18 Facts About Mondragon Corporation

Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain.

Mondragon Corporation cooperatives operate in accordance with the Statement on the Co-operative Identity maintained by the International Co-operative Alliance.

Mondragon Corporation was called Talleres Ulgor, an acronym derived from the surnames of Usatorre, Larranaga, Gorronogoitia, Ormaechea, and Ortubay, known today as "Fagor Electrodomesticos".

In October 2009, the United Steelworkers announced an agreement with Mondragon Corporation to create worker cooperatives in the United States.

Mondragon Corporation co-operatives are united by a humanist concept of business, a philosophy of participation and solidarity, and a shared business culture.

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At Mondragon Corporation, there are agreed-upon wage ratios between executive work and field or factory work which earns a minimum wage.

That is, the general manager of an average Mondragon Corporation cooperative earns no more than 5 times as much as the theoretical minimum wage paid in their cooperative.

Mondragon Corporation operates in four areas: finance, industry, retail, and knowledge, with the latter distinguishing Mondragon from other business groups.

In capital goods, Mondragon Corporation posted a turnover of €976 million in 2009 and is the leading Spanish manufacturer of machining and sheet metal forming machine tools.

Mondragon Corporation University is a co-operative university, which combines the development of knowledge, skills, and values, and maintains close relations with business, especially Mondragon Corporation co-operatives.

In 2012 Richard D Wolff, an American professor of economics, hailed the Mondragon set of enterprises, including the good wages it provides for employees, the empowerment of ordinary workers in decision making, and the measure of equality for female workers, as a major success and cited it as a working model of an alternative to the capitalist mode of production.

Vicenc Navarro wrote that from a business perspective, Mondragon Corporation is successful in matching efficiency with solidarity and democracy.

However, he writes that the number of employees who are not owners has increased more rapidly than worker-owners, to a point that in some companies, for example in the supermarket chains owned by Mondragon Corporation, the first is a much larger group than the second.

Actually, one of the successes of Mondragon Corporation was its ability to create a sense of identity among the workers within the company, encouraging an environment of solidarity and collegiality among them, a feeling that extended to non-worker-owners.

In 2312, a science fiction novel by Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mondragon Corporation has evolved into a planned economy system called the Mondragon Accord.

The Mondragon Corporation Accord is controlled by means of a network of AIs running on quantum computers, and rules large parts of the Solar System, including Mercury and most of the moons of the gas giants; only part of Earth, and its colonies in space, retain remnants of capitalist economies, while Mars has withdrawn from the Accord in the century preceding the story.

The Mondragon Corporation already appeared in Robinson's earlier Mars trilogy, as one of the Terran groups involved in the colonization and terraforming of Mars; the coop is portrayed as the inspiration of both the bogdanovist movement and the libertarian-leaning Praxis Corporation two of the main forces leading the revolution for the independence of Mars.

In Robinson's book The Ministry for the Future, the Mondragon Corporation is introduced in chapter 58 as a model for a future, post-capitalist, cooperative economy.