Worker co-operative Mondragon has demonstrated impressive resilience in helping keep jobless levels in the Basque region to under half the Spanish national average. By Race Mathews.

Back in the early 1980s, the former Secretary of State for Education in Harold Wilson’s Labour government, Shirley Williams, alerted me to a remarkable instance of regional economic development through employee empowerment, centred on Mondragon in the Basque region of Spain.