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.”
Capitalists could do that on their own… They never needed the Soviets to demonize the work class. Much like today’s conservative right wing is perfectly capable of being horrible on its own an is a product of its own system, much to the chagrin of the liberal right.
See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_Wars
There’s been a war between the classes ever since agriculture gave us the idea of owning land.
Yup. Was probably the worst thing to ever happen to mankind because it set the stage for singular ownership vs community well-being.