Click on the links below to learn more!
What benefits do worker owners have?
Worker-owner benefits include:
- Health insurance with part-time work (25 hours/week or more)
- Retirement benefits
- A raise upon becoming a member
- A raise for every 1000 hours worked
- Free meal while on shift
- Half-priced meals when not working
- Free admission to our own Cantina shows
- Opportunities for professional education through classes, conferences, and committee work
- Permanent or flexible schedule (depending on which they prefer)
- Wholesale grocery and body care shopping
- Closed Thanksgiving and Christmas
- 1 share, 1 vote
- Sabbatical (up to 1 year, with the option to take sabbatical again and again as long as there are 9 months+the length of the sabbatical between sabbaticals)
- Medical and/or Family Leave-of-Absence
- Pay advance
- Emergency loan
- Vacation loan
- Paid time off (allocated by hours worked)
- A totally unique and crazy work experience
What benefits do associates have?
Associate benefits include:
- Health insurance with part-time work (25 hours/week or more)
- Retirement benefits
- A raise for every 1000 hours worked
- Free meal while on shift
- Half-priced meals when not working
- Ability to request time off whenever they like (within reason)
- Wholesale grocery and body care shopping
- Closed Thanksgiving and Christmas
- Free admission to our own Cantina shows
- Opportunities for professional education through classes, conferences, and committee work
- A totally unique and crazy work experience
I hear you split your tips. Is that true? How does it work?
No, we do not split our tips. We used to! Everyone at Casa starts at the same base wage. From 1985-2012, all of our tips from the Restaurant, Cantina and Bodega were pooled together during our semi-monthly pay periods. At the end of the pay period, the tips were divided up based on how many hours of shift work we had done, and then redistributed to everyone through payroll. This way, everyone from the dishwashers and cooks to the servers and bartenders had an opportunity to receive tips. At Casa, we feel that everyone who works here is doing a valuable job and deserves a pat on the back as much as anyone else. All positions in this way are equal.
Beginning in 2012, we stopped accepting tips in order to comply with the FLSA, and we raised our prices to compensate for what we were losing in tips. Now everyone still starts with the same base wage, but receives a “revenue share” that is about 20% of our sales.
How do you do profit sharing amongst owners?
The profit the business makes in a year is split so that 40% goes back into our business as equity and 60% gets distributed to the worker-owners. Each worker-owner receives their profit in two parts: 80% in May and 20% in October. The 80% profits we are splitting in a given year are from three years prior. The 20% profits are from the previous year. The profits that each member receives are based on hours worked for the year that the profits were earned.
For each fiscal year, we set financial goals, or projections, which we want to reach each quarter. If we make a profit in any given quarter that is 1.5 percentage points over our projections, the BOD decides whether or not to split up the “cream on the top” amongst membership as a bonus, or if we want to leave it in the business to help us out during leaner times.