The employment performance of the Mondragon worker cooperatives 1983–2019

In 2019, the Mondragon worker cooperatives, which number around 100, employed over 81,000 workers. Based primarily on information from the Mondragon annual reports, this article traces Mondragon’s employment performance from 1983–2019. In this period its Spanish employment growth outran that of Spain by a factor of 3.4, and that of the aggregated OECD countries by a factor of 6.3. On top of the Spanish employment, Mondragon cooperatives’ subsidiaries employed about 4,300 workers abroad (7% of the total) in 2001, and about 14,500 (18% of the total) in 2019. The article expands on the reasons for this last type of employment. The article also explains why the proportion of cooperative owner-members in the total employment varies over time. Depending on the sector, in 2019 this proportion is 32% to 45%, and measured as a proportion of the employment in cooperatives 32% to 74% – the difference being engendered by non-cooperative subsidiaries. Many cooperatives regard these proportions as second-best practices in the search for a modus between competitive pressures and the maintenance of employment within cooperatives.