Davos Man

by Peter S. Goodman

Howard’s idea had taken inspiration from the Mondragon Group, a collection of cooperative businesses in the Basque region of Spain that was the workplace for more than seventy thousand people, making it one of the ten largest employers in the country. The group owned one of Spain’s largest grocery chains, a bank, and factories that exported auto parts and other components around the world. Mondragon was governed by an agreement that the top management salary was limited to six times the wages of the lowest paid worker, as compared to a ratio of more than 300 to 12 among publicly traded companies in the United States. The laborers owned the company as partners, receiving annual shares of profit. If one business hit hard times, partners could find work at the other cooperatives. After the global financial crisis, as the unemployment rate surged beyond 26 percent in Spain, Mondragon largely avoided job losses.