Employee Ownership Gives Workers Voice Before It Builds Wealth

Matt Helmer framed employee ownership through a line from Studs Terkel’s Working: work as “a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread,” for recognition as well as cash, and for “a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” For Helmer, the practical test of employee ownership is whether it can join those two things: material participation in the enterprise and a different relationship to the work itself.

The three employee owners on stage came from different structures: Equal Exchange, a mature worker-owned cooperative; Advisors for Change, a newer and fully remote worker cooperative; and Lewis Tree Services, a large ESOP. Across those models, they described ownership less as a narrow financial instrument than as a change in agency.

Krystal Thompson, a worker owner at Advisors for Change, said people often associate ownership with equity, “who doesn’t like that,” but the first change for her was not financial. “It changed my mindset well before it changed my financials,” she said. Thompson had been involved in her firm’s transition into worker ownership: feasibility studies, the transition team, the sale agreement, bylaws, service as inaugural vice president of the board of directors, and later leadership of the membership committee. The effect, she said, was that she could see how decisions were made and where her own voice could fit.

Nicole Vitello described Equal Exchange as a long-running example of worker ownership at scale. The company is a worker-owned cooperative with about 120 worker owners, celebrating its 40th anniversary. It manufactures coffee, is nationally distributed, operates globally, and has about $80 million in business. Its worker owners include production-line employees, roasters, packaging workers, warehouse workers, salespeople, senior leaders, and the president and founder. The structure is one member, one vote; workers serve on the board; they own the company; and investments, decisions, and risks are taken collectively.

Vitello’s own route into the company shaped how she understood ownership. She had spent 10 years as an organic farmer in Rhode Island and said the farm business was successful but could not continue because of equity, capital, land, and related constraints. When she came to Equal Exchange as a sales representative, she did not know that worker-owned cooperatives existed in manufacturing or in global trade with small farmers. Over time, she became a vice president. The significance of Equal Exchange, in her account, is that ownership, investment, retirement, healthcare, and equity can be linked across the supply chain: from the farmer who grows the coffee to the person who drinks it.

Charlie Arrindell described Lewis Tree Services in a different ownership form: an ESOP. The company, one of the largest vegetation management companies in the country, trims near power lines to help keep the power grid reliable. Lewis has been an ESOP for more than 26 years and has more than 4,000 employees across the country. Arrindell, a division manager for the Connecticut region, joined 14 years earlier between careers, after a friend urged him to look at the company’s culture, people, and ESOP.

For Arrindell, ownership meant being able to “live the American Dream”: provide for his family, develop others, succeed in business, and help the community. He emphasized that profit sharing at Lewis is not just individual accumulation. Employees understand their contributions as helping themselves, the company, and the people around them. “Our success will ultimately lead to their success as well,” he said.

Matt Helmer argued that the “secret sauce” of employee ownership is not only shared profit or shared equity, but the culture that surrounds it. In the accounts from Equal Exchange, Advisors for Change, and Lewis Tree, ownership required training people to understand the business, opening up information that is usually reserved for managers, and creating habits of participation that were not assumed to exist automatically.

At Equal Exchange, Nicole Vitello said new hires enter a worker-owner track during their first year. They go through a cooperative curriculum, work with a mentor, and learn what it means to become a co-owner of an $80 million business. That includes reading a balance sheet, understanding financials, learning what worker-owner votes mean, and seeing how board service works. New worker owners attend worker-owner meetings, observe board meetings, and participate in a system where the company’s financials, business decisions, and risks are transparent and discussed.

That does not mean every decision is made by the cooperative as a whole. Vitello was explicit that Equal Exchange has a management structure and that “not everything is decided by a co-op,” because that would be impossible. The cooperative structure and the management structure coexist: workers own the company, elect peers to the board, and participate in a transparent governance system, while teams and managers still make many operating decisions.

The resulting culture is not only formal governance. Vitello described a workplace where production workers from Cape Verde, local warehouse employees, sales staff, founders, new workers, and long-tenured employees share a physical environment, including a communal kitchen. She has been at the company nearly 20 years and said her own job moved from sales to running the produce business and importing fresh bananas from Ecuador, then into the leadership team. The point was not that everyone follows a linear ladder from warehouse to executive role. Rather, worker ownership creates multiple ways to grow: through lateral moves, moves across offices, board service, committees, mentorship, and work with cooperative businesses that have merged into Equal Exchange’s ecosystem.

Vitello also pushed back on the idea that cooperatives are necessarily conservative because many people are involved in decisions. In her view, shared ownership brings ideas forward, creates pressure to grow and change, and enables risk-taking because workers control the business and its capital.

At Advisors for Change, Krystal Thompson described a younger and smaller cooperative. The firm had been a worker cooperative for two years, had about 20 people including a new hire, and operated fully remotely. Thompson said conversion did not instantly turn everyone into an active participant who understood everything. Preparing people to become worker owners was a process, not a title. It involved transparency, business education, emotional adjustment, and financial learning.

She used a sports analogy: the organization has a coach and a game plan, but the worker owners have to know their role, see themselves in the plan, and understand what they need to do to drive success. The transition, she said, forced more communication about gaps in understanding and gave people practice using their voice. The most immediate change was empowerment: people who previously attended meetings just to do what they needed to do began speaking up, offering ideas, and seeing some of those ideas acted on.

At Lewis Tree, Charlie Arrindell described culture through language and information flow. Helmer noted that in prior conversations, Arrindell had said “I” is rarely used at Lewis Tree; the more common words are “we” and “us.” Arrindell added that the company also rarely uses “they.” In his framing, there is no distant “they” in a corporate structure reaping the benefits of field labor. The benefits are invested back into the people doing the work.

Lewis is also, Arrindell said, a minority-owned company. He connected that fact to the ESOP’s ability to serve a community that is often underserved. The company relies heavily on manual labor, and Arrindell said people in manual labor often try to keep every penny and spend locally or in the moment, rather than thinking 10, 20, or 30 years ahead. The ESOP gives them a future, he said, without requiring them to set aside extra money they may not have.

Lewis operates across more than 30 states, so culture cannot depend on everyone being in the same place. Arrindell said one operating principle is “improvement-mindedness”: always asking how to improve local operations and the corporation’s broader processes. The point is financial as well as operational. State of the Company meetings, leadership gatherings, Teams calls, local visits, and shared balance sheets and profit-and-loss statements are part of how the company aligns workers around that idea.

Nicole Vitello made the strongest case that employee ownership should not be understood only at the boundary of a single company. Equal Exchange imports coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, bananas, avocados, and other products globally. According to Vitello, all of those products are sourced from small farmer cooperatives. The farmers own their farms, but they are also members of cooperative businesses that may handle exporting, quality control, certifications, accounting, and related functions.

That structure matters because individual small farmers may not have enough volume to access export markets alone. A cooperative can aggregate products, create business infrastructure in the community, and support a second tier of local jobs: accountants, certification specialists, technical staff, and others who understand the farming business and can help navigate global supply chains, commodity pricing, and fair trade premiums. Vitello argued that those functions do not have to be exported to an outside company.

Equal Exchange then becomes the importer, manufacturer, and seller within a larger ownership chain. In Vitello’s description, ownership can exist at the source through farmer cooperatives, in import and manufacturing through Equal Exchange, and at the retail or consumer end through independent, family-owned stores or consumer-owned food co-ops.

The distinction she drew was between a cooperative supply chain and a conventional one in which a major food corporation pushes down margins for shareholders, forcing pressure back through the chain onto farmers. Equal Exchange, she said, can be profitable not by forcing farmers or others to take less, but by cutting out middlemen and operating efficiently. She connected that to consumer awareness about grocery prices: buyers want to know where their money is going, and a transparent supply chain can link spending decisions to farmer-owned, worker-owned, and community-owned businesses.

Krystal Thompson made a parallel argument from the service side. Advisors for Change helps nonprofits transform their financial management systems so they can eventually own and operate those systems themselves. The firm does not hold partners “in perpetuity,” she said; it helps build sustainable internal capacity. Worker ownership sharpened that accountability because Advisors for Change had to practice internally the same principles it advises clients to adopt. The transition meant “not only talking the talk but walking the walk.”

For Thompson, the reach of ownership is broader than any one sector. Advisors for Change serves nonprofit communities, and if the firm can sustain itself while teaching nonprofits to build sustainable systems, the effects reach those organizations’ missions and communities. She emphasized that worker ownership applies across accounting, agriculture, technical services, and other fields, and that participating in more employee-ownership conversations had expanded her sense of what was possible.

Matt Helmer pointed to a pattern he sees in employee-owned companies: a “grow your own” strategy. In his view, worker-owned companies tend to be invested in training, development, and promotion. He referred to research from the ESOP Association suggesting that ESOPs train workers at a higher rate than ordinary companies do, then asked how Lewis Tree thinks about developing and retaining people.

Charlie Arrindell said the ESOP is a major factor in retention. In vegetation management and other manual-labor industries, workers may quickly move to a competitor that wins a contract or offers slightly higher pay. The ESOP gives Lewis a reason for people to stay, and that in turn makes the company more confident about spending money to train them. He cited employees who have been with the company for decades, including people under him with more than 30 years at Lewis.

The company’s vision, Arrindell said, is to grow from within, use employees’ experience and talent, and help them move beyond what they imagined possible. People coming from field roles may not have thought they would ever be in management or at the corporate office. Training has made that happen.

At Equal Exchange, Nicole Vitello emphasized development through governance as well as job progression. Serving on the board, joining committees, learning financials, mentoring newer workers, and moving between divisions all become part of the work of ownership. The system demands preparation: if workers are going to own the company and govern it, they need the tools to understand it.

At Advisors for Change, Krystal Thompson emphasized development as confidence and voice. The transition created space for people to admit what they did not understand, learn how the business worked, and speak up. Professional development at the firm also extends beyond narrowly job-relevant topics, she said, giving people more confidence to go into their communities and explain both the company’s work and employee ownership itself.

Ownership culture is harder to sustain when workers do not share the same job, schedule, workplace, or geography. Each company had to solve a different problem of distance.

Advisors for Change is fully remote, with workers spread across the country. Krystal Thompson said it can be difficult to create a unified vision among people in different places. The firm’s answer, in her description, is intentional communication, professional development, and a shared accountability to its mission and clients. Because the company works with nonprofits that can affect large numbers of people, she sees exposure to employee ownership as part of its community role. Conversations with nonprofit leaders, whether they run a 19-person firm considering succession or a much larger organization, can help others see where ownership might fit.

Equal Exchange is national and increasingly international, with locations in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Portland, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Nicole Vitello said that raises practical questions about meetings, inclusion, and who can actually participate. A remote worker at home has different flexibility than a production-line worker, a warehouse employee, or a direct-store-delivery driver. The company has to think about timing, coverage, whether someone can safely pull over and join a meeting from a car, and how policies affect people in very different roles.

The company’s community practices reflected that awareness. Vitello said Equal Exchange belongs to national cooperative and organic-policy organizations, including the United Federation of Worker Cooperatives and the National Organic Coalition. During Covid, worker owners developed “Covid hours” so people could be with family or friends or support others. The company later carried that idea into “Civic Engagement hours”: time intended for workers to engage in their communities, whether taking someone to the polls, volunteering at a church or congregation, working at a food bank, or participating in some other local activity. The company does not prescribe the activity, she said, but creates space for engagement and experimentation.

Lewis Tree’s distance problem is different: thousands of employees across more than 30 states, many in field work. Charlie Arrindell described the answer as repeated transparency and repeated contact: State of the Company meetings, calls, local visits, financial sharing, and a language of “we” rather than “they.” The culture depends on connecting field decisions to the ESOP and to the idea that improvements accrue back to employees’ retirement.

Employee ownership was presented as one answer to several pressures at once: business succession, retirement insecurity, community attachment, and social disconnection.

Nicole Vitello connected employee ownership to the local role of small and family-owned businesses. She argued that it is difficult to ask a large national retailer to support a local Little League team in the way local businesses once did. As she sees it, many small businesses and family-owned businesses are approaching another transition as owners retire without strong plans for succession, while the cost of capital and expectations for returns have made business transfer harder. In that context, she presented employee-owned and cooperatively owned models as a way for some small and medium-sized businesses to remain rooted in communities while gaining some economies of scale for the people involved.

Vitello also linked that idea to Equal Exchange’s own strategy: using capital built over 40 years to help other businesses in its network survive and gain scale. The practical ethic, as she put it through a family phrase, was to “put your money where your mouth is.”

Krystal Thompson gave the clearest closing reflection on meaning and connection. She said employee ownership can rebuild connection by giving people meaning in their work. People want more than a paycheck, she said. They want voice, flexibility, autonomy, and a sense of impact. When people feel connected to the work, they “show up differently”: they are present, ask questions, engage, and empower others to engage in their communities.

From Buffalo, New York, Thompson said independence is often imagined as either working for yourself or becoming a professional athlete. Employee ownership offers a different path: a person can work within someone else’s vision and still share in it. It is hard, she said, to enter a workplace and see a future inside another person’s vision; ownership gives workers a voice in the future they are building together.

Charlie Arrindell returned to retirement. Referencing earlier remarks about Social Security possibly running out, he said many retirees are still working because they were not set up for success when they had the opportunity. An ESOP, in his view, can allow workers to retire, leave the job market, and become self-sustaining even if Social Security is not there for them.