José María Arizmendiarrieta

José María Arizmendiarrieta was born in 1915 in the Basque Country of northern Spain, the son of a farming family, and studied for the priesthood despite disruption from the Spanish Civil War, during which he was imprisoned and narrowly escaped execution for his sympathies. In 1941 he was sent as a young priest to Mondragón, a small town left poor and demoralised by the war, with high unemployment and little industry.

Finding that local young people had almost no access to technical education or decent jobs, he founded a small polytechnic school in 1943, funded partly by donations he collected himself, to train them as engineers and technicians. In 1956, five of his former students, unable to find work that matched their skills, pooled their savings to start a small workshop making paraffin heaters, called Ulgor, which Arizmendiarrieta helped structure as a cooperative, owned and governed by the workers themselves rather than outside shareholders.

He spent the following two decades helping found further cooperatives in manufacturing, banking, retail and agriculture, along with a cooperative bank to fund them and a research institute to support their technology, all loosely coordinated into what became known as the Mondragón Corporation. He insisted throughout that the cooperatives should compete seriously in ordinary markets rather than survive on subsidy or sentiment, while still capping pay differences between workers and managers far more tightly than conventional firms.

He died in 1976, by which time Mondragón employed thousands of people across dozens of cooperatives, and it has since grown into one of the largest cooperative federations in the world.