It is no secret that today in the United States the richest people in the nation are better off than they have ever been in our history. The richest 1 percent in our nation owns 40 percent of our nation’s wealth, while the bottom 80 percent has about 7 percent of the wealth. Today the average CEO makes 380 times his (or her, but usually his) average worker’s pay. That’s not 380 times the lowest worker’s pay in the company, but the average worker. Despite these record prosperous times for the richest of the rich, the rest of us are experiencing a 7.7 percent unemployment rate. That number is probably significantly higher in real life when you account for people who have given up looking for a job and people on disability benefits.
Clearly, our nation’s distribution of wealth is much too top heavy. This is a widespread belief among Americans, as demonstrated in multiple surveys. But the most important problem that arises from this insanely unequal wealth distribution is an insanely unequal distribution of power, which perpetuates economic, political and social inequality.
One possible solution to this unequal distribution of power in business is the worker-owned cooperative company. Worker-owned co-ops go back as far as the 19th century, but their popularity resurged again in the 1960s. The basic idea of a worker-owned cooperative is in the name: workers own a share in the company, and hence have a say in how it operates. This is completely opposite to how most companies are run, where a few wealthy shareholders own the entire stake in the company and decide how it operates.
The quintessential example of a successful worker-owned cooperative is the Mondragón Corporation in the Basque region of Spain. Mondragón is a federation of more than 250 worker cooperatives, employing more than 83,000 people. It was founded in 1956 in the town of Mondragón and has only grown since in popularity and wealth.
In a time when Spanish unemployment is around 20 percent, unemployment in the Basque region is only around nine percent. Unemployment remains low because these sort of cooperatives put labor above capital, community above profit. These companies do not pick up and leave when economic times are difficult because they are democratic and invest in the community where they are located. This humanist ideology is demonstrated in Mondragón’s own motto: “Humanity at Work.”
Mondragón works for Spain, but it sounds like a dirty socialist paradise, right? It could never work here, right?
Wrong. Not only can it work here; it already does. There are more than 300 co-ops in the U.S. right now in nearly every sector of the economy, employing more than 3,500 people and generating $400 million in annual revenue. These numbers are growing all the time.
While we Americans often extol the value of big business, you cannot deny that big business’s fundamental belief in profit over people has hurt us over and over throughout history. Our current economy and the top 1 percent who run it recklessly have created physical, mental, social and economic suffering.
The worker-owned cooperative is an alternative to the mess we are in now. Fundamental American values are actively demonstrated through these businesses: democracy, community, family, independence and freedom. Can you say the same about Exxon-Mobil, General Motors, Goldman Sachs or Bank of America?
— Lindsay Lee is a junior in mathematics. She can be reached at [email protected].
