On a sweltering August afternoon at Red Emma’s, the anarchist bookstore, cafe, and community organizing space in Baltimore’s Waverly neighborhood, something that would have seemed impossible two decades ago was underway: the first-ever national convening of worker cooperative restaurants. Over two days, 100 worker-owners from more than 30 cafes, pizzerias, bars, breweries, and coffee shops from across the country had descended on Baltimore for an intensive program.
“Corporate restaurants are pretty good at scaling up through collective power,” said John Duda, Red Emma’s co-founder and conference organizer. “What would it look like if the nascent cooperative ecosystems in foodservice could do likewise, with a goal of building community wealth, instead of maximizing corporate profits?”
The gathering represented a remarkable evolution for both Red Emma’s and the broader cooperative movement. Named for the famed anarchist organizer Emma Goldman, Red Emma’s began in 2004 as a scrappy collective operating out of a Mount Vernon basement storefront. Today, it employs 13 worker-owners in their sprawling “forever home” complete with a bookstore, restaurant, and bar — a transformation that helped catalyze Baltimore’s emergence as an unlikely hub for economic democracy, while upholding its radical roots. The space features a Free School serving as an educational and organizing hub, regular book talks with progressive authors, and walls and windows adorned with posters expressing solidarity with immigrants and Palestine.
The timing of this growth is particularly significant during the second Trump administration. While the White House has championed shredding the social safety net to fund tax breaks to billionaires and mass deportations, worker cooperatives offer a fundamentally different vision that puts power directly in the hands of workers and treats immigrant labor with dignity and as an asset rather than a threat.
At a time of skyrocketing inequality, worker cooperatives show it’s possible to create a successful business model not fueled by greed and exploitation. Corporate CEOs make 344 times as much as a typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. For coops, the ratio between the highest and lowest paid worker is 1.45 to 1, according to a 2023 report by the United Federation of Worker Cooperatives.
At a time of skyrocketing inequality, worker cooperatives show it’s possible to create a successful business model not fueled by greed and exploitation.
Despite their growth, there are still relatively few worker cooperatives in the US — 751 in 2023 according to UFWC — with the main barrier being lack of financing and technical assistance not available at large enough scale.
Traditional banks struggle to understand the cooperative model, according to Kate Khatib, who serves as both a worker-owner at Red Emma’s and co-director of Seed Commons, a national cooperative financing network. “Banks mitigate risk by checking credit scores and personal assets,” she explained, so they are unable to “to deal with that strategy for risk mitigation when there are multiple owners, and so they often will misinterpret many owners as increasing risk, rather than decreasing it.”
The lack of support from traditional financial institutions led Red Emma’s worker-owners to help create an entirely new national infrastructure for cooperative finance. When the collective decided to expand in 2013, they hit the familiar roadblock of lenders unwilling to sign off on loans without individual collateral from cooperative members.
So they teamed up with other cooperatives and cooperative funders to launch Seed Commons, a network of cooperatives that pools resources to create a revolving loan fund supporting workers in traditionally disinvested communities.
Today, Seed Commons has made more than one hundred million dollars in non-extractive loans supporting some fifteen thousand workers across the country. According to Khatib, 97% of those workers qualified as low-income before receiving loans, and 93% are people of color. Sixty-five percent are women and queer people. Unlike traditional banks, Seed Commons asks for repayment solely from business profits, without taking resources needed to pay bills and sustain workers.
The model has proven particularly effective in the Baltimore-D.C. corridor, where Seed Commons has invested close to $25 million supporting 250 ownership-track jobs and lending to 23 cooperatives through their local affiliate, Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy. In recent years, there’s been a growing emphasis on helping existing businesses transition to worker-ownership, including the award-winning Taharka Brothers ice cream in 2020, Common Ground Cafe in 2023, and the Wine Source in 2024.
The restaurant convening highlighted both the appeal of worker-ownership and the challenges facing the industry. The cooperative model addresses endemic problems in food service, from sexual harassment to wage theft to dangerous working conditions.
“What made me interested in co-ops was the fact that my voice actually matters and my insight mattered,” said Alexus Snovitch, who became a worker-owner at Mera Kitchen Collective in Mount Vernon this summer after twenty years in the restaurant industry. “So it wasn’t just run by one person and their vision and what they thought was working, even if they weren’t involved in actually running the business.”
Mera embodies the cooperative movement’s values around immigration and community. The restaurant began as dinners for immigrants and refugees arriving in Baltimore to share their food and create connections with their new Baltimore community, according to Emily Lerman, a Mera worker-owner who also provides technical assistance through BRED and Seed Commons.
“We thought about how we’d grow this into a sustainable business. We knew we wanted to be a worker-coop, so we reached out to Red Emma’s,” Lerman said. “They were the gold standard for us.”
For Snovitch, who works as Mera’s general manager, the cooperative model offers protections absent in traditional restaurants. “Here there is no toleration for sexual harassment,” she said. “You go through courses that teach you about what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate.” The restaurant also implements a 20% livable wage service fee that ensures kitchen staff receive a share of tips.
At cooperatives, workers are given a clear path to ownership, allowing them to build equity in the business rather than just earning wages.
The convening also served as an opportunity to showcase Baltimore to visitors unfamiliar with the city. “Most out-of-town attendees had never been to Baltimore before and had little idea of what to expect of the city,” Lerman said. “By the end I had many people telling me how much they enjoyed it here and couldn’t wait to come back. It was an opportunity to show the strength of our relationships, how people — and especially small businesses — want to support each other’s success.”
The convening highlighted both the movement’s rapid growth and the challenges ahead. Participants spent sessions exploring everything from democratic compensation structures to conflict resolution in worker-owned workplaces.
“Red Emma’s was created to be a laboratory for workplace democracy,” Khatib said, “and we have worked very hard to try out every new idea, and to implement new and innovative models and structures, constantly, and with varying success over the past twenty years.”
“Red Emma’s was created to be a laboratory for workplace democracy,” Khatib said, “and we have worked very hard to try out every new idea, and to implement new and innovative models and structures, constantly, and with varying success over the past twenty years.”
This approach stands in stark contrast to cooperative development in cities like New York and Cleveland.
“Baltimore’s worker-cooperative ecosystem is very grassroots and worker-led, and it’s one of the fastest-growing cooperative ecosystems in the country,” Khatib noted. “I think we have demonstrated that we can do a lot with a small amount of resources, and next to no support from the city.”
Recently won policy changes offer hope for further expansion. In 2025, Maryland became one of only a handful of states to officially support worker-owned cooperatives by creating the ability for cooperatives to incorporate as Limited Worker Cooperative Associations, effective in 2026. The change addresses longstanding issues with taxation and workers’ compensation insurance while opening new possibilities for raising investment.
As the restaurant convening wound down with a reception at Mera Kitchen, participants carried with them more than just new strategies for democratic workplace management. They had witnessed proof that another economy is possible — one built not on exploiting workers but by building dignity at the workplace through cooperation and community control.
“The biggest takeaway I saw was that the worker-owners who attended came away with a sense of being part of something bigger,” said Duda. “Not just their own democratic workplaces, but a larger movement for a different kind of food service economy.”