WORLD 24/12/02 Don José María Arizmendiarrieta, founder of the Mondragón Corporat

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Don José María Arizmendiarrieta, founder of the Mondragón Corporation

This article, summarizing his life, formation and pastoral work, aims to profile him spiritually and intellectually, and to reflect on his legacy

Don Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta's sculpture in Mondragon University's Mondragon campus (Photo: Wikipedia) (Photo supplied)

By Fernando de la Iglesia Viguiristi SJ

Published: December 02, 2024 10:00 AM GMT

Updated: December 02, 2024 10:00 AM GMT

On July 17, 2024, the annual Congress of the Mondragón Corporation was held at the Euskalduna Conference Center in Bilbao. In attendance were 650 delegates representing the 92 autonomous cooperatives where more than 70,000 people work.

This cooperative group, with a presence on five continents, is structured around four areas of operation: Finance, Industry, Distribution and Knowledge. It includes a bank, an insurance company, a center for the promotion of new business, five technology centers, seven corporate research and development units, a goodly number of industrial and distribution companies, and its own university.

Today it is the leading Basque business group and the tenth largest in Spain. In 2023 it had a turnover of 11 billion euros and a profit of nearly 600 million.

Beyond its unquestionable economic success, its greatest achievement is the fact that Mondragón has become, today, a world reference for cooperative work, because it embodies a humane and egalitarian way of managing business.

Thousands of people visit Mondragón (a town located in the province of Guipúzcoa, Spain) every year to study its self-managed cooperative model of creating and maintaining jobs, the result of a continuous and consistent development that has continued since its creation in 1956.

Read the complete article here.

This article is brought to you by UCA News in association with "La Civiltà Cattolica."