This is a reprint of Case No. 1-384-270. Harvard Business School 1984. It gives an overall view of the Mondragon cooperative movement of the Basque country in northern Spain as it was in the early 1980s.
Who Pays for ESOP Shares?
December 12, 2012 by
This is an old paper (1980s) analyzing the American Employee Stock Ownership Plan or ESOP. The original proposer of the ESOP idea, Louis Kelso, and his ardent follows have shrouded the ESOP transactions in such a cloud of rhetoric, that one needs to independently perform an analysis to see what is really going on. The paper was never published (except in this website version) since I had no reason to publicly attack ESOPs, only to be clear about them and their true institutional contribution–which is considerable.
On the Role of Capital in “Capitalist” and in Labor-Managed Firms
December 10, 2012 by
This paper outlines the “fundamental myth” about the structure of property rights in a capitalist economy, namely the idea that being the residual claimant in a productive opportunity is part of a bundle of property rights known as the “ownership of the firm.” Residual claimancy is contractually determined so there is no such “ownership.” The fundamental myth exposes a basic fallacy in capital theory that has hitherto escaped attention in the capital theory debates. (Reprint from: Review of Radical Political Economics, Winter 2007)
Translatio versus Concessio: Retrieving the debate about contracts of alienation with an application to today’s employment contract
December 10, 2012 by
Liberal thought is based on the fundamental question of consent versus coercion. The autocracies and slavery systems of the past were based on coercion whereas today’s democracy in the political sphere and employment system in the economy are based on consent. This paper retrieves an almost forgotten contractarian tradition, dating from at least the Middle Ages, that based political autocracy and economic slavery on explicit or implicit voluntary contracts. Hence the democratic and antislavery movements had to hammer out arguments not simply in favor of consent and against coercion, but arguments based on the distinction between contracts to alienate (translatio) sovereignty versus contracts to only delegate (concessio) self-governance rights.
The Democratic Firm: An Argument based on Ordinary Jurisprudence
December 9, 2012 by
This is an article in the Journal of Business Ethics treating a more fundamental topic than the usual fare on business ethics.
Brookings Conf. Paper on Workplace Democracy
December 9, 2012 by
This is a paper on workplace democracy and the corporate governance debate which was prepared for a 1998 conference at the Brookings Institution. For some reason, it was never published.
Corporate Democracy Movement
December 9, 2012 by
This article argues for democratizing the corporation and is oriented towards an industrial relations / labor union audience.
Book review on plywood coops
December 9, 2012 by
This book on the plywood coops is written by an academic economist who is sympathetic to worker cooperatives, but just repeats the standard criticisms as if he were unaware of the solutions and counterarguments. Hence I wrote the review to once again point out the solutions and counterarguments.
Mondragon Business Planning with Labor as a Fixed Cost
December 8, 2012 by
This is an old 1984 study of the 286-paged business planning manual, Plan de Gestion Anual de la Empresa (Annual Management Plan for the Enterprise) of the Empresarial Division of the Caja Laboral Popular, the bank in the Mondragon system of cooperatives. The remarkable thing about the Mondragon method of business planning is that they started with the number of members working in the cooperative and then planned production and sales to keep them on the job during the year.
On Rawls and Nussbaum
December 8, 2012 by
This paper was delivered at a 2008 conference in Leuven on Martha Nussbaum’s book Frontiers of Justice. The paper was to be published in the conference proceedings, but somehow that never happened.