Madison cooperatives booming, both old and new
Posted: January 20, 2012 Filed under: Cooperatives, United States | Tags: CICOPA, Isthmus, John Kessler, Lisa Thoms, Madison, Mondragon, Rebecca Kemble, USFWC, Wisconsin, worker-owned 2 Comments »Madison is the state capital, seat of the University of Wisconsin, and home to several worker cooperatives that have been in business for over 30 years.
Cab driver Rebecca Kemble is board president of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, and President of CICOPA North America.
Rebecca works at Union Cab, founded in 1979, which now boasts 228 worker members – drivers, mechanics, office staff, and dispatchers. Committed to environmental sustainability, they are replacing gas guzzling Crown Victorias with hybrid vehicles. And they designed their own computerized dispatch system to respond to calls for service with the nearest available vehicle, reducing mileage and improving service and efficiency.
Rebecca drove us around and pointed out other long standing Madison coops like Nature’s Bakery and Community Pharmacy. “Worker cooperatives are sustainable businesses, especially in hard times. They are more flexible with changes in the market and give the highest priority to people working in the business. In the U.S. few people are aware of worker cooperatives, but with the economic crisis we are finding lots of interest.”
Isthmus founder John Kessler
Inspired by Mondragón’s example, Isthmus Engineering was founded 25 years ago. The cooperative designs and builds state of the art automation systems for a broad range of industries. With 50 employees, the majority worker owners, Isthmus is highly project oriented. Self-directed teams of mechanical and controls engineers, plus highly skilled electricians and machinists, collaborate to design, build, and test equipment that meets their customers’ needs.
“The core principle is one worker one vote, not each dollar one vote,” says founder John Kessler. “We’re not giving up anything by being a worker cooperative. It’s an excellent way to run a business.”
Lisa Thoms
A proud workers coop, Isthmus holds weekly board meetings over a catered lunch, so members can more easily stay abreast of current projects. And finances are completely transparent, even how much each person is paid.
Engineer Lisa Thoms, Vice President of the cooperative, explained. “We vote on hourly pay rates every year, based on each member’s discipline, experience, and contributions. So we all have a say in deciding what our fellow worker/owners are paid. But no member is paid more than twice as much as anyone else.”
“We’re democratic with a small ‘d’,” says engineer Ole Olson, “Everyone can have input in a decision. It doesn’t always go your way, but you know how and why the decision is made and that’s different from a conventional company.” Ole, who sits on the Isthmus coop affairs committee, is active with the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives and in MadWorCs, a budding network of Madison worker cooperatives that promotes support among coops in the area, and encourages creation of new coops.
Ole Olson
Inspired by the experience of Mondragón, where complex support networks among individual coops developed over 50 years, similar networks exist in Western Massachusetts. [Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives], the San Francisco Bay Area [Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives] and Austin TX [Cooperation Texas]. The Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland are being developed as part of a network from the outset.
Now Filming at the Mondragon Coops in Basque Country
Posted: October 11, 2011 Filed under: Basque Country | Tags: Fagor Cooperatives, Jose Maria Ormaetxea, Mondragon, Orbea, Spain, worker-owned 2 Comments »
“We started with nothing, and everything we have achieved was because of our own hard work and dedication,” explains Jose Maria Ormaetxea, one of the five founding members of the Mondragon coops in 1956.
We have to interrupt our reports on worker owned companies in the U.S., because we are now visiting the Mondragon coops in the Basque region of northern Spain. Our days are long and intense as we film in numerous factories, universities, research centers, the coop bank and social service agency. We’ve been given complete access to coop managers, regular workers and others in the region to report on what these remarkable cooperatives have achieved and the complex ways they work together to benefit their worker owners and the economy of the entire region.
People here are feeling the effects of the economic crisis, of course, but unemployment in the Basque country is half what it is in the rest of Spain. The cooperatives take a variety of measures to prevent layoffs of members. They can vote to reduce their own hours or pay, or workers may be transferred temporarily to other cooperatives that are not as affected by the downturn. These worker owned coops employ 85,000 people and had revenues of about 25 billion dollars in 2010.
Worker-owned Orbea builds some of the finest bicycles in the world. The Orbea sponsored mountain bike team now holds the world and Olympic championships.
We look forward to sharing more stories, both from here and from North America, in the coming weeks, as we wrap up our Mondragon filming and begin editing the documentary, Shift Change. Stay tuned.
Our First Visit to Basque Country
Posted: June 15, 2011 Filed under: Basque Country | Tags: Fagor Cooperatives, Guernica, Maier, Mondragon, Spain Leave a comment »
Sheep grazing in the hills of Basque Country
We recently returned from a research trip to the beautiful Basque Country in northern Spain where the Mondragon Corporation has its roots. While we won’t actually begin filming at the Mondragon factories until this fall, we had a wonderful time touring the area, making connections, and further honing our vision of the kinds of stories we want to feature in the film, Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work.
Thoughts on our trip
Well, 9 hours of time zone change does take some adjustment….
We booked a rural guesthouse for lodging near Mondragon, and found ourselves in a lovely area of small farms, close to town. Like many areas that we saw, there were small farms on the hillsides, with towns and cities tucked into valleys, often with a huge factory on the outskirts, a source of employment for people of that town.
Many of the towns, like Mondragon, have a long history, and the central part of the town, the “casco viejo,” has a stone plaza and narrow walking streets. In the summer season especially after work, these central areas are full of people who are out visiting with neighbors and enjoying the offerings of local cafes and bars, often “pintxos”, snacks of incredible variety, and small glasses of beer or wine. Children run rampant. People seem relaxed.
On one such afternoon in Mondragon, we met some members of one of the Fagor Cooperatives, the oldest and largest of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation. They shared some of their views, let us know that all were doing a re-training around cooperativism and the roots of the Mondragon system which was inspired by a Catholic priest, Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta 55 years ago.
Basque country has a very long industrial history, and particularly around the town of Mondragon, we saw factories everywhere, factories that produce household appliances, auto parts, industrial machinery, etc. But in addition to that, many institutions are organized as coops, such as Mondragon University, a banking system, language training centers, social service agencies, research and development centers, and a major supermarket chain. Employees in the Mondragon coop system number around 85,000.
After a week or so in that part of Basque country, we traveled to the town of Gernika [commonly called Guernica]. This town is known from the Picasso painting “Guernica” of what was a devastating airstrike by German and Italian Nazi war planes during the Spanish civil war that leveled the city in 1937. It has been rebuilt, but retains a central plaza and walking streets.
Maier, a factory on the outskirts of Guernica affiliated with the Mondragon cooperatives, produces plastic auto parts and employs 1,000 residents. Passing by one afternoon we struck up a conversation with two men leaving the factory. They explained some of the benefits they saw of working in the cooperative. With the recent downturn in the economy, the coop members voted to reduce their own salaries rather than lay people off.
The economic downturn has had a major impact in Spain, where unemployment is 20%. This provoked massive demonstrations particularly in the Plaza Puerta del Sol in Madrid where thousands camped for weeks. We saw tents pitched in the plazas of Bilbao and Vitoria in Basque country, but unemployment is only at 8% there.
This visit was a great introduction to the beauty of Basque country, and the people who proudly speak the Basque language unrelated to any other in the world, [but fortunately for us, also Spanish]. We are eager to return in the fall to film for the segment of Shift Change about the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation to show the impact of an economy organized around cooperatives after several decades.
