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Re: Mondragon: Fwd: New ILO Recommendation on the Promotion ofCooperatives
Title: Re: Mondragon: Fwd: New ILO Recommendation on the Promotion of Cooperatives
on 15/7/02 2:41 am, RaceM at race@netspace.net.au wrote:
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
dear race, this follows on from the message which I think got away OK before lunch. To begin
I endorse most strongly your identification of the Rochdale cul de sac and your account of its
source: namely (p 176) the "insufficient centrality" of the "consumption of goods or services"
in today's world to "provide the foundation" on which to build a lasting co-operative
consciousness. What you may not know - but will find in the CASE FOR WORKERS COOPS - is
that the rochdale pioneers were at least half conscious of this themselves. That is why soon
after the Toad lane store was up and running they started a textile manufacturing business.
It was evidently a great success but they failed to lay down rules to protect its employee
ownership, so that hey presto, it was quite quickly taken over by outsider capitalists. In the
context of this discussion it may also be worth pointing out that at a conference in the 1880s
or 1890s, held I think in Dewsbury, the Co-operative Congress rejected production co-ops to
extent that they even outlawed profit sharing. The bureacratic interest of the co-op manage-
ment had by then , as you rightly say, become the single most important factor in the
whole set up. But there isn't really any need to go on. Need I say more than that I shall much
enjoy talking this over with you when you are next in London - ? perhaps either on your way
or back from those EFES meetings in Bilbao and Mondragon in November. What a pity that
Belloc 's energies were "sapped by grief and disappointment" and that Cecil C's were
extinguished by his death near the end of the war. His illustration of how employee
ownership could work perfectly well at the great Armostrong engineering works is
marvellously prescient and telling. You brought him to life for me as no one has before. Which
reminds me can you tell me more about the "Chesterton Review". I could find no trace of it
in the London Library. I assume it must be an American publication. And well, good luc k in
your efforts to bring together in America the chesterton devotees and the Capital Owner-
ship group. The latter asked me some months ago for permission to use my own Mondragon
chapter on their website. I postponed a reply because it seemed at the time that I might
find a US publisher for Jobs and Fairness. But that chance now seems to have petered out.
On the other hand I am more inclined to suggest an approach to you for permission to
use your Mondragon material. I fancy that it may have data which is more recent than mine.
It is also superior in its collective identification and naming of the "support co-ops". So, well,
renewed congratulations and - to repeat - I will make contact again once I know what has
happened at the Tablet. all the best from Robert O.
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