Mondragon is one of the key inspirations for Earthworker Cooperative but as this essay points out there’s often not a lot of available information despite it being the second largest worker cooperative in the world. The authors opinions (and image choices) do not necessarily line up with Earthworker’s but there’s a lot of interesting information here nonetheless.
Elle Griffin in The Elysian – Even as a journalist, information on the company has not been readily available. The books I read on the subject are only available at company headquarters, the biography of its founder is only in Spanish. Knowledge about the model is limited to academic journals, a sparse Wikipedia page, and a spattering of mainstream articles that extol the benefits of cooperatives without diving deep enough to explain why they’re interesting. After emailing the corporation for a year, I was only granted an interview if I could attend one of the company’s in-person media days which are hosted once a month. I had to buy a plane ticket, rent a car, drive six hours from the Barcelona airport, and rent a hotel nearby to get a meeting—a large expense for an independent journalist.
It makes sense—cooperatives are businesses first and cooperatives second. They have to compete with other companies on the market, and win, to make a profit. Only then can they use that profit more equitably. “We bought the chairs in this room from a company that’s a cooperative,” Lorenzo illustrated, “but we got them because they were the best price and quality, not because they were from a cooperative.”
Mondragon can’t afford to spend all their time proselytizing. What founders do come to study the model might put it into practice, but if they only create one cooperative that benefits 100 workers, Lorenzo says they miss the point. They need to create a network of them to fund new startups, create new jobs, provide social services, and transfer workers between companies. It is the combination of cooperatives that makes the whole thing self-sustaining, not the individual ones.
Read the rest of the article here. There’s also an option to listen the article.