When Marisa Fernández lost her husband to cancer a few years ago, her employers at the Eroski hypermarket went, she says, “above and beyond to help me through the dark days afterwards, rejigging my timetable and giving me time off when I couldn’t face coming in.”
She had a chance to return the favour recently when the store, in Arrasate-Mondragón in Spain’s Basque Country, was undergoing renovations. Fernández, 58, who started on the cashier desk 34 years ago, and now manages the store’s non-food section, volunteered to work extra shifts over the weekend along with her colleagues to ensure everything was ready for Monday morning. “It’s not just me. Everyone is ready to go the extra mile,” she says.
Such harmonious employer-worker relations are the stuff of corporate dreams, and they are no accident here: the Eroski retail chain is part of Mondragón Corporation, the largest industrial co-op in the world. As a fully signed-up member, Fernández co-owns part of the supermarket chain that also employs her. “It feels like mine,” she says. “We work hard, but it’s a totally different feeling from working for someone else.”
I know it’s not exactly the same but I worked for a credit union, they are member owned. All of the workers and customers are members and the members are the owners. It was a really good place to work. It was technically not-for-profit, so our surplus at the end of the year was reinvested into the institution, rather than being paid out to shareholders.
You’re right, not the same but I still love credit unions! Multiple times now they’ve given me an interest rate on auto loans that no one else could beat. Plus most recent one I got a discount because the car was electric.
I think a credit union would be considered a “consumer cooperative” because the members are people who use the service/good, while Mondragon is a worker cooperative - the members are the people doing the work, and selling goods/services to others. (There are also residential coops for housing and multi-stakeholder coops)