80,000 workers own the tenth-largest company in Spain.
In 1956, five graduates of a technical school in the Basque town of Mondragón founded a small cooperative called ULGOR, making paraffin heaters. Their teacher was José María Arizmendiarrieta, a Catholic priest who had arrived in Mondragón in 1941 and spent 15 years building educational institutions before any cooperative was launched.1
Arizmendiarrieta believed that ownership of the means of production should belong to those who worked with them. The cooperatives he inspired operated on one member, one vote, regardless of seniority or capital contribution.
By the 2020s, the Mondragón Corporation had grown into a federation of more than 80 cooperatives employing roughly 80,000 worker-owners across finance, manufacturing, retail, and education.2 It is the tenth-largest business group in Spain by revenue and the largest cooperative enterprise in the world.3
Pay ratios within the cooperatives are capped. The highest-paid worker-owner cannot earn more than six to eight times the salary of the lowest-paid, depending on the cooperative. In comparable publicly traded companies, CEO-to-worker pay ratios in Spain and the United States regularly exceed 100 to 1.4
The cooperative model is not without strain. In 2013, Fagor Electrodomésticos, one of Mondragón's founding cooperatives and its largest manufacturer of home appliances, filed for bankruptcy following the European financial crisis. The federation absorbed displaced workers into other cooperatives rather than laying them off.5
Mondragón operates its own university, bank, and social security system. The Caja Laboral, the cooperative's bank, was founded in 1959 specifically to finance new cooperatives. Mondragon University, founded in 1997, enrolls roughly 4,000 students and is itself organized as a cooperative.6