This paper shows how a worker cooperative can serve as an ESOP-like employee-ownership vehicle to make a partial or total buyout of a conventional company.
Three Themes about the Mondragon cooperatives
January 1, 2014 by
This is a preprint of a paper developing three themes, capital structure, active learning, and spinoffs, with special attention to the Mondragon cooperatives.
Harvard Business School Case: Mondragon
December 12, 2012 by
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.
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.
Socialization of Enterpreneurship at Mondragon
December 7, 2012 by
This 1982 paper published by the ICA was the basis for the Harvard Business School case study on Mondragon–with most of the material on socializing entrepreneurship taken out.
The Democratic Corporation
December 6, 2012 by
This is a law-journal treatment, coauthored with Peter Pitegoff, of the theory and practice of worker ownership in the US in the early 1980s.
The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm
December 2, 2012 by
My second book was the 1989 The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm. The book was revised for the Chinese translation, and that is the version that can be downloaded here. This book develops the labor theory of property and democratic theory arguments for a democratic firm, and analyzes the connection between those principles and the legal structure of the firms.
Jobs & Fairness
January 1, 2012 by
This the late Robert Oakeshott’s magnum opus of case studies of and reflections on employee ownership. There is nothing else like it but it is very little known.
Obama needs new job creation ideas
January 29, 2010 by
The Obama economics team seems trapped by rather conventional job-creation ideas, e.g., Keynesian pump-priming or tax breaks for small businesses, ideas whose main virtue is that they are better than the opposition’s ideas of more tax breaks for the rich. But there are other ways to increase job creation and entrepreneurship that have been hindered by the size-maximizing tendencies of American corporations.