Saro Khan had been on shift at Baby’s On Fire for less than an hour when the message landed in the staff group chat.
It was the first time the cafe’s owners had said anything to the staff since June 22 when workers requested voluntary recognition of their union.
The owners said they could “no longer operate the business.” The Mount Vernon cafe and record store would close for good.
“It was incredibly jarring to receive that information while on shift,” said Khan, who worked at Baby’s for nearly two years and has lived in the neighborhood for seven. “We were processing it in real time while thinking about informing our community.”
Eight workers, a mix of full- and part-time, lost their jobs when Baby’s on Fire served its last customer on July 19. Within hours of that final shift, the shop was cleared out. Staff and management keys were collected, and by the next morning the exterior seating and signage had been removed as well, according to a statement posted by the union on Instagram. But the workers aren’t ready to call it an end.
The staff hoped to start a new chapter by turning the shop into a worker cooperative, where employees collectively own and run the company. Baltimore has quietly become one of the country’s fastest-growing hubs for the model, breathing new life into shuttered establishments through employee ownership.
Within hours of the closure announcement, the workers connected with Emily Lerman, project steward at the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy, a local cooperative incubator known as BRED. Lerman is a regular at Baby’s. She is also a worker-owner at Mera Kitchen Collective a few blocks away.
“We see in Baby’s on Fire all the elements we’d look for in a potential cooperative conversion: a group of engaged workers, a devoted customer base, and a lot of community support,” Lerman said shortly after the closure.
BRED has since repeatedly reached out to the owners, and later their attorneys, with an offer to help convert the business to worker ownership. With no response, BRED has exhausted its options for reaching the owners, the union said.
Most of the staff have spent their adult lives in the service industry. Some were already struggling to cover rent and groceries, Khan said. A few hours after they received notice, the workers had a public statement out and launched a GoFundMe.
In a public statement posted to the cafe’s Instagram account the same day the news was shared with staff, owners David Koslowski and Shirlé Koslowski said the business had faced significant revenue losses “due to the economic downturn,” leaving them no choice but to close after 10 years. They thanked the community and the staff. They did not mention the union.
The owners did not respond to a request for comment.
The workers question that account. Khan points to a raise they received a few months ago and a recent promotion that gave the cafe a second manager. The shop stayed busy, with regulars going back a decade, despite being tucked down an alley off a parking lot.
“It just doesn’t feel aligned with the reality that I experience working there,” Khan said.
Back in June, the workers requested the owners recognize the union voluntarily, without a vote. The owners never answered. So, on July 2, the workers, organizing as Baby’s on Fire Workers United with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 27, filed for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board. Eight days later, the owners announced the closure.
“This has been a popular business for a decade, and there is no reason to shut it down, but it seems the owners would rather throw their workers out of a job than respect their right to unionize. It’s union-busting 101,” Jason Chorpenning, president of UFCW Local 27, the union representing the workers, said in a statement shortly after the closure was announced.
The owners have run Baby’s on Fire from Portugal for more than three years while workers handled daily operations, according to the union. That absence is what pushed the staff to organize, Khan said. It is also, they argue, what makes worker ownership plausible.
BRED has helped other businesses that closed the same way reopen under worker ownership.
In 2023, Common Ground Cafe in Hampden closed after its owner learned of a union drive. But just two months later it reopened as a worker cooperative. Thanks to strong community support and BRED’s help, 17 workers came back as owners, with pay up as much as 47%. They set their own wages, hours, and policies, and split the profits.
Common Ground was not a one-off. BRED has transitioned nine businesses to worker ownership in as many years, Lerman said. Its conversions have preserved 149 jobs and created more than 50. It has done that on more than $5 million in financing, repaid out of business profits rather than personal collateral, according to the organization. Nearly half of the worker-owners across those conversions are Black. That matters in a city where Black neighborhoods received nearly $2 billion dollars less in small business loans from 2013-2023, a recent Johns Hopkins study found.
For a decade, Baltimore’s cooperative sector grew without money from the city or major institutions, even as other cities like New York and Cleveland spent millions a year on theirs. That changed on June 24, when the City Council committed $250,000 to BRED to expand cooperative conversions, the first time the city has funded the work.
“Cooperative ownership is one of the most powerful tools we have for keeping beloved Baltimore businesses open and locally owned,” City Council President Zeke Cohen said in announcing the allocation.
That funding is still months away, but Lerman said the city’s backing has already shifted how owners hear the pitch.
“Whereas five years ago we struggled to convince owners that selling to their workers was a viable option for succession planning, this new partnership with the city adds both critical resources and legitimacy,” she said.
Successful conversions require owners to be at the table, but so far, this hasn’t happened. The workers said every move by the former owners — including the rapid removal of signage and clearing out of the shop the day after it closed — “affirmed all of our reasons for organizing.” They are “putting that chapter behind us” and remain focused on building toward a cooperative future with BRED, they said in a statement.
In the meantime, the workers are turning to pop-up events to support themselves and keep fundraising for the group’s eight members. The first is planned for August 7, when they’ll join the Baltimore Coffee Collective’s First Friday Latte Art Throwdown at the Hotel Revival in Mount Vernon, selling stickers, prints, ceramics, baked goods, and limited-edition staff posters, along with their take on a customer-favorite drink.
Baby’s on Fire’s workers are still absorbing what the closure means for themselves and for the neighborhood.
Baby’s sat in what is still considered Baltimore’s queer neighborhood, down the street from the former sites of the Hippo and Old Major. One is a CVS now.
“We [were] one of very few sort of informal queer spaces that remained in the neighborhood,” said Nora Krause, the cafe’s baker. With the closure, Krause lost half her income. But her first thought when the notice came was not her paycheck. The shop also ran a pay-it-forward program that let customers buy meals for homeless neighbors, who used it as a place to sit or to get out of the heat.
“How can we make sure that our homeless neighbors that rely on this space are safe in the coming weeks?” she said. “This isn’t just a cafe.”
Among those neighbors is DJ, a regular who relied on the cafe’s pay-it-forward Community Card program to rest, charge his phone, and get a meal, the workers said in a July 24 post. The group said it continues to raise money for DJ and other unhoused regulars affected by the closure.
That’s what Baby’s on Fire was: not just a cafe, but a refuge for workers and neighbors alike. Now the community is answering with donations and support as the workers move forward.
“What this has shown us is that we have far more support than we ever could have imagined, and neither we nor the community will accept a total loss of Baby’s,” Khan said.
The workers don’t know how long a co-op conversion would take, or whether they can pull it off at all. Much depends on whether they can build something new with BRED, since the original owners have gone silent.
“I don’t think this is the end,” Khan said, “I believe this is the beginning of a new chapter that will create a Baby’s that’s not just more sustainable, but thriving.”
As of July 27, the GoFundMe had brought in $19,421 of a $21,000 goal.