Skip to main content

Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy

A Culture of Cooperation

In October 2008, at the beginning of the financial meltdown, Praxis Peace Institute was in Mondragon, Spain, with a group of 20 people. We were there to study the Mondragon Cooperatives, the largest consortium of worker-owned businesses in the world. We wanted to learn about their business model and how it had transformed the Basque region from the poorest area of Spain to the wealthiest area in less than 50 years. Even a reporter with the Wall Street Journal noted that today the Basque region of Spain was probably the wealthiest area in the entire European Union.

So, how did this transformation come about? How does a region go from being the poorest of the poor to the wealthiest in a relatively short period of time?

It all began in the 1940s with a Catholic priest, Don Jose Maria Arrizmendi, who was sent to oversee an impoverished parish in the small town of Mondragon. At that time, the unemployment rate in the Basque region was the highest in Spain and the area was mired in poverty. Arizmendi founded a polytechnic school that provided work skills for the unemployed men. This training allowed them to find jobs in the manufacturing plants in Bilbao. Arizmendi’s focus was to find employment for the unemployed and lift the populace out of poverty.

Read the full article at the Sonoma Valley Sun

 

Go to the GEO front page

Add new comment

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
CAPTCHA This question is to verify that you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam.

What does the G in GEO stand for?