> >Does anyone know of a recent film or video about Mondragon? "The
> Mondragon
> >Experiment" is too old and too British to be effective for my
> students.
> >
> >Ric McIntyre
> >Economics and Labor Research
> >University of Rhode Island
> >Kingston RI 02881
> >
I don't know of a recent video or film but I gather the culture
has changed a little over the years. I enclose a report by Greg Pirie
From: Greg Pirie[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Mondragon: When I attended the CICOPA (a sub-set of the ICA
specifically
orientated to artisanal & workers' coops) conference in June
1994 in
Vittoria, Spain, we visited the HQ of the Mondragon Cooperative
Group (MCG).
During the course of a promotional video on how the MCG was
geared up to
successfully exploit the integration of the European markets
into a
borderless single market, etc, etc, the ownership/operation of
factories in
Thailand and Brazil by the MCG was mentioned, almost as a
throwaway line
just to demonstrate diversification, dynamism, etc.
When, at a subsequent panel discussion session, a couple of us
asked about
these, we were told they were not separate worker cooperatives,
as are all
other components of the MCG, but direct subsidiaries of
Mondragon coops,
employing local labour under local conditions. We specifically
asked about
worker participation in ownership and application of the MCG
norms about
wage relativities and were told (in our words) that this was a
standard
European investment in lesser developed economies. Our
conclusion was,
therefore, that Mondragon coops were taking advantage of the
lower costs of
doing business in these countries in order to gain a competitive
advantage
in the European market. When we questioned the inconsistency we
saw between
this behaviour and the espoused values on which the MCG is
based, we
received agreement from one of the MCG pioneers on the panel,
who
effectively expressed his disagreement with the action.
That was about it. The two of us who had got a bit excited
about the issue
never had an opportunity to confront any of the MCG's leadership
-- it was a
big affair covering a host of matters.
It does, however, touch on the challenges for any coop system
about dealing
with the two questions of size and interfacing with the rest of
the world.
Within the mature Credit Union systems, there's stiff debate
about getting
"too" big. Do you lose the essential characteristics of being a
coop when
you have member/owners in excess of 20,000 (or any other "too
big" number)?
What are the essential characteristics anyway, and are they
vulnerable to
issues of size?
Visiting one of the original Mondragon coops caused me to wonder
about the
reality of worker/owner participation. The answers to various
questions
suggested it was limited to broad issues and only at annual
assemblies. Day
to day, the management-worker relationship was pretty standard.
Jocelyn
once had a book about some participative research into
management-worker
relationships in coops that suggested it was essentially no
different from
the capital-labour model.
Equally, Credit Unions have to put the money they have in
savings from
members but not out on loan somewhere. That means in the
orthodox banking
system or equivalent. Thus raising the question as to the use
of those
funds now 'outside' the Credit Union system.
