Analysts said it couldn’t happen and liberals said it was too
early to come, but the Spanish cooperative of Mondragon has grown
into a global powerhouse.
The Mondragon cooperative of 120 different companies was the
focus of Carl Davidson, a writer and the national co-chair of the
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, who
talked on Thursday to a sparse audience in Lawson Hall. The speech
was sponsored by the Committee on Peace Studies and the Latin
American and Latino Studies Program.
Mondragon is the largest cooperative in the world. The
cooperative has been successful in a wide array of businesses
including industry, research, and education.
“Think about a platypus. When they discovered them (Mondragon),
it wasn’t supposed to exist,” Davidson said.
An unusual aspect of the cooperative is all the workers are
owners of the company. Every worker gets one vote and a paycheck
based on the company’s profits rather than a wage.