When Prospect Butcher Co. signed a lease in Prospect Heights in October 2020, it was a given that the operation would be worker-owned, said co-founder Greg Brockman. About four years prior, he had attempted to start a butcher cooperative, but it never got off the ground.
“It’s really admirable to do the [the full cooperative method] but people are tired and have a limited amount of free time; they don’t always want to spend it writing bylaws,” said Brockman. Instead, Prospect Butcher Co. is somewhere in the middle. They have taken outside investment, but workers, not investors, are the ones with what's called voting shares about “major” company decisions.
The promise of better working conditions through employee ownership is especially valuable in the post #MeToo era, as Eater reported. Much like unionization, which is also seeing more interest among workers in New York, worker-owned models are not a magic wand fix or guarantee of the longevity of the business. Of course, just because the model aims to provide better working conditions, that doesn’t guarantee that a business will be operating ethically, either.
“That isn’t to stay what we’re doing isn’t capitalism,” he said. Employees are paid $18-22 per hour as the starting wage, with paid vacation, dental, vision, physical therapy, and life insurance; there’s a health discount plan, but they’re working on getting full insurance.
Brockman said he knows it's a daunting task and “having more options that are objectively better and fairer to workers is better than an all-or-nothing approach.” He said he is skeptical of profit-sharing being the main focus in general, but especially in an industry where margins are thin: “The profit is too easy [while evaluation is harder] to manipulate and it disguises the actual benefit of worker-owner which is being required to have your voice heard,” he said, adding of his butcher shop that “I would love it to be everyone’s last job.”
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