Content area
Full Text
Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC), headquartered in the Basque Country, may be the most notable example of workplace democracy that has ever existed. These cooperatives are typically presented from a labor-relations perspective. Studies often focus on process, and the unconventional way the cooperatives organize for innovation. At other times, the cooperatives are examined from a cultural or ethical perspective, which analyzes labor relations or the way MCC organizes internally. In contrast, we want to examine here MCC's workplace democracy as a means for community economic development. This requires a philosophical analysis of its cultural ethos which underscores the wider potential for workplace democracy in economic and political life. As we'll see, workplace democracy can serve the participatory life of citizens at the same time it serves their economic needs.
Beyond the typical organizational details of this federation of one hundred or so producer, consumer, service, financial, insurance, research, and educational cooperatives, we can also examine MCC from an applied ethics orientation. This approach will reflect, among other things, my six field-study visits to the cooperatives in Arasate/Mondragon, and the surrounding region. My purpose is not to initiate those who have not yet been introduced to MCC, even though it has an international presence, or to reacquaint those who may even have already traveled there, but to offer a broad sense of the success this democratic workplace experiment has achieved. Workplace democracy, with MCC as an example, provides a progenitor for greater democracy in general, a form of community economics that serves and cultivates a community politically rather than a form of economics that imposes on a community for its service to the economic system. Workplace democracy is the practice of cultural-philosophical economics.
Paying attention to workplace democracy not only "makes the word flesh" for workplace members by fulfilling human aspirations for a quality life that includes decent work, but workplace democracy can also extend itself outward from particular enterprises. Democratic workplaces can influence life beyond their particular walls, in the larger community and society, as quality economics and quality politics. The broader Arasate/Mondragon/Basque/Spanish community benefits economically and politically from workplace democracy because MCC's economics does not succeed at the expense of that community.
MCC not only provides for the community, but is a model for other...