When Workers Run Their Own Factories, Banks and Schools: A Report on the Mondragon Coops

When Workers Run Their Own Factories, Banks and Schools:
A Report on the Mondragon Coops
 
May 10, 7 p.m.
Lexington Central Library
140 East Main Street
Lexington, Kentucky

• Overview of Famous Mondragon Cooperative Movement– Centered in Spain’s Basque Country, but spreading across Europe and the Global South


• Examples of US Worker Cooperatives- California, Chicago, and Cleveland, OH


• Possibilities for Green Jobs, Green Manufacturing and Clean Energy Structural Reform beginning in Eastern Kentucky

For the past 50 years, something important has been growing in Spain’s Basque Country. It’s an organized network of over 120 factories, with their own bank, schools and research centers, involving more than 100,000 workers. They’re called the Mondragon Coops, and they are unique in that they are owned and controlled by the workers themselves—one worker, one share, one vote. They are also unique in they obtain credit from their own worker-owned bank and skills from their own university. They are thriving and growing , even in the midst of crisis, and have a lot to teach us on the possibilities of radical change in hard times.

Carl Davidson is a national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, a national leader of the US Solidarity Economy Network, a member of Steelworker Associates, and writes for Beaver County Blue, a progressive website In the 1960s, he studied social and political philosophy at Penn State University and the University of Nebraska. He currently resides in Aliquippa, his hometown in Western PA.

We will also be joined by Sara Pennington, the new power campaign organizer for KFTC who will share the work being done to reform energy cooperatives in eastern Kentucky.

A short discussion will follow the presentation

Sponsored by:

Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
The central Kentucky chapter of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth
Central Kentucky Council for Peace and Justice

Contact Person: Janet Tucker, [email protected]