one percent.
What I, and the participants who joined the Praxis seminars in Mondragon, were most interested in learning about was not so much their business models but how their businesses worked democratically. What was the decision-making process? How much power did the worker-owners really have? What was the culture of cooperatives? Why did they flourish in the Basque region? And, could we replicate their model in the U.S.?
In some ways, landing in the Basque Country is like being dropped on another planet. The culture is that different. The mission of the Mondragon Cooperatives is to create wealth within society, to foster a people society instead of a capital society. As the educational director has told us many times, “People are the core, not capital.” People always come before profit. Caring is built into the culture. Great wealth is not an aspiration. There is no observable great wealth in the region, nor is there any poverty. Instead, there are gradations of middle class that rise to a high middle level but not beyond. This has made for a happy society and the lowest crime rate in all of Europe.
Praxis will bring its 6th group to Mondragon, Spain, May 10 – 16, and there are still spaces available. Information: www.praxispeace.org or call 707-939-2973.
