The economic reality of this company—it is not, in truth, a “worker-owned brewery” as advertised. There are 4-5 worker-owners who started the company, who comprise the CEO and management in the kitchen, the brewery, and front of the house. The considerable majority of actual, working employees are required to “audition” to be worker-owners, for a year—meaning, you work there for a year, with a regular hourly wage, and if you can manage the right level of sucking-up to the worker-owner-management over that time, you get to buy a share in the company. If you can’t stomach the sucking-up requirement, and/or if you are the one female hired to work in the kitchen, they’ll lay you off at the first opportunity, to pay (in my case) for the cost of a new mixer after the used fire-hazard mixer they initially outfitted the kitchen with imploded. And, you won’t have any recourse to union representation, as Democracy Brewing is essentially about using the history of American labor as a thematic source for naming beers, and fails in reality to even adequately protect its hourly workers. Getting laid off there is startlingly similar to getting laid off by any soulless corporate entity—the net effect for a worker is the same, as there’s no safety net and you just have to circulate your resume and start over.
I wanted to love this company, and I really believed in its ethos. But very little actually backs this ethos in terms of actual, non-exploitative politics towards female BOH workers—it’s all talk, local news coverage and strategic photo ops. I began there as one of two full-time bakers. There was more than enough full-time baking work for two people. Yet I was told to cram 40 hours of baking into 30, and cover line cook work for the rest of my time. I did this. Then, the only industrial mixer we had broke, and I brought in my home KitchenAid to handle the overload while the head chef negotiated the cost of a new mixer. I was fired, after preliminary performance reviews that indicated I was doing really well, just after making our weekly bread pars with my home mixer.
There’s other stuff too—the fact of the matter is, “democracy” as a concept is pretty alien to how most kitchens are run. Take a peek into any kitchen—you’ll probably notice a really obvious color divide, with people of color washing dishes and doing prep, and mostly white men working the line and making menu decisions. The head chef had a really great habit of speaking only to the male baker when he wanted to communicate any pertinent information about the kitchen’s bake needs. For a place with “Suffragette” Pale Ales, this seems more than a little hypocritical
