Opened in 2003, the bakery is one of five independently operating worker-owned sister bakeries serving up coffee, sweet and savory pastries, and their signature daily pizza and soups. During their year of closure, the Emeryville Arizmendi’s 16 baker-owners, ranging from two to 17 years in tenure, met monthly to plot their return. During that process, they were able to pay themselves using funds from the business’s savings and insurance, as well as a GoFundMe campaign that raised almost $14,000.
“If this would’ve happened to another bakery, it just would’ve been over with. Since this is our bakery and that was our money, we were able to make decisions on what we wanted to do with it,” Guion says. “It wasn’t just one person [saying] ‘Okay, that’s the end of the bakery, we’re not going to pay them.’”
The owners also decided to take this opportunity to renovate the bakery. “We all made the floor plan ourselves,” Guion explains. “We were able to say what we wanted to see changed. Everyone’s input got heard.” Part of the renovations include a brand new oven, a new customer area that includes a shallow bar wide enough for coffee and pastries, and new pastry cases.
In neighboring Berkeley and across the bridge in San Francisco, workers at Tartine Bakery outputs have been organizing to unionize across the bakery’s four locations. Partly citing the Bay Area’s ever-increasing cost of living, Tartine’s employees are hoping to stabilize their employment at the popular bakery chain where, from their standpoint, staff retention hasn’t been a priority. The employees demands and their request for a union has been declined by Tartine management who have recently hired prominent union-busting firm, Cruz and Associates.
