Better Means: Protect the Unprotected

We need one syndicate for coffee people — where our voice is heard and our labor rights are protected. We are building it in The Better Coffee — as The Places.

Look at how many coffee people work seasonally. In warm months at beach bars and food trucks, at festivals. During harvest season on the plantation, picking coffee and doing everything else that comes with it. In roasteries around the holidays — Christmas, Eid, Diwali, the Chinese New Year, the big retail push.

Think about how many people work in coffee in exchange for shelter and food. How many of them are refugees, people without homes — with no other option. And they are stripped not only of a future. Also of identity documents.

How many earn far less than they should, and in return receive a "ration" — a bed in a workers' hostel? How many earn below minimum wage? Who would dare ask for more, knowing that asking means losing even that?

Many people work as "help" for their spouses or partners — owners of small cafés or roasteries in our industry. They receive no wage of their own — nothing that belongs to them, nothing they control. To leave the job, they would have to leave the family.

There are also those who work off debt — repaying usury with their labor, paying back the "lease" of land. And those promised land in the future — most often young people from African countries who sometimes do not live to adulthood, and never see the land they were promised.

Let's break these silences. Coffee people frequently work without an employment contract, without any contract at all. Without insurance. Under compulsion, out of fear, with no real possibility of walking away. These are forms of contemporary slavery.

This is not only cost-cutting — it is also competition to the bottom on price. Because there are still companies buying coffee and services from bosses like these.

Don't ask how many points this coffee scored. Ask how many employment contracts are attached to it.