By Natalie Yahr Oct 9, 2024
Immediately after workers at Madison screen printing company Crushin’ It Apparel voted unanimously to be represented by a union, their boss announced he’d shut down that part of the business.
For Juana Montes and her nephew, Leonel Aguilar, the closure cost them their jobs. But it wasn’t long before the two started talking about opening their own business.
They joined with friends, family and the Madison nonprofit Worker Justice Wisconsin to found Los Volcanes, a seven-person cooperative that offers alterations, screen printing and custom clothing, including sewing traditional Mexican outfits for folklore dances.
In June, the cooperative rented two artist studios at The Joinery, a shared woodworking and art space in Middleton. On Thursday, after a year and a half of planning, Los Volcanes will invite the public to The Joinery for a launch party.
The celebration, which runs 3:30-6:30 p.m. at 8508 Fairway Place, will feature food, music and Los Volcanes gear for sale. At 5 p.m., there will be presentations by speakers from Madison Cooperative Development Coalition, cooperative law nonprofit Small Axe and economic development organization WWBIC.
“I’ve suffered a lot of bad experiences at work, at Crushin’ It,” said Montes, an experienced and enthusiastic seamstress. “I decided that it would be better to organize, and thanks to this group, we’re making the cooperative.”
Co-op born from labor struggles
Workers at Crushin’ It presented owner Jeremy Kruk with a list of demands in September 2022, asking him to meet to discuss the heat and working conditions in their south Madison workshop. Workers say Kruk yelled at them, refused to meet and fired them until a National Labor Relations Board judge told him that was illegal.
Two months later, after workers voted to be represented by the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades District 7, Kruk fired them again.
“Due to the financial strains on the business, we’ve closed up those divisions and will no longer produce them. We sold or are in process of selling all of the equipment,” Kruk told the Cap Times. “This door to my life is now closed.”
Kruk owes workers a total of about $8,200 in unpaid wages, according to the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development’s Wage and Hour Division, which ordered him to pay that amount by July 20, 2023.
Months later, Kruk appeared in videos posted to the Facebook page of “Thunder Bay formally known as Crushin’ It.” The videos, which identified Kruk as the owner of Thunder Bay, explained the company had rebranded and moved to Columbus, 22 miles from its former facility.
Under federal labor law, it is legal for an employer to shut down a unionized business because of union activity, but it is illegal to continue operating and refuse to negotiate. When asked by the Cap Times last year, Kruk said he was an employee, not an owner, of the new company.
Most of the members of Los Volcanes never worked at Crushin’ It. Some are family members of Montes and Aguilar. Others learned about the project through Worker Justice Wisconsin, the worker advocacy organization that “incubated” the cooperative.
Josefina Julian spent 13 years working at a local day care before losing her job last December. The idea of joining a cooperative where she could help make the decisions appealed to Julian. At her last job, she said, she didn’t get sick time, and she couldn’t choose when to use her vacation days.
“They don’t understand that we’re human beings too, that we have families, that our children can get sick and need our help,” Julian said. “It’s really difficult to work with people who sometimes don’t value our time, so we made the decision to stop putting up with mistreatment, to be our own bosses and decide how to spend our own time.”
Julian said she and many other Latinos stayed in bad jobs because they didn’t speak enough English for other jobs, but the work was often so exhausting that taking classes in the evening seemed impossible.
Hoping to turn a profit
Initially, the future founders of Los Volcanes thought they would become part of a Milwaukee screen printing cooperative called Shaky Hands. Members of Shaky Hands had read about the troubles at Crushin’ It and contacted Worker Justice Wisconsin, inviting the unemployed workers to create a Madison branch of their cooperative.
Coordinating at a distance proved difficult, so the Madison workers opted to use what they learned from the Milwaukee veterans to start their own project.
“So we decided to look for a name to make our cooperative,” Montes said.
With help from a free graphic design program called Canva and Frida Ballard, a worker cooperative organizer for Worker Justice Wisconsin, they created a design inspired by Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, two iconic volcanoes in their home state of Puebla, Mexico.
The cooperative isn’t making money yet, so no one is getting paid. Some members have other jobs, but all of them meet each Monday evening in the cooperative’s side-by-side screen printing and sewing studios to update each other and make plans for the work ahead.
Those who can are encouraged to come at other times, too, to use the sewing machines, heat press and vinyl cutter.
“We don’t have a budget yet, so obviously we have jobs outside of the cooperative,” Julian said. “When one of the people has some free time, they come here and start printing or sewing.”
They’re investing their time, they say, in hopes of making the project a success. Through word of mouth, people have already bought bags and shirts emblazoned with the group’s logo. Soon they plan to create a website and open an online store.
“We’re volunteering for now, trying to get more work,” Montes said.
“We are available for any small business interested in our work,” Julian said. “We want to start from there.”
The former Crushin’ It workers are still waiting to get paid, Ballard said. In April, Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul sued Kruk for the more than $8,000 in wages owed to workers.
In June 2023, the National Labor Relations Board ordered Kruk to take more than 30 corrective actions, including reinstating the workers and paying any lost earnings or benefits within 14 days, and ceasing from “equating employees’ protected concerted activity to extortion and lying.” That judgment comes with a penalty of 6% for every additional day until the debt is paid, Ballard said.
