How Workers Call The Shots At This West Village Bar

WEST VILLAGE, NY — Do you spend hours thinking about all the ways you'd be better at your bosses' job than your boss? Have we got a West Village bar for you.

The new worker-owned bar Donna at 7 Cornelia St. near Sixth Avenue (steps from Taylor Swift's temporary abode) is bringing coop-style industry to the booze business.

These workers did not buy Donna because they hated their former boss — he's still working as a kind-of advisor for them — but they hope their efforts will make the industry more sustainable for all.

"In the hospitality industry, a lot of businesses never extend hospitality to their own workers," said bar manager Kitty Bernardo, Donna's first hired employee.

If all goes well, she'll be the bar's fifth worker-owner.

Shaking Things Up

Donna first opened in Williamsburg in 2012 to high regard, and survived the worst days of the pandemic only to be told at the end of 2020 that its lease wouldn't be renewed.

That March, former owner and boss Lief Huckman sent workers an intriguing email, said Lauren Ruiz, one of four current worker-owners.

"We got an email that was like: 'Hey, who would be interested in opening up Donna as a worker-owned cooperative?'" said Ruiz. "It was super interesting."

Huckman had attended a city program called Owners 2 Owners, which pitches businesses on novel means of keeping employees employed.

Ruiz summed up the program's message: "'Hey, owners, don't close your shop — sell it to your workers.'"

From there, Huckman connected with lender The Working World, a Community Development Financial Institution that works with both start-up worker co-ops and transitioning ownership of existing business towards a worker cooperative model — the ladder being vastly more common.

Which is how it happened with Donna.

The Working World describes what they do as "non-extractive finance," said Donna's project manager Alice Maggio.

"We lend based on the business plan and social mission as opposed to collateral," Maggio said. "It's a model of shared incentives."

Donna is the first cocktail bar Working World has worked with — most cooperatives they help fund are typically business-to-business industries — "but it's not all that different," said Maggio.

Ruiz said that because Huckman had already ran such a transparent and open business at the Brooklyn Donna, "it felt natural" when it was time to transition to a worker-owned cooperative.

Manhattan With A Twist

Ruiz and a handful of colleagues got to work.

They held pop-ups around Brooklyn, began looking for Donna's new home and kept chugging at other jobs to pay the bills.

"It was a long process," Ruiz said, "a lot of unpaid work to open the space."

During some of their busier pop-ups that summer, Ruiz says they were putting in 50 hours each week towards their worker-owned dream.

But finding a new spot was taking forever.

"It was a pain in the a--," she said.

A few people who signed on at first dropped out. Those who remained discovered that they were priced out of Brooklyn.

But finally after months and months of searching, a spot opened up in a cozy up-and-coming neighborhood filled with charm: the West Village.

They signed the lease on the Cornelia Street space, the former home of Aussie-style Southeast Asian bar Uncle Chop Chop.

"It just kind of fell into our laps," Ruiz said.

Bernardo, meanwhile, liked the location for the community it offered.

"This street is so tiny that you really get to know all your neighbors," Bernardo said.

Now Donna's worker-owners can say "I rent a place on Cornelia Street," just like Taylor Swift, who once rented a townhouse a few doors down that was recently listed for $18 million.

But some neighbors — namely a number of established spots offering tacos steps away — forced a change in Donna's menu.

In the spirit of cooperation, collaboration and market research, out went the tacos from the Brooklyn menu and in came the pupusas, inspired by one of Donna's worker-owner who is Salvadorian.

And behind the bar, Bernardo brought her own Filipino flair for her drinks program, creating what she calls a "post-colonial" tropical cocktail bar, featuring wines and spirits from other worker coops.

"Different people have different approaches and backgrounds," said Bernardo. "And so seeing how we've been able to collaborate together and bring out our strengths has been really cool to put into this model. "

Doing The Opposite

New York City's bar industry is notoriously grinding, brutal and precarious for its workers, Ruiz said, something her and Bernardo know first hand.

Before Donna, they had worked together at an unnamed Brooklyn restaurant that they described as "high volume," and "very big on Instagram."

Ruiz, who was also once a paralegal for a labor attorney, discovered that the owners were stealing their tips. After she raised the alarm, a manager quit in protest, Ruiz said.

"We were trying to get management to understand that we love working here, we love each other, we love being part of this thing," Bernardo said, "but we just didn't feel supported or taken care of at all. We're working all these hours, bringing in multi-millions of dollars so they could expand, but we never saw any of those rewards. And that's not sustainable."

At lunch one day, Ruiz and Bernardo pledged if they every had the chance, they would do everything opposite.

Those endemic issues of the hospitality industry, like wage theft, unpredictable schedules and equity all intensified during the pandemic.

"The good hospitality workers pivoted away from hospitality work during the pandemic," Ruiz said. "If you can't keep your workers, then you're kind of in a bit of a lurch."

Calling The Shots

Donna's worker-owners hope that co-ownership will alleviate some of that stress.

But isn't cooperation stressful, too?

Does a worker-owned cooperative cocktail bar mean they now require four-hour subcommittee meetings on where to put the coasters?

Ruiz says that actually, it's the opposite.

All new workers — chosen with careful deliberation — will eventually have the opportunity to become worker-owners, which means they have a vested interest in working well.

Workers can be afforded much more autonomy in day-to-day decisions, since there is a clear shared interest and stake in success.

Trust, Ruiz said, is a huge component of their business.

But there will be longer monthly coop board meetings where they discuss larger business and financial decisions — all of which will require at least three-quarters of the worker-owners to agree to any decisions.

"We don't need a quorum to order more toilet paper," Ruiz said, or for small tweaks to the menu and other day-today decisions.

But larger changes — like maybe to a main dish that's really popular — are decided at weekly meetings with the five worker-owners and the 11 employees.

"We have a whole system, an extensive decision-making matrix," Ruiz said, which gives them guidelines to their democratic governance. "It's kind of a misconception with cooperatives that it's so bureaucratic and filled with red tape," she said.

Donna owners' ideal is that by maintaining this balance of power, they will do more than survive — they'll all thrive together.

The ultimate goal is to show other interested bar workers what business could be like if they called the shots.

"We want to be an example," Ruiz said. "And hopefully usher in a new format for hospitality, because this format addresses a lot of things."