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The Philippine Association of Self-Employed Workers’ Cooperatives
(Co-opworks!) Inc., recently engaged in a mutually beneficial
partnership with Mondragon Corporacion Cooperativa (MCC), the
seventh largest business group in Spain.
A memorandum of understanding was signed between
Co-opworks! and MCC, represented by Leo Parma, Co-opWorks! chairman
for International Relations and Asiapro Cooperative founder, and by
Mondragon International President Jesus Maria Herrasti. The
momentous event transpired during the third edition of
Spain-Philippines forum (Third Tribuna España-Filipinas) in Madrid
last December 2007.
According to Asiapro Founder Mr. Leo Parma,
local cooperatives can learn valuable lessons from the MCC
business-model marked by Mondragon’s experience in terms of
governance and how they apply the cooperative principles to their
very large network of cooperatives and corporate entities. Asiapro
pioneered the organization of non-regular workers in the
Philippines. It is a multipurpose cooperative that takes care of
providing its worker-owners non-regular jobs in cooperating
companies. Under this model, worker-owners organize themselves and
form a cooperative enterprise. They become self-employed co-owners
of the cooperative and they engage in outsourced assignments with
the cooperative serving as the contracting party. Today,
Asiapro has almost 25,000 worker-owners and about 200 clients.
“MCC is the biggest business organization in
the Basque country. With its many worker members, it diversified
within 50 years of existence. That is something that we want to
replicate in our own work or business environment. We established a
partnership with them to see what we can learn and apply it to our
local cooperative condition,” said Parma who was also amongst the
initial envoys of Co-opworks! to Mondragon.
“Initially, it is about awareness, standards
and exchange of learning opportunities through training, information
sharing and international cooperation and understanding. So we
encourage our member cooperatives to go to Mondragon for study tours
and see first hand what they do. From there, we’ll see if we can
link in terms of business,” said Parma.
MCC is a group of manufacturing and retail
companies based in the Basque country and extended over the rest of
Spain and abroad. MCC is the fruit of the sound vision of Father
Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta. Founded in 1956, it is now the Basque
Country’s largest cooperative enterprise, the seventh largest
business group in Spain. MCC’s mission combines the basic
objectives of a business competing in international markets with the
use of democratic methods in its organization and with special
emphasis on job creation, the promotion of its workers in human and
professional terms and a commitment to the development of its social
environment.
Co-opworks! is RP’s prime example of worker
cooperatives bonding together for a unified front. There are 14
primary cooperative members under Co-opworks! These are the Asiapro
Multipurpose Cooperative, Alternative Network Resource
Multipurpose Cooperative, Caritas et Labora Human Resource Service
Cooperative, Epic Resources Multipurpose Cooperative, Fourth
Dimension Multipurpose Cooperative, Globalpro Multipurpose
Cooperative, Helping Hand Development Cooperative, Jobpro
Cooperative, People Serve Multipurpose Cooperative, Rightway THS69
Multipurpose Cooperative, Serbiz Multipurpose Cooperative, Tekton
Entre-Workers’ Cooperative, TotalDev Multipurpose Cooperative, and
Yearnings Outsourcing Multipurpose Cooperative. Each member
cooperative wants to provide better working opportunities for the
nonregular sector of the nation’s labor force. This newly
empowered sector is expected in turn to aid other sectors of society
such as labor, government institutions, industries, communities, and
even the cooperative movement. Co-opworks! constantly look
for ways on how to contribute further to the development, not only
of its members, but also of the business community, the government
and its appropriate agencies.
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