Threading the Needle

JUST AFTER LUNCH, Eulalia Francisco shows Molly Hemstreet two pieces of white elastic bands, one of them slated for use as waistbands in a batch of woolen children’s pajamas being cut and sewed by the North Carolina-based, worker-owned cooperative Opportunity Threads.

Francisco, who had just two years of formal schooling in her native Guatemala, has noticed the elastic recommended for the sewing job is not the best choice for these pajamas. She recommends another elastic band.

Francisco is “our master sewer,” says Hemstreet, founder of Opportunity Threads, who agrees with Francisco’s suggestion and immediately orders the correct elastic.

After four years together, Francisco and Hemstreet, both worker-owners of Opportunity Threads, have a strong, trust-based working relationship. Hemstreet, an Episcopalian, earns the same wage as the other worker-owners and sees Opportunity Threads as having a spiritual component. “Before I met my husband, I thought deeply about going into cloistered work,” Hemstreet says. “I think of that whole thing of prayer and work, and that’s how I come here every day. We’re not making icons, but we’re doing work, and we do things in a joyful, prayerful way.”

The co-op grew from humble beginnings. After completing degrees in Spanish and Latin American studies at Duke University, Hemstreet moved with her husband, Francisco Risso, back to her hometown of Morganton, N.C., to open a Catholic Worker House. The local chicken plant hires many Latinos, but the work is hard and tedious, the pay not nearly a livable wage. So Hemstreet, with no formal training in business, explored the world of cooperatives, thinking it might be a good path to more meaningful and dignified employment for the Latino community.

The co-op started in a single room with one donated sewing machine, and has since expanded into a textile business that includes six worker-owners, eight candidates for ownership, and eight additional employees who are on salary. “Many of the candidates will be full owners this spring,” Hemstreet says.

Following steady growth over the last few years, Opportunity Threads registered almost $1.2 million in sales in 2016 by cutting and sewing textiles for small companies, making items such as pajamas, dog collars, T-shirts, tote bags and—the co-op’s specialty—blankets that create a quilt-like patchwork of a person’s T-shirt collection.

The starting wage is $11 an hour, with frequent opportunities for overtime at time-and-a-half—very good wages for Burke County, which sits in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains about 100 miles east of the Tennessee border. Worker-owners earn between $16 and $17 per hour, plus bonuses.

The election of Donald Trump sent a chill throughout the U.S. immigrant community as people braced for anti-immigrant policies that the president now has implemented. At Opportunity Threads, Hemstreet says that some things are in a holding pattern as the co-op waits to see what might happen. Some co-op workers are deferring life decisions, such as buying homes, in response to Trump’s actions.

“I think our dreams are getting deferred,” says Hemstreet, who was born and raised in Burke County. “Before people are making these long-term decisions, I think they want to understand what the environment will be in terms of politics.”

‘There’s no Walmart taking a cut’

Eulalia Francisco, a mother of five who immigrated to the U.S. in 1995, already owns her own home, thanks to her job at Opportunity Threads. Her daughter also works there, and another daughter attends a local community college. Francisco’s family and her husband’s family are part of a large enclave of Guatemalans who have settled in Morganton, many of whom work at the local chicken plant.

Francisco says that working in the co-op changes people’s lives. In other jobs, employees are not equal with owners and managers, she says. At Opportunity, she says, she has “a voice in the way things are managed.” She adds, “At the co-op you feel a desire to work, to be able to get things done. It’s a lot of responsibility.”

Last year, the co-op moved to its third location, a 10,000-square-foot warehouse-like building that has enough room for approximately 40 sewing machines, fabric storage, work tables, offices, and other machinery, including three “clicker presses,” specialty machines that cut out the front portion of T-shirts that are used to make the quilt-like blankets that are Opportunity’s biggest revenue-maker.

The T-shirt blankets, which are sold via the internet by a Massachusetts company called Project Repat, are cut and sewn entirely by Opportunity Threads, with three workers using the clicker presses to cut out as many as 3,000 shirts a day. The co-op holds the contract for all orders from the southern half of the United States.

While the blankets account for most of its sales, Hemstreet says Project Repat’s owners “are really masters at marketing,” and the project keeps expanding. At the height of the Christmas season, Opportunity can produce as many as 800 blankets a week, with workers on the job seven days a week, earning both overtime pay and a bonus that Project Repat gave to Opportunity at the end of the year.

Another benefit of the blankets is “it’s very non-off-shoreable work,” Hemstreet says. “Nobody’s going to send their T-shirts to China to have them made into a blanket.” In addition, all of the T-shirt remnants are recycled, and the fleece used as a backing for the blankets is made from 100-percent-recycled plastic water bottles.

Opportunity workers have gotten the blanket-making “down to a science,” Hemstreet says. “Our error rate is .04 percent; we have a very small error rate on a very complex kind of process.” High quality products have become the co-op’s hallmark, and they have no trouble finding enough business to stay busy. “At this point the work comes to us,” Hemstreet says. “We have people that call us every single day asking to work with us.”

Choosing workers who might become owners has been hit and miss, because having the skill to operate a sewing machine is just one component of a good worker and potential owner, according to Hemstreet. Opportunity tries to identify people with good problem-solving skills, who are collaborative, good at working with people on a team, who accept responsibility for their mistakes, who “don’t stir up trouble, no drama,” and “who can self-manage,” Hemstreet says. “We set very high standards for people. What we found is, a skill can be taught. It’s much harder to teach the mindset that’s collaborative and participatory.”

Much of the co-op’s productivity success is achieved by workers who self-manage how they use their time. Hourly accounts of production in the shop are recorded in ledgers, which are used to compute “our costs per minute,” Hemstreet says. “If somebody’s meeting their quantitative-production goals, then we’re not losing money.”

Workers who cannot keep up their production quota will often spend extra time learning ways to improve their skills. “We know our costs per minute, so we won’t take a contract if it’s not profitable,” Hemstreet says. Opportunity Threads has a good profit margin because “there’s no middle person. There’s no Walmart that’s going to take 85 percent.”

Stuffed animals out of socks

Santos Gonon, 34, immigrated to the United States 12 years ago, leaving his wife and two children behind. After four years at Opportunity Threads, he is a worker-owner who has bought his family a home in Guatemala.

Many people leave their country “out of necessity and poverty to come here,” Gonon says, as Hemstreet interprets. After stints working at the chicken plant and a furniture factory, Gonon says he’s thankful for his job at Opportunity. “I trust in God; everything comes from God,” he says. Both Francisco and Gonon are active members of St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church in Morganton, a parish that has forged strong ties with the Latino community and supports Opportunity Threads. Gonon says that while he is very sad not to be able to see his family in person, “I’m also happy because I’m able to help them have a good life there.” He hopes to be able to see his family soon.

Most of Opportunity’s customers appreciate the fact that workers earn a just wage in the co-op system, have a chance to buy in, and treat one another with dignity. Project Repat’s advertising brochure says, “Each worker at Opportunity Threads is part of a collaborative working model, where each employee adds input to the production process and has the opportunity to earn an ownership stake in the company.”

Bená Burda is the founder and president of Michigan-based Maggie’s Organics, the clothing company that gave Opportunity Threads its first contract in 2008 to make stuffed animals out of socks. Hemstreet met Burda at a co-op workshop, and they’ve been partners ever since.

“We’re absolutely thrilled with their progress both as a company and as a supplier,” Burda says. “We started with a little stuffed animal project back in 2008, and their ability to grow within that project was very impressive.” Burda visited Opportunity Threads in January. “Every time we go down there, I’m more excited with the progress and the hope I see, and the difference it’s made in the lives of the workers,” Burda says.

Giving back

Hemstreet says the worker-owners have dreams of expanding, including the development of some of its own products that will increase the co-op’s profit margin. “I think we’d be great at about 40 workers,” she says, “because I think we’d still be small enough where we could know everyone, but be big enough to produce basically anything in the world at any quantity.”

Because they use a “limited liability company” model that allows for worker-ownership, instead of a not-for-profit model, which does not, it was initially difficult for Opportunity to get start-up grants. That’s where the Catholic Campaign for Human Development stepped up to the plate.

“It’s very hard to get funding,” Hemstreet says. “But the Catholic Church, through Campaign for Human Development, is one of the only groups that will fund—at a substantial level—a cooperative.” Three CCHD grants totaling more than $100,000 helped the co-op become self-sufficient in short order. After those CCHD grants “we were profitable and on our own,” Hemstreet says. “Now we need nothing; we create our own profit.”

Thanks to record sales in 2016, Opportunity Threads workers also gave back in the form of charitable donations, including a $2,000 gift to St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church, which has supported the co-op and is the parish home to many of its workers, as well as donations to a local public school. The co-op is also starting a nonprofit that will support workers in Guatemala, the native country of many Opportunity workers.

Hemstreet says her most important work is to pass on her skills to the other owners so Opportunity Threads can grow and prosper without her. “As people of privilege our job is to be deeply in solidarity with people, and I think this is a good example of being in solidarity,” she says.

“I have developed a real aversion to charity. I think what we have to look for are true structural, radical ways to do things. I think it’s radical to carve out truly just economic models, to carve out new and creative economic ways for people to work with fairness and dignity.”