A Fair Slice

Can co-ops save restaurants?

- By Maddie Oatman

The Lockdowns last March nearly spelled doom for Joe Squared, a pizzeria and music venue in Baltimore’s arts district. The popular eatery already had some outstanding debts from a recent expansion; all of a sudden it had to curtail its hours and shut its dining room. General Manager Okan ArabacioÄŸlu recalls frantically trying to make the numbers work with owner Joe Edwardsen, but they decided they couldn’t sacrifice the quality of the coal-fired pizza or the living wage they paid employees. “So at that point,” ArabacioÄŸlu says, “we were like, let’s wrap it up.” Joe’s closed its doors for the next nine months.

The two men continued to brainstorm about what to do next. Edwardsen was considering getting out of the restaurant industry to spend more time with his family. Joe’s had previously been located across from Red Emma’s, a worker-owned bookstore and cafe, which got them thinking: What if Edwardsen passed on the restaurant to his workers? The restructuring would take the load off a sole proprietor, and each worker-owner would be more invested in the business’s well-being. A 2016 meta-analysis of more than 100 studies across several countries linked employee ownership to better productivity, organizational stability, and business survival. In times of crisis, co-ops have been shown to be more resilient than traditional enterprises and less likely to lay off workers.