In December 2022, workers at Common Ground Cafe in Baltimore started to talk about forming a union. They wanted to address issues of pay equity and workplace discrimination, among others. They hoped their boss would be open to working with them to improve the cafe, which had been a mainstay in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood for over 20 years. Instead, when the boss found out about their union drive in July 2023, he closed the business with less than 12 hours’ notice.
Nik Koski, a Common Ground worker involved in the union campaign, was completely shocked: “We prepare ourselves for the different ways a boss might retaliate, but to actually experience it was something else.” Koski’s co-worker Claud Casquarelli had been working at Common Ground for less than a week when they got a Slack message alerting them of the closure. Casquarelli said the news made their heart sink. But shortly thereafter, Casquarelli was added to a group chat where their co-workers were talking about how to respond.
Building a Campaign
What the Common Ground workers pulled off next is remarkable: They organized a successful campaign to pressure their former boss to agree to a worker buy-out of the business. Today, Common Ground Cafe is open as a worker-owned cooperative, and its workers are unionized with UFCW Local 27. Those of us in the labor movement can learn a lot from how Common Ground workers built power in this seemingly-bleak situation and won collective ownership.
Koski and Casquarelli shared that Common Ground workers were ready to meet the moment when their boss abruptly closed the business because of the connections they had built with co-workers during months of organizing towards a union. The day after the closure, workers gathered at Casquarelli’s apartment. They ordered pizza and talked about how they felt about losing their jobs so suddenly. Then they got to work.
Koski described this night as a first moment of Common Ground workers taking back their power, however they could. They divided and conquered, to both meet the needs of co-workers put in immediate financial precarity by the business closure and to organize toward a long-term plan to get their jobs back. Quickly, the workers coalesced around a mission to reopen that cafe as a worker-owned cooperative.
Pressuring the Boss
Common Ground workers understood that to get their former boss to agree to a buy-out, they needed to create mounting community and media pressure. They immediately created a press release and appeared in interviews to talk about how their boss’s decision hurt both workers and customers. They talked to regulars they had built strong relationships with over the years. They spoke at community events and other coffee shops. They successfully wrestled control of the narrative and created a situation in which the former owner could only redeem his public image by agreeing to sell the business to its workers.
Common Ground workers also turned to worker co-op experts in their community to figure out how to strike a deal. They got advice from folks at Red Emma’s, a worker-owned bookstore, cafe, and community space in Baltimore. They also received technical support from the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED), a non-profit supporting worker co-ops in the greater Baltimore area. Once the former owner agreed to a buy-out, BRED also provided Common Ground workers with a non-extractive loan to purchase the business.
In September 2023, just two months after the initial closure, workers successfully reopened Common Ground as a cooperative. They accomplished this through militant organizing to create public pressure against the former owner and through the support of the wider Baltimore labor and worker co-op movements. Since then, they have been running the business collectively, trusting one another to play to their strengths.
Co-op and a Union
One might think that because the workers succeeded in creating a co-op, they may have lost interest in unionizing. But in December 2024, two years after their initial union drive, Common Ground Cooperative workers voted to join UFCW Local 27. Koski shared that the worker-owners made the decision to join Local 27 because they believed unionization could bring many benefits in conjunction with worker ownership. Worker co-ops offer a way for workers to share in the wealth they generate, but even the best worker co-op is still only one business. A strong, fighting labor union connects workers across businesses and industries. Common Ground workers also understood that joining UFCW would give them access to the union’s pooled resources, such as greater lobbying strength and better healthcare options.
Koski and Casquarelli also shared that since opening the worker co-op, members have faced the challenge of wearing both the hat of “worker” and “owner.” As owners, they want to run a profitable business, but as workers they do not want to exploit themselves to do so. They hope that joining UFCW will give them a structure within which they can protect their interests as workers.
Organizing Lessons
The Common Ground workers’ path to unionization and collective ownership offers a powerful example to the labor movement. First, it demonstrates that even in a worst-case scenario of a business owner closing down shop in response to a union drive, workers still have power, and they can still mount pressure to extract concessions from the boss. Second, their story demonstrates that when workers see ownership as a goal, they can achieve it through the same organizing efforts that create a strong union drive. Finally, the Common Ground workers show us that worker ownership and union representation can work well together at the same business, providing workers with both a structure to share power and profit, and a structure to advocate for themselves as workers and to connect to the wider working class.
