Humanity at Work
I contributed a chapter to Humanity @ Work & Life: Global Diffusion of the Mondragon Cooperative Ecosystem Experience. The chapter explores the ways in which cooperative principles can show up in simple cultural norms like how we share a drink with friends and the unique challenges that co-ops face in the United States where cooperative principles run counter to the dominant culture and economic system.
I drew on my personal experience co-founding a communications consulting worker cooperative, Samara Collective and shared some of the lessons learned in starting an equity-based worker-centered organization after seeing the ways in which advocacy organizations do not always align their internal staff practices with the issues they fight for externally.
My reflections also come from my unusual introduction to cooperatives through my living in the Basque Country at a young age while my mother did research on the Mondragon Cooperatives, which I share more about below.
Being part of the cooperative community feels like both a path I chose and was given. My mom, Chris Clamp, has been researching the Mondragón Cooperatives since the early 80s. I spent much of my childhood and early adulthood rolling my eyes as my mom repeated some fact or anecdote about co-ops I’d heard a million times. But as I developed a deeper understanding of the challenges that I and many others face in the workplace, I came to understand why she’s been so excited by and devoted to it for so many years. Instead of trying to put a bandaid on a broken system, as we are so often forced to do — to try and stop the bleeding — this a way of creating, at least internally to your organization, a more functional, equitable, and democratic space to exist in and work from.
It doesn’t replace large-scale movements and organizing to build and shift power, but it can help to build life rafts while we work towards larger-scale change. And IF we can create ways to make co-ops a more accessible business model (right now, there are a lot of hoops to jump through), they could become a larger player in shifting those power dynamics and building a deeper understanding of democracy that could push along a culture shift — but we’ve got a lot of work to do to make that a reality. So, taking steps towards building scale is crucial to move us in that direction. And working towards making that happen in whatever way I can — feels like a personal culmination of all of those years of stories, as well as all of the skills — writing, design, web development — I’ve learned along the way, coming together to meet a need that so many people have for fairer, healthier workplaces.
My introduction to Mondragón, or Arrasate as it is known in Basque, was very different from that of most Americans. I lived in the Basque Country (Euskal Herria) for a month when I was twelve. My parents arranged for me to attend a Spanish public school while my mom continued her research. It was the late 90s, pre-cell phones and Google translate, so I stumbled through with a digital pocket dictionary and the ability that children have to become friends, even when they can’t speak more than a few words to each other.
We lived with some of the friends my mom had made in Mondragón, the first time she visited to do field research in 1982, Iñaki and Carmen. When we stayed with them in 1998, they lived in Algorta, a small town just north of Bilbao, along the coast.
I learned bits and pieces of Basque history through my conversations with them. They met in Paris after having had to flee the rise of authoritarianism in their respective countries of Spain and Chile. Iñaki grew up in exile between Paris, Berlin, and New York City because his father was José Antonio Aguirre, the first and last Basque president, before the rise of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain.
The house where we lived with them was Iñaki’s family’s house that Franco’s regime had seized, but some older women in the family had been able to petition for its return after the fall of the dictatorship.
I did my best to be a terrible twelve-year-old. I even hid Iñaki’s cigarettes behind the toilet one time to make the point that I thought he should quit. Being in a small town, I could come home for lunch, wander around after school with my friends, go to the candy store, and hop the school fence to play soccer or basketball. It was a wonderful and eye-opening experience for a twelve-year-old used to living in a bigger city where I didn’t have as much freedom to roam.
I remember driving through the mountains out to Mondragón, meeting my mom’s cuadrilla, and going to bars and dinner at a gastronomic society for the first time. Both of these were mind-blowing to a twelve-year-old from the States. “Go in a bar?! I can do that?” Learning that bars could be more family-friendly places where everyone could go to meet up in the community was such a culture shift for me.
While I was in college, studying abroad in Barcelona, I revisited the Basque Country and sat in on a meeting that my mom had with someone from Otalora, where I learned about the shared funding structures and how that supported continued employment and stability for workers when there were emergencies, like a fire in a factory — they could get placed in another cooperative within the Mondragon group, while repairs were done.
I graduated from college in 2008, just in time to see most job opportunities slip away as the American economy collapsed. Luckily, I’d applied to a program through the Spanish government to help teach English as a native speaker in a public school and was able to ride out the better part of 2009-10 teaching. I lived in Mondragón for eight months with friends from my mom’s cuadrilla and taught at a machine tool institute nearby in Elgoibar. Winding through the clouds and mountains for my commute was a welcome change from hopping on the L train to go into Manhattan for work.
My mom’s friends immediately set about finding me my own cuadrilla to spend time with while I was there. Once they’d made introductions to their niece, who was around my age, I joined her and her friends for their weekly hangouts on Thursday nights for pintxo-pote and group excursions to a cider house and winery in Rioja with my mom’s cuadrilla. I also spent many hours talking with all of the professors I worked with at the machine tool institute over many coffees, lunches, beers, and wonderful shared meals that they hosted at gastronomic societies they belonged to. It’s thanks to my mom’s cuadrilla and their families and the openness of my co-workers that I learned so much about the generosity and richness of Basque culture and traditions that informed my thoughts in this piece.
Eskerrik asko!
