Workers at Lamplighter Brewing Company say they feel cautiously optimistic about what the company’s planned ownership shift, announced earlier this week, will mean for them. On Monday, co-owners and co-founders Cayla Marvil and AC Jones said they were transitioning ownership of the company to an employee ownership trust, whose role would be to benefit employees.

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“I’m still learning about it,” said Shane Fuller, who works as a barista at Pepita Coffee, the daytime cafe operation at Lamplighter’s Broadway location. “From what I understand, this seems like a good thing.”

Employees first heard of the plan in an email from Marvil sent on Saturday. She said she and Jones were stepping back from day-to-day business after 10 years and that employee ownership aligned with their values. Employees were invited to participate in staff meetings on Monday at the brewery’s two locations on Broadway and in Cambridge Crossing. Fuller was not able to attend the meetings. He said he was surprised by the announcement, but seemed optimistic. “This seems like a big deal,” he said.

Dan Hennagin, a brewer at the same location, said he felt excited.

“It [seems] like a really cool chance to technically be a brewery owner,” he said. Although the brewery would be owned by a trust, it could still be deemed employee-owned.

In her announcement to staff, Marvil said the owners’ plan is to create a profit-sharing pool, which would be distributed annually to employees who have worked at the company for at least six months and work at least eight hours a week. The first payment is anticipated in March 2027.

The new structure needs approval from the state and the city. “Once these license approvals are complete (anticipated in October), I’m proud, excited, and thrilled to share that Lamplighter will officially transition to 100% employee ownership,” she wrote. “AC and I will remain as advisors and in Board and [Trust Stewardship Committee] seats, but will not be employees, owners, or participate in any future profit-share.”

Hennagin, a brewer with Lamplighter, has worked in local breweries since 2017 and is interested in the profit-sharing benefit. 

“It would be nice to have a little bit of extra money and knowing that that’s going to be a direct result of the work that we put in every day,” he said.

Perhaps having more of a say in operations would be useful, too. After Lamplighter’s head brewer left the company last year, Hennagin said he’s been working with a “leaner” crew.

“It would be nice to have at least one or two more people on the team to help with days off.”

Hennagin has nearly a decade of experience in the industry and noted the breweries he’s worked at have had different structures. “There’s some breweries where the bartender five days a week is the owner of the brewery or the head brewer is behind the bar pulling beers. So it’s hard to have a uniform structure with everything.”

The differences across companies make it difficult to set industry-wide working standards. “There’s obviously some brewers that maybe don’t treat employees as well as others do,” Hennagin said. “From my experience, Lamplighter treats their employees the best and understands their needs and approaches them a lot more directly.”

On the café side, Fuller had similar experiences. He used to work remotely from Lamplighter as an engineer and when he decided to transition out of that role, he thought Pepita Coffee, which is a part of Lamplighter, would be a good place to work.

“It’s honestly changed my life,” he said. “It’s really become a hub for me, and I found a lot of community through it. I really like who I work with, I really like what we make and I really like how connected to the greater Cambridge community we are.”

The news is still fresh, though, and Fuller wants to learn more about what it would mean for him and his colleagues. 

Management transitions 

Director of Operations Canaan Khoury, who stands to become CEO if the process moves forward, said that the trust would be stewarded by a committee of five members to protect the trust’s mission of benefitting employees and handle trust-level decisions like a potential company sale or merger. Alongside the trust would be a board of directors “for strategic, financial, and management oversight” and the brewery’s current leadership team focused on day-to-day operations. 

Although rank-and-file employees could occupy seats on the trust’s stewardship committee, they would not have majority representation. Khoury shared that the trust’s five seats would represent the brewery’s founders, its managers, its executives, its operation staff and its guest experience staff.

Beyond sharing the desire to launch it next March, the details of the profit-sharing pool have not yet been finalized or shared.

Waiting to launch

The announcement was news to most employees, but Marvil said the process to shift to an EOT began in 2022. At the time, the brewery was recovering from COVID lockdowns. And while the owners originally considered other ownership structures like an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, they eventually decided an Employee Ownership Trust was a better fit. However, the transition to an EOT was initially delayed.

“COVID was obviously a really strange period for the industry and truthfully our financials were all over the place,” said Marvil in an interview with Cambridge Day. “We said, ‘Wait a minute, we want stable cash flow, we want consistent profitability because we want to make sure that this is a responsible decision for the company.’ We’ve achieved that over the past few years and decided to go for it [this] January.”

Union complications

At the same time, workers were organizing a unionization effort. In February, they worked with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1445 to file a union election petition with the National Labor Relations Board. And after a successful vote in March to form a union with UFCW, they began negotiating their first contract. 

Union lawyers say they found out about the proposed ownership shift at the same time as employees, and expressed frustration over its timing and their lack of involvement.

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In a letter addressed to Marvil, Alfred Gordon O’Connell, General Counsel for UFCW, Local 1445, opposed the timing of the trust’s launch and asked for bargaining to finish first. Implementing the trust before a contract agreement is reached “amounts to a clear and blatant violation of the National Labor Relations Act,” he wrote.

Responding by phone and over email, Marvil said, “We disagree that this [proposed change in ownership structure] is in violation of labor law … We disagree with the Union’s assertion that those negotiations must be complete prior to the ownership change.”

“There’s no change to the current bargaining unit’s wages or benefits,” she said. “We’ve had a really positive and constructive six months of bargaining with them so the letter came as a surprise.”

In the letter, the lack of union involvement in the trust arrangement was also a contentious point.

“We believe [an Employee Owned Trust] can certainly be a good thing,” added Jack Kenslea, political director of UFCW Local 1445, but “the company has an obligation to negotiate over these terms with us.”

In the letter to Marvil, O’Connell wrote, “…you are literally pushing [employees] into an ownership structure and imposing a Trust document on them that has not been negotiated with their exclusive representative.”

Marvil wrote later in an email to Cambridge Day: “We understand that certain elements of the EOT will need to be negotiated with the Union, and we’ll do so in good faith.”

The National Labor Relations Act, which protects private-sector employees’ right to organize, does not prevent a change in company ownership during contract negotiations. However, anything that unfairly delays bargaining could be considered illegal under the act.

Geoff Gilbert is the Legal and Technical Assistance Director at the Beloved Community Incubator, which provides legal assistance to worker-owned cooperatives in the D.C. metropolitan area. He said that because rank-and-file employees do not have majority representation on the governing bodies under the new plan, there are a number of things that could be put into place legally.

“I can imagine an EOT that creates power for workers to participate in choosing management, creating an evaluation structure and discipline structure, and a way to decide pay ranges or fringe benefits,” he said. “Employees could have formal rights within an EOT, but it’s unclear if that’s included here. That’s what could be discussed with a union.”

Marvil said she and Jones shared the new ownership plan with some of the brewery’s managers earlier to see if they would be comfortable in leadership roles, but that she and Jones were advised to not inform the whole company until they were “quite close to the finish line.”

“It would have been unfortunate to share it with people and have it drag out,” she said. “So we waited until we were ready.”

Although the owners did not ask for feedback from employees or their union beforehand, she said, “there’s no downside for employees, so we would hope employees would want it to be employee-owned. There’s only potential profit sharing, governance and benefits.”

In addition to profit sharing, Gilbert said decision-making power and accountability structures are key forms of power for workers. 

“An EOT and a union both have paths to [guarantee] what formal rights the workers have to shape how they’re impacted in the workplace,” he said. “It could be separate; it could overlap. But putting in plain language what’s happening and how workers are impacted feels like the main thing [to figure out]. 

Looking ahead

What’s on the horizon if this trust is approved?

For Marvil, who has been on parental leave with a six-month-old child, she said she’s ready to focus on family and “taking time to see what’s next.”

Hennagin, who works on the brewing side of the company, is mostly happy to continue doing the work his team excels at. “At the end of the day, beer makes people happy, it brings people together, so getting to have kind of a bigger influence on that is going to be really cool.”

He used to work for Harpoon, whose employee stock ownership plan was a big selling point for the company, he says. If Lamplighter’s ownership shift gets approved, he says “that’s something that’s going to be on our labels.” 

“It’s just something that you don’t see too often and is a really cool way of taking care of the employees and putting more pride in your work.”

And on a personal note, Hennagin admitted he’d be advocating for Lamplighter to brew more lagers.

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