Mondragon Worker Cooperative Documentary (---Must Watch---)
It's 50 minutes and incredibly interesting.
The Mondragon group of cooperatives is likely the most successful in the world with nearly 90,000 employees, 260 companies and an annual revenue of over 19 billion dollars.
Workers buy into the cooperative with a fixed sum of money; usually a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. If they cannot afford this payment, the cooperative owned bank Caja Laboral will lend them the money to be paid back when they can afford.
The group has largely been resistant against economic recessions, often showing greater resilience than traditional capitalist firms. Unlike other corporations who lay off workers when profits decrease, Mondragon allows workers to take cuts in compensation to maintain company stability. In the event that workers become redundant, instead of mass firings, the group will send the redundant workers back to school in one of their many cooperative based academic institutions.
As highly motivated workers, the employees require no supervisors. The company boards are elected from the pool of workers. The board members serve for several years, having meetings in the morning and then go back to work in the factories and research centers. General managers are appointed by the boards and can be fired at the slightest indication of failure.
There is a fixed ratio of income from lowest to highest paid of 9:1 (in the film it is 3:1 but that is from the early 80s). 10% of profits are reinvested in the surrounding community. 20% of profits are placed in a surplus fund. The remaining 70% is distributed to the workers annually based on their relative salaries. However, the workers cannot withdraw this money until they quit. And once they quit they must withdraw this fund. This process helps to shield the company from any single person gaining substantial control over it's operations or goals.
Once workers retire, they are left with a proportion of the profits that can be in excess of 75,000 dollars (inflation adjusted figure from 1981). That is on top of other their salaried savings and other retirement benefits.
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