Mondragon Business Planning with Labor as a Fixed Cost

This is an old 1984 study of the 286-paged business planning manual, Plan de Gestion Anual de la Empresa (Annual Management Plan for the Enterprise) of the Empresarial Division of the Caja Laboral Popular, the bank in the Mondragon system of cooperatives. The remarkable thing about the Mondragon method of business planning is that they started with the number of members working in the cooperative and then planned production and sales to keep them on the job during the year. Thus labor was treated as a fixed cost in contrast with the conventional method of business planning that starts with the projected sales and then adjusts labor accordingly (treating at least direct labor as a variable cost). The planning example is reworked in American terms and is carried out in some detail in this 56-paged study.

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