Cooperatives

In 1956, a Catholic priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta gathered five workers in a converted school in Mondragón, a small town in the Basque region of Spain, and started making paraffin heaters. The school had been set up to train young workers who had no other way into higher education after the devastation of the Spanish Civil War. The stove factory was meant to give those workers somewhere to apply what they had learned; what Arizmendiarrieta wound up building instead was one of the most durable experiments in worker ownership the twentieth century produced. By 2024, the Mondragón Corporation employed roughly 80,000 people across manufacturing, retail, financial services, and education. Its retail chain, Eroski, operates hundreds of supermarkets across Spain. Its finance arm, Laboral Kutxa, is one of the larger banks in the Basque Country, and its manufacturing division makes everything from machine tools to household appliances. None of this is run for the benefit of outside…