About the Book

HUMANITY@WORK&LIFE is intended to provide hope and inspiration by serving as a resource for those interested in developing worker cooperatives, as well as an introduction for those interested in virtuous cycle, "Solidarity Dividend" alternatives to shareholder primacy capitalism practices. It is also intended to peer over incoming vision horizons and around strategy corners, "showing, not telling" how Mondragon-inspired virtuous cycles transform "humanity at work" globally and locally.

The book was conceived in the middle of four lethal virus pandemics simultaneously threatening "humanity@work" advancing extreme climate precarity, withering economic class inequalities including embedded racism, novel COVID-19 killing millions, and a global assault on democracy. Its twofold mission: first, to be a resource for those developing hybrid model worker cooperatives and social enterprises as structural and cultural antidotes to a rising, inclusive, and climate-respecting Stakeholders-as-Shareholders global economy; and second, to uplift and amplify critical new voices of those doing the work. The four concurrent global pandemics have shone a harsher light on inequalities in society and offer opportunities to develop hybrid worker ownership models that seed virtuous cycles.

This book's core belief is that there is no sustaining worker voice without worker power communicated and demonstrated through solidarity, democracy, equality of opportunity and shared equity and wealth outcomes. Its premise is that an ineluctable foundational policy for a fair and aspirational economy working for all demands inclusive, broadened, and deepened, stakeholder worker ownership undergirded by workplace democracy practices. Like Mondragon, we believe single class equity governance is synonymous with solidarity. Every equity share guarantees the equal right to vote for change and provides the basis for power-paradigm-changing culture combining stakeholder community and individual civic mutualism, stability, and self-reliance to innovate, defend and facilitate more fulfilled lives and dignified retirements.

The core academic purpose of HUMANITY@WORK&LIFE is to make the case as to why Mondragon is a dynamic working and evolving model for those who see the need for replicable structural change in our economic institutions and in the proverbial "free market" economy across physical borders and cultural silos. The Mondragon case will be detailed and include both an overview of ecosystem cooperatives and discussion of global diffusion activities that the Mondragon cooperatives embrace locally and globally as well as those from other geographies inspired by close to 70+ years of Mondragon cooperative experiences. The book will include sections that examine how cooperatives inspired by the Mondragon cooperative ecosystem in the Basque region of Spain are emerging in different communities in the USA, Canada, Germany, the Republic of Korea, and the UK.

The last section of the book is intended to provide grounded inspiration about how to develop worker cooperatives and ecosystems that scale and breathe freely in a world beset by culturally induced pandemics doing their utmost to subvert democracy, freedom, truth, and hope.