Anna Maria Tarantola: "Focusing the company on people is efficient".Ethics in the company: a serious, clear and profitable spiritual accompaniment"True wealth is sharing," Pope Francis comments in an audience with businessmen.On Wednesday, May 3, the round table "Towards a new model for Europe's companies" took place at the European Parliament in Brussels, with the participation of members of the European Commission and the European Commission. Arizmendiarrieta Foundation and COMECE, among others.
The event was subtitled "From the Mondragon experience towards a participatory and inclusive business model". In the afternoon, a round table on the same theme was held in the ecumenical Chapel for Europe, in which the Spanish model of the Mondragon Corporation.
José María Arizmendiarrieta
This model emerged based on the Social Doctrine of the Church, promoted by the Venerable José María Arizmendiarrieta.
Arizmendiarrieta (1915-1976) was a Catholic priest originally from a rural area of the Basque Country. In 1922 he entered the Minor Seminary of Castillo-Elejabeitia. Due to the Civil War, he could not be ordained until 1940. In 1941 he was sent to the parish of San Juan Bautista, in the industrial town of Mondragón (Guipúzcoa).
There, he sought to Christianize the world of work and founded the Mondragon Professional School. "Before being an employee, before being a worker, before everything else, you are baptized," he said. In the 1950s he founded Ulgor, a company that sought a reform in the concept of the company that was centered on the person and not on exploiting him, as well as the San José Cooperative and the Caja Laboral. He considered that "the working world will not believe in the social doctrine of the Church if it does not see it incarnated in the reality of social works".
A more humane business model
"The cooperative formula requires that human activity share and involve higher human values, so that work, capital, [business] organization are not ends in themselves, but means to better serve higher human interests," it states in the statutes for Talleres Ulgor. "The company cannot and should not lose any of its efficiency virtues because of the fact that human values enjoy a clear prevalence over purely economic or material resources; on the contrary, it should accentuate its efficiency and quality".
He also considered that the Christian's mission "is to demonstrate to society that business can be organized in a more humane way and that man can be treated as his dignity requires without detriment to productivity, quite the contrary".
An example of the results of these efforts is the cooperative company Eroski, which emerged from this impulse and belongs to the Mondragon Corporation.
Event in Brussels with the collaboration of the Arizmendiarrieta Foundation.
The event in Brussels, organized by the European Parliament and the Commission of European Episcopal Conferences, was attended by the Bishop of Bilbao, Monsignor Joseba Segura, two European experts, John Kearns and Lucy Anns, and two members of the Governing Council of the Arizmendiarrieta Foundation, Jon Emaldi and Gaspar Martínez.
Topics such as how to achieve more humane and competitive European companies or the importance of the Mondragon cooperative experience were discussed, as well as the model of company participatory and inclusive, among others.
For the Arizmendiarrieta Foundation, the seminar organized jointly with the European Parliament and the Commission of European Bishops' Conferences on the "European Year of Intercultural Dialogue" was a great opportunity for the European Parliament and the Commission of European Bishops' Conferences. Inclusive participatory business model has meant a qualitative leap in its diffusion at an international level and a step that brings us closer to the possibility of the proposal being evaluated by some European body, an aspect on which we will be working in the near future. It is, on the other hand, a complement to the favorable reception it has already had so far in Catholic environments, such as UNIAPAC (association of the 43 national organizations of managers and entrepreneurs around the world, with more than 40,000 affiliates), the Economy of Francis and the Dicastery for Integral Human Development itself", says Juan Manuel Sinde, president of the Arizmendiarrieta Foundation.
