Cooporative companies in Spain

by Annabell, Flora, Michala, Rikke and Sofia There is a financial crisis in Spain, and there are many different ways to protect your company. One of them can be to establish cooperative corporations. A cooperative corporation is owned and controlled by its workers, and everyone has a say in the running of the company. This has been a solution for some companies during the financial crisis. To make this easier to understand we would like to compare it with a student council. In the student council everybody is equal. There is no one who is less valuable than anyone else. However, there will always be a student president and vicepresident. In a student council, everybody has a say in the decision making process. In essence, cooperatives and student councils are fundamentally democratic. Most of the cooperative companies in Spain have been established in the service and agricultural sectors. This structure enables the workers to decide that they will support, for example, sustainable agriculture. However, not many people work at cooperative companies, because workers have to have enough money to invest in these companies. In 1981the company Mol-Matric decided to make the company a cooperative. In 2010 the employees of Mol-Matric decided to only receive two thirds of the payment that they originally earned, so that the company did not have to fire any employees. Fernado Sid explains: This process is of course much easier to decide when you are in on making decisions. At the same time the 20 colleagues that are not a part of the cooperative company know that we always keep our promises. Mol-Matrics success story is of course not the only one in Spain. For example, the Basque company Mondragn is a case-study in business schools all over the world. It is very efficient, and saved 80,000 employees from being fired. In order to do this everyone in the company went 1% down in pay.

The citizenship aspect of cooperative companies in Spain legal and political

In legal terms, everyone has the same rights with regard to pay and decisions in cooperative companies. In political terms, the cooperative companies have a completely different approach to handling the current financial crisis. Furthermore, they make decision together and have equal pay.