Mondragon

Re: Mondragon: Fwd: New ILO Recommendation on the Promotion ofCooperatives

Title: Re: Mondragon: Fwd: New ILO Recommendation on the Prom

Mark Levin
ILO

Dear Mark:

Congratulations to you and your colleagues for getting this important motion on cooperatives passed at the ILO. I know your name from my colleague David Ellerman at the World Bank.

You may have heard of a recent unionized cooperative model that may be of interest to your ILO colleagues. Team X, Inc. is a UNITE! organized worker cooperative that produces Sweat X brand apparel out of a new factory in Los Angeles. Team X was launched in early 2002 and is successfully operating in the marketplace.

The Team X effort - described on the web at www.sweatx.coop - has been funded by a new social venture capital fund run by Ben Cohen and Pierre Ferrari. Ben Cohen is the former owner of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream here in the United States. The social venture capital fund Ben, Pierre and others have started aims to pay a "living wage" at all its target investment firms and is partial to Mondragon-inspired industrial cooperatives. I am glad to report that unions are also a welcome part of the Hot Fudge/Team X / Sweat X model and that UNITE! has been an enthusiastic partner in this effort to build a model firm that can prove that the apparel industry need not operate under sweatshop conditions.

My firm (Ownership Associates, Inc. www.ownershipassociates.com) with early help from David Ellerman, Jeff Gates and the law firm of Dorsey & Whitney has played the lead role in helping to structure and organize Team X. We play a continuing role helping with internal organizational and educational challenges, with external public relations efforts and in helping to place Sweat X brand apparel in universities, with unions, faith based organizations and with the entertainment industry.

The labor connection is crucial here. In addition to my work at Ownership Associates, I serve as a member of the core faculty of the Harvard Trade Union Program teaching on the general topic of Capital Strategies for Labor. Richard Freeman is the faculty co-chair of the Harvard Trade Union Program. He and colleagues at UCLA are producing case study material on Team X Sweat X that should prove useful to the broader labor community.

Finally, on an international note, one of the mid term plans for the Hot Fudge Team X Sweat X group is to replicate our effort in Mexico or Central America. Please let me know if you would like any further information on this project. You can write me here or preferably at cm@ownershipassociates.com

Regards,

Chris

Christopher Mackin
Ownership Associates, Inc. (a worker cooperative)
6 University Road
Cambridge, MA 02138
T. 617-868-4600
F. 617-868-7969
www.ownershipassociates.com

Dear Chris

It was great news, in your message to Mark Levin, that your SweatX project is flourishing, and also that there are plans for replicating it in Mexico or Central America. Are you yet able to share any preliminary observations about the level of participation that is being achieved at the shopfloor level, and ways in which it can be maintained and enhanced once the formative phase is over? And - remote as the issue may seem at this stage - have you developed any views about the optimum size of businesses that are derived in some sense from the Mondragon model, particularly in the light of Arizmendiarrieta's conclusion following the 1974 Ulgor strike, that at the point where the membership of a co-operative reached around 300 it should spin off a daughter co-operative? Is it possible in this respect that aspects of what you are undertaking could be instructive for Mondragon in its currently re-energised pursuit of shopfloor inclusion, participation and democratisation? Might not there be an opportunity here to establish a precedent for a mutually advantageous exchange of information with Mondragon, through, say, a regular swapping of notes with entities such as the Saiolan business incubator or the LKS management consultancy co-operatives, or perhaps less ambitiously with individuals within them? In short, how can a genuine dialogue with Mondragon be substituted for what at present is more in the nature of serial monologues - how can channels be established for giving back to Mondragon at least some fraction of what is gained from its example? Many thanks, and all good wishes, Race Mathews

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Dr Race Mathews,
Senior Research Fellow,
Government and Governance Unit,
Faculty of Business and Economics
Monash University.

Postal Address:
123 Alexandra Avenue,
South Yarra, Vic, 3141,
Australia.

Phone/Fax: (03) 9826 0104.