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MEGATRENDS: January 10, 2024 The Future Of Work: in the US and around the world

The Future Of Work examines different labor systems: the Mondragon model in Spain, the ESOP worker-ownership model in the US, and traditional labor unions. Since the early 2000's in the US, an under- the-radar sea change has occurred, out of view of mass media. The Mondragon model in Spain has had a profound impact in more than 100 countries around the world, who have sent delegations to the Basque region to learn the process of building similar worker coop consortiums in their own countries.

Spain's Mondragon Corporation's consortium of small-to-medium worker-owned and worker-managed businesses benefits from its own university, Mondragon University, a school designed since the 1950's to provide research & development education system. The faculty has grown into various departments from decades of experience in coop business acumen. Its role is to evaluate each business in the consortium for regional and global competitiveness, which guides regular retraining and professional development. Once you've "bought in" to the Mondragon corporate coop structure, "unemployment" vanishes. In the event of a business downturn or failure, a cumulative slush fund to which all the businesses in the consortium contribute assures that workers are fully paid with benefits until they are re-employed.

In the US, a "market-driven" development involves the ESOP process (Employee Stock Option Program), originally conceived as a retirement program that employees can buy into. ESOPs have become a stepping stone to employees, whose ownership ratio may increase over time, buy into the company via stock ownership, which may (or may not) include some voice in the direction and growth of the business. This changes the labor-management equation, though power and final-decision conflicts may still arise. Over time, ESOPs can lead to a complete worker ownership of a business, resulting in a worker-owned coop.

But worker-owned coops are being formed as the original business model--along the Mondragon model. Moreover, for the last decade (and decades to come), a generational transition of "silver tsunami" business CEOs are retiring, selling their US businesses to their workers, who then form a worker-owned cooperative business, funded by an 1998 act of Congress that provides taxpayer-funded loans and grants for the transition costs to for employee-ownership businesses.

Alas, an ESOP can become a long-term strategy that finances a gradual collective worker-ownership, who may have the power to terminate and then buy out investors. This means they no longer make decisions based on investor compensation (like PG&E).

Moreover, several labor unions have been working with community and co-op coalitions to develop unionized co-ops from the ground up. “They include United Steelworkers in a ground-breaking agreement with Mondragon, United Food and Commercial Workers in their work in Cincinnati, Communications Workers of America, and the United Electrical Workers.” In 2009, the United Steelworkers (USW), the largest industrial labor union in North America, and Mondragon, the largest system of worker cooperatives in the world, based in the Basque region of Spain, announced that they were teaming up to build unionized worker cooperatives.

Can this MEGATREND spell the end of the zero-sum model of corporate greed of the US "disaster capitalism" model?