🔒Cooperative ownership: A small Worcester printing company is on the cutting edge of a statewide push toward employee ownership

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a fan of Worx Printing Cooperative. Gov. Maura Healey would like to see more companies like it. Even Sen. Ted Cruz has offered support to similar companies. At its heart, Worx is a printing shop, producing customized T-shirts, hats, and other merchandise for more than 200 clients, generating millions of dollars in revenue each year. What sets it apart from its competitors is an ownership structure governed by one ideal: one worker, one vote. “Every year we help hundreds of organizations with their merchandise, millions of dollars in sales,” Worx Co-Founder Kevin O’Brien said. “We’re finally, after 12 years of fits and starts, finding our plateau and our groove and really focusing on us and how to strengthen our cooperative.” Founded in 2014, Worx is a unionized worker-owned cooperative, where the eight worker-owners all have a stake in the business occupying the upper floor of an unassuming 110-year-old brick manufacturing building south of Downtown Worcester.

As Baby Boomer business owners retire, Massachusetts is pushing employee ownership as a succession strategy, with cooperatives like Worx and employee stock ownership plans, or ESOPs, positioned as alternatives to private equity or closure. In October, Gov. Healey launched the Massachusetts Center for Employee Ownership to help businesses explore and adopt employee-ownership models. “Whenever you visit Worx, everyone's happy to tell you about it,” said Kevin Kuros, interim director of MassCEO. “Most employee-owners are part worker and part evangelist. They love talking about their business. They love talking about what worker ownership has meant to them.” Worx is one of five active worker cooperatives in Central Mass. and several dozen throughout the state, according to MassCEO. The state is home to at least 130 ESOPs; in Central Massachusetts, the largest one is the 2,500-employee Consigli Construction in Milford.

The go-to printer

Worx’s values and its business model has made it the go-to printing partner for a variety of labor unions and pro-labor politicians, including Sen. Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Other clients include Doctors Without Borders, the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and the Service Employees International Union. The company filled 60,000 orders from Warren fans after she announced the end of her presidential campaign in 2020. “There are over 100,000 businesses in the country that represent that they sell custom merchandise,” O’Brien said. “Because we've chosen the highest bar for ethics is one reason people seek us out. To choose the union cooperative model means having to do a lot more work, and people appreciate that. I think they also appreciate having a clean supply chain they can believe in.”

Before he co-founded Worx, O’Brien was involved in SweatX, a 2002 attempt by Ben and Jerry’s Co-Founder Ben Cohen to push against the hollowing out of America’s textile industry and the increasing reliance on overseas child labor. From a small Los Angeles workshop, SweatX attempted to hire experienced garment workers, educate them on running a cooperative, and then sell the business to the workers. SweatX faltered after two years. The support network for worker cooperatives had yet to form, but it had sufficiently grown by the time O’Brien helped form Worx in 2014, he said. Worx was inspired by Mondragon Corp., a 73,000-person group of more than 100 cooperatives based in the autonomous Basque Country of Spain. Mondragon has a footprint in finance, industry, and retail. Worker-owners at Worx are represented by the United Steelworkers union, which had experience with cooperatives after signing a collaboration agreement with Mondragon in 2009. Financial support for Worx’s launch came from the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast, a community development loan program focused on socially-responsible investing. Unlike U.S. Small Business Administration loans, Cooperative Fund did not require personal guaranties. With financial support, O’Brien secured an accountant and began developing a business model. After attending a conference on worker cooperatives in Worcester, O’Brien realized many worker-owned businesses were failing not due to their governing structure, but the lack of a well-researched business plan. “It's so imperative to have a good business model and good market research on what you’re trying to bring to market,” he said.

Support for employee ownership

MassCEO uses Worx as an example of what employee ownership can offer for workers, owners, and the community at large, Kuros said.

“The state's interested because employee-owned businesses have proved over the time, study after study, to be more resilient, to be less likely to lay people off in economic downturn, to have less income disparity between the highest-paid employees and the lowest-paid employees,” he said. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has been a leading advocate of expanding worker-cooperatives and ESOPs, but the idea has received support from Republicans as well. Sen. Cruz (R-TX) introduced legislation in 2024 to help ESOPs retain government contracts. The MassCEO board meets monthly to plan regional symposiums to raise awareness of employee ownership models. The 19-member board includes John Biagioni, president of employee-owned manufacturer Lampin Corp. in Uxbridge, and Veronica Ortiz, director of global customer service for employee-owned manufacturer Web Industries in Marlborough. MassCEO’s latest event was a Feb. 26 webinar on employee-ownership trusts. “You can sell to private equity, you can sell to a competitor, you can just shut down, or you can sell it to your employees,” Kuros said. “More and more folks are really taking a hard look at selling to their employees. It's a wonderful tool for succession planning.” Eric Casey is the managing editor at Worcester Business Journal, who primarily covers the real estate and banking & finance industries.