most writing on Mondragon idealizes it, in large part, because of its comparative success...
for example, there is tendency to downplay start-up role played by Spanish gov't in 1950s/1960s - it provided upwards of 20% of investment capital to coop ventures, it collected no corporate taxes for first 10 years and levied only 50% rate after that, and it imposed import quotas & high tariffs on imported goods that coops produced...
while Mondragon coops have provided pretty good lives - decent incomes, job security, social security, educational opportunities - for members, they may not be models of worker democracy they've been posited to be... Sharryn Kasmir (_The Myth of Mondragon: Cooperatives, Politics, and Working Class Life in a Basque Town_, 1996) argues that coops have fostered management-labor relations that undermine working class identity and labor unions and she claims that rank-and-file do not really control decision-making...
moreover, restructuring in early 1990s shifted more power towards managers who now have greater autonomy in policymaking and are, therefore, less acountable to worker-owners...market ideology has apparently taken its place alongside market activities that coop enterprises are dependent on...
Michael Hoover