The coffee labor movement is having a moment in the United States. Workers at Starbucks locations in Buffalo in 2021 helped shepherd a swell of union activity that has since spread to all corners of the industry, from nationwide chains to specialty trailblazers to mom-and-pop cafes.
Today, more than 500 Starbucks stores representing nearly 12,000 workers have unionized. The success of Starbucks Workers United organizers has shown that coffee shops can be run differently—and in a way that balances the needs of the business with the needs of employees.
The popularity of unions, specifically within the food and beverage sector, has also opened the door to new ways of thinking about business ownership. Within the coffee industry, a new model is gaining popularity: the worker-owned cooperative, or a business owned and managed by its workers.
There have been several high-profile examples of coffee shops moving away from traditional ownership models in recent years—the New York City-based Gimme! Coffee transitioned to a cooperative in 2022—but Baltimore, Maryland, has become a particular hotspot for coffee worker-cooperatives. In 2023, Common Ground Cafe became the latest example when workers banded together to take over the business after the owner closed down in response to a union drive.
Does worker ownership offer a model for the industry more widely, say for business owners who want to retire but don’t want to just sell out completely? Is it a model that more coffee workers can explore as an alternative—or complement—to unionization? And why has Baltimore become such a hub for worker-owned cooperatives?
Baltimore’s Worker Co-ops
According to the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives, there are two key characteristics of a worker cooperative: Members own the business and receive financial benefits based on their contribution, and such businesses are democratically managed on the basis of one worker, one vote.
The number of worker cooperatives in the United States grew by 30% between 2019 and 2021, according to data from the Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI). The appeal of such models is obvious: Workers get a democratic say in the way a business is run, as well as share equally in any potential profits. In the U.S., as DAWI reported in 2019, the average entry-level wage at a worker-owned cooperative was more than $7 per hour higher than the minimum wage in the 13 states with the most worker co-ops.
Baltimore has a long history of worker cooperatives—the first cooperative factory in America was founded there in 1794—but the modern renaissance of worker-owned businesses in the city began in 2004, when Red Emma’s opened. A radical bookstore and cafe, Red Emma’s has grown to become one of Baltimore’s most celebrated cooperatives, garnering national attention and acting as an incubator for other aspiring worker-owners.
Red Emma’s has had a direct influence on the growth of several local co-ops, while its worker-owners have also helped to expand the wider cooperative movement. They were part of the team that created the nationwide funding cooperative Seed Commons, which helps connect co-ops to non-extractive lending, and its local offshoot, the financial and development hub the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED). When a cooperative needs help expanding or finding a new home, BRED and Seed Commons help to access the necessary funding and support.
“When we started Red Emma’s in 2003, and opened our first location in 2004, we really had no idea what we were doing,” says Kate Khatib, co-founder and worker-owner of Red Emma’s, co-executive director of Seed Commons, and co-founder and a senior fellow at BRED. “It was only really about 10 years into our development that we started to understand ourselves as a worker cooperative, and to use that language—and to think differently about ourselves, as a group of workers sharing the collective labor of ownership, rather than as a bunch of activists running a collective cafe.”
Red Emma’s moved to a larger location in 2014, and connected with another young Baltimore worker cooperative, Thread Coffee, which was looking for a roasting space. Thread became Red Emma’s in-house roastery before expanding into its own space in 2017. “The period under Red Emma’s was sort of like an incubation to try to get Thread off the ground, but the intent was always for it to be its own company,” says Thread head roaster and worker-owner Holly Kent-Payne.
Thread originally based its structure on Red Emma’s, but has refined it in the ensuing years into something that works for its specific needs. For example, Kent-Payne says they extended the time needed to become a worker-owner from one year to three. “That’s what we feel works best, just because we’re such a small team, and you really have to find someone who’s a good fit, you know?”
Kent-Payne is proud of Thread’s approach. “We prioritize things that aren’t typical in traditional businesses, like paying ourselves a living wage and paying our employees a living wage,” she says. “So the profit margins don’t always treat us as kindly as they could, but it’s more about what are our priorities as business owners, rather than the bottom line.”
Worker Cooperative or Unionize? Why Not Both?
In late 2022, workers at Common Ground Cafe—who were looking to have more of a say in their workplace, and who were becoming frustrated with pay discrepancies between different roles—quietly began to organize. Six months later, as they prepared to go public with their union campaign, the owner abruptly closed the cafe.
The fired staff started an Instagram account and posted their side of the story, and the response from their community was immediate. “Everyone was really encouraging afterward—they were like, ‘You should reopen,’ and ‘You should buy it back,’” says worker-owner Claud Casquarelly. “[We] ran with it and took the leap of faith together.”
The learning curve to build a worker-owned cooperative was steep: “We had no idea if it was going to work. We didn’t know how to run a business,” Casquarelly says. But BRED and Seed Commons helped them get access to financing. Ultimately, the workers were able to buy Common Ground from the previous owner, reopening the store just a few months after it closed.
With this new structure in place, staff members can become owners after one year working at Common Ground. Crucially, everyone also earns the same salary, regardless of role and whether they are an owner. This interest in maintaining equality resulted in the next step in the cafe’s progression: Even as workers leaned into running a cooperative business, the idea of unionizing hadn’t gone away. In December 2024, a little more than a year after Common Ground became a cooperative, the 23-strong team, including staff and worker-owners, announced they would still unionize with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 27.
Casquarelly accepts that the idea of a unionized worker-owned co-op sounds odd. “At first I was like, ‘Why would we need a union when we have so much power in our workplace?’ But through a bunch of meetings that we’ve been having, [we understand] there’s still going to be workplace inequity in our structure.”
Unionization offers support to non-owners when they are on the pathway to worker-ownership but don’t yet have as big a say in how Common Ground is run. “We’re acknowledging that there still is a power dynamic in our workplace between the people who have worker ownership and the people who are workers,” Casquarelly says. “We want to make it a place that everybody has some level of feeling like they have the power to change something here.”
A Sustainable Alternative
There are a few reasons why Baltimore seems to be a hub for worker-owned cooperatives. According to Khatib, the city’s size plays a big role. “Baltimore is a mid-size city that has a small-town feel,” she says. “There is a lot of word of mouth, and a lot of rich neighborhood culture.”
Having such a public worker-owned flagship in Red Emma’s helps as well. Red Emma’s has “dedicated itself to being a public laboratory for workplace democracy, that’s open to sharing its successes and failures with other coops, and that people can just walk into,” Khatib says.
For many coffee workers, baristas especially, it can be hard to see a pathway to a sustainable career within the industry. For Kent-Payne, becoming a worker-owner at Thread was life-changing. “The co-op model in the coffee industry specifically has been extremely transformative in my life,” she says. “Going from being a low-wage barista with no real opportunities for advancement, no financial security, no benefits, [to] now, I have been able to become a homeowner, I’ve been able to start a family, and I have the financial stability and the job satisfaction of a career that I never really thought was possible.”
There are plenty of ways to structure a coffee business, but not many that give workers so much say in how it operates. “Co-ops won’t solve all our problems as a society of workers,” Khatib says. “We still get into fights and hurt each other’s feelings, and it can be hard and exhausting! But once you’ve done it, it’s hard to go back.”
