From Mondragon to Silicon Valley: the Move to Shared Local Wealth Production

Are worker cooperatives a plausible alternative after the victory by Republican autocrats over a proposed union and worker council at Volkswagen?  While this victory of growing national conservative strength seems intent not only to keep the cost of labor cheap but shows little concern for the shrinking standards of living of workers, a trail of stepping stones beginning in Mondragon, Spain and running to Cleveland and Silicon Valley is trying and testing the cooperative idea in highly creative ways.

The more obvious consequences of the status quo and conservative leadership can be seen in our huge prison populations, in sections of whole cities patrolled by heavily-armed special police units and, of course there’s the February jobs report. It  shows the ranks of the long-term jobless who have been out of work by 27 weeks has risen  203,000 to 3.8 million.

Since the 1950s Mondragon, in the northern Basque region of Spain, has created a federation of 110 cooperatives, 147 subsidiary companies, eight foundations and a benefit society with total assets of 35.8 billion euros developed over the past fifty years, reports Gar Alperovitz, professor of political economy at the University of Maryland and a founder of The Democracy Collaborative. 

Out of the ashes of cities destroyed by capital mobility such as Cleveland, Detroit and Oakland, new experiments to apply Mondragon’s example are developing through networks of green businesses organized as cooperatives that keep cash flows local by reinvesting savings and making workers stockholders who share decision-making with management. 

The most dramatic  is in Cleveland where community energies have been mobilized to create Evergreen Cooperatives consisting so far of three state of the art cooperative businesses: a commercial scale laundry, a solar panel energy company and a commercial-scale hydroponic greenhouses.  The goal is to create seven more—all located in the inner city.  The design should be applicable anywhere from the Bronx to San Jose’s east side, where gang warfare rages because, of course, there’s no work.  

This issue of Public Liturgies invites serious readers to spend time looking at each of these rather spectacular efforts by clicking below and then viewing the video at each website:

To see the 3.25 acre greenhouse function go to:

http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/02/green_city_growers_cooperative.html

For the commercial laundry:

http://evergreencooperatives.com/business/evergreen-laundry/

For the Energy Solar business:

http://evergreencooperatives.com/business/evergreen-energy-solutions/

It has taken all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to organize these cooperatives—The Federal Reserve, the Cleveland Foundation, Cleveland Clinic, City Hall, Gar Alperovitz, and Mondragon.

We’ll comment further about this power array and the feasibility of both its replication and its model in our next blog.