The Basque Country’s Mondragón Corporation is the globe’s largest industrial co-operative, with workers paying for the right to share in its profits – and its losses. In return for giving more to their employer, they expect more back
Jorge Vega Hernández, a mechanical engineer working in northwestern Spain, returned from a business trip and started to feel sick. It was March, 2020—the beginning of the pandemic—and so he called a government help line. He was told that he might have the coronavirus and that he should stay home. But, without leaving the house for a test, Hernández couldn’t get proof of his illness—and, without that proof, he had no excuse for not coming into work. A week after he got sick, he said, his company fired him. (The firm cited “insufficient” job performance as the motive.)
An increasing number of workers and business owners in the US are looking to a small town in northern Spain as a model to tackle wealth and income inequality.
The 22,000-person town of Mondragon in Spain’s Basque region is home to the world’s largest worker cooperative network, called Mondragon Corporation. Founded half a century ago by a priest and some of his acolytes, the co-ops have found a way, crisis after crisis, to keep unemployment and income inequality in check.
