When Marisa Fernández lost her husband to cancer a few years ago, her employers at the Eroski hypermarket went, she says, “above and beyond to help me through the dark days afterwards, rejigging my timetable and giving me time off when I couldn’t face coming in.”
She had a chance to return the favour recently when the store, in Arrasate-Mondragón in Spain’s Basque Country, was undergoing renovations. Fernández, 58, who started on the cashier desk 34 years ago, and now manages the store’s non-food section, volunteered to work extra shifts over the weekend along with her colleagues to ensure everything was ready for Monday morning. “It’s not just me. Everyone is ready to go the extra mile,” she says.
Such harmonious employer-worker relations are the stuff of corporate dreams, and they are no accident here: the Eroski retail chain is part of Mondragón Corporation, the largest industrial co-op in the world. As a fully signed-up member, Fernández co-owns part of the supermarket chain that also employs her. “It feels like mine,” she says. “We work hard, but it’s a totally different feeling from working for someone else.”
Just thinking out loud here. Regularly we hear about “communism!1!” and how bad it is. But really, isn’t communism way too broad a term? In the same way the west is capitalist, but different countries still treat / implement / regulate capitalism differently. I feel this isn’t really discussed whenever communism comes up. Stalinism in the USSR for example is brought up as “communism bad” even though its a specific flavour and implementation of communism. The same as americas capitalist society - poverty and crime is rife. But you can regulate a capitalist economy to reduce and prevent poverty.
Just ask them to define what communism is. You’ll see them twist themselves into a pretzel trying to explain it, or they won’t reply at all.
Communism is when the gubmint tells me what to do
“…but regulating capitalism is communism!”
-Some idiot conservative probably