Madison Aument: For 91.9 KVCR News, I’m Madison Aument, and this is Economics IE.
If you live in Redlands, you may have been to Slow Bloom Coffee. The shop is a worker-owned cooperative that was born out of a failed union drive. Kelley Bader is a founding member of Slow Bloom, the co-op’s former board president, and he now manages a program at the Inland Empire Labor Institute to help others form co-ops.
Madison Aument: Can you just give a rundown of how Slow Bloom came into existence?
Kelley Bader: Slow Bloom began as actually a union drive at a coffee chain in the Inland Empire called Augie’s. We actually started to form a labor union. And after we formed our labor union, our previous employers did not want to negotiate with us, and so they fired everybody, and then they closed the business as retaliation. In the wake of all of the lost jobs, and in the wake of the union drive going so poorly, we pivoted to a co-op.
Madison Aument: My next question actually is, how did you guys go from trying to unionize to deciding that you wanted to build a co-op? And what was that process like?
Kelley Bader: It became really apparent that they weren’t going to open the business back up, and so we decided to pivot and open a co-op to try to recreate as many jobs as we could. But also, a big part of it was that we had so much community support—from the union drive to the closure to supporting us after the closures—that it would have been a letdown, I think, to just walk away. You know, they’re still in it. We should also still be in it, and we should build our co-op.
Madison Aument: I feel like there are more resources for building or starting a union than there are for starting a co-op. How did you create a co-op when you didn’t have, like, a model?
Kelley Bader: Yeah, I mean, without any resources to start the co-op, we just started it the way anybody else would start something that they don’t know how to do—one step at a time. It was a lot of Googling, finding experts who knew about co-ops. We had a really good lender kind of teach us some financial literacy about co-ops. Honestly, I don’t think we really knew how to do the whole co-op thing until a year and a half in.
Madison Aument: Can you describe the kind of structure of a worker co-op?
Kelley Bader: Yeah. The structure of a worker co-op is that the workers—they own and operate the business. Some co-ops, every member of the co-op votes for every decision that happens in the co-op, and then other co-ops can look a lot more like a traditional business, where the leaders are elected by the rest of the members. In every co-op, there are two things that are present: there’s democratic control, and there are economic rights. Everybody in a co-op gets to vote on certain elements of their business, and every member of the co-op has a right to the profits of the business.
Madison Aument: What were some of the challenges initially of starting a co-op, and maybe some of the continuing challenges?
Kelley Bader: Resources are always a big one—like as a co-op, where do you go to get funding? Some of them are a little bit less anticipated, like education about what a co-op is. You know, especially a lot of groups that start co-ops like us don’t begin as business entrepreneurs or experts. We started as workers, and so we don’t come from a background of knowing how to start a business.
Now, on the bright side, as workers, there is a lot of education that we bring. We know how a workplace should function to be really successful. Especially at Slow Bloom, you know, we had all of this expertise in our industry that made us really successful day one. The things that we didn’t know how to do were HR services or employment law. And one of the other challenges too, that’s kind of hard to quantify, is the interpersonal challenges.
Madison Aument: I feel like that is the question a lot of people have—the interpersonal. We’re all governing this business together. You guys have been open three years now. Like, I feel like that would be a roller coaster.
Kelley Bader: It is a roller coaster. And I think for everybody, it is the conversation. I think for a lot of people, it is the biggest challenge. Even when you think it’s gonna be easy because you’re really close friends, sometimes that’s an even bigger challenge. You have to figure out how to formalize your relationships in a professional way when you might have years and years of history, and you suddenly have to figure out how to go from being friends to being business partners.
I think the solution was: How do you write the best policies? How do you manage the system and build the structure so that the relationships inside the structure are healthy and good and flourishing? You really have to learn to avoid relying on unspoken agreements or “this is just how it is.” You really want to get it all written out, and you want to do that through documented conversations, through documented elections and vote processes, and make sure that everything is really sound and transparent and in front of you. Which is hard—like, nobody just acts like that in their life—so it can feel really unnatural until you really learn the value in establishing all of that protocol.
Madison Aument: Join us again next week for part two of my interview with Kelley Bader. Funding for this segment comes from the Nowak family. For KVCR News, I’m Madison Aument.
