The Mondragon Experiment
Mondragon, in the Basque region of Spain, is a flourishing industrial town with over 80 factories ranging from iron foundries and shipyards to printing works and sawmills. They are the most efficient in Spain - and they are all cooperatively owned! Their 18,000 workers run the factories, appoint the managers, and decide how to distribute the profits. They also run their own bank, their own technical college, and their own research laboratories, working on robots, microprocessors and solar energy. And they have created all this with scant help from a suspicious government and no funds from stock-market investors.
In Britain, workers and management, capital and labour, have been at loggerheads since the Industrial Revolution-and there is no sign of things getting better. The experiment has been running for 25 years. Could we follow the same road to prosperity? Narrator ALEXANDER JOHN
Film editor GEOFFREY MOORE Editor SIMON CAMPBELL-JONES Written and produced by DOMINIC FLESSATI