thusspakekate-is-here:ladyoflate:txinternationale:serve-the-masses:biodiverseed:dentonsocialists:Fro
thusspakekate-is-here:ladyoflate:txinternationale:serve-the-masses:biodiverseed:dentonsocialists:From the ISO’s kick-off forum “Why You Should Join the Socialists & Change the World”.“Starbucks baristas make about $9/hr. If they make 3 drinks for $5 each, they pay for their hour of their labor & supplies. At 5 drinks they pay for themselves & a coworker. At 10 the whole store for an hour. At peak hours they make 2-300 drinks & see none of the profits. Every drink after 3 is theft.”Having been both a Barista and a Waitress, I’m not saying the Baristas don’t deserve to be paid more of the cut……but the profit margin here doesn’t account for the folks who are bigger losers in this scenario: do you know what it takes to harvest coffee?Coffee cherries ripen unevenly, so they are hand-picked by workers (often children) making poverty wages and working long days.The cherries are then depulped, fermented, sorted, hulled, dried and packaged: all labour-intensive processes that take a few days.Usually the green coffee is shipped from somewhere in the Global South.On arrival in the Country of consumption, the coffee is then graded, roasted, cupped, and re-packagedIt is delivered to a Starbucks, where a minimum-wage worker presses a button that grinds it, and percolates a beverage from it.The arduous process of making coffee, from tree to table.Young Mexican girl picking coffee cherries.Rwandan workers grading ‘beans.’This is not to mention the people doing the logging, and pulp and paper processing to make disposable cups, the people working on dairy farms, for the milk and cream, or the people harvesting beets or other crops and processing sugar from them. These are the people whose labour creates the goods being consumed.In light of all this, $5 is actually a perfectly reasonable price for coffee, and there is actually no reason in the modern world that the person working at Starbucks couldn’t have a machine doing their job, and doing it better. Baristas don’t really create anything of value.Briggo Coffee Haus: it does everything a Barista can, except be told to smile.We preserve these essentially redundant, poorly paid, and low-satisfaction jobs (and demand higher wages for them) in wealthier countries, all while the people doing extremely strenuous agricultural labour don’t see more than a few cents of that $5. Cut out the Barista entirely (it’s not like it’s a fulfilling occupation), and then apply these sort of profit margin analytics to workers in the Global South: then maybe we have a coherent worker’s rights politic.#coffee #food politics^^^Thank you!!! FULL CIRCLE! OMG, thank you comrades for making my post even better. It’s a good thing when something that unfortunately oversimplifies the matter is expanded upon communally. True solidari-love!uh, while spreading the profits around through the entire process is so obviously a good thing that it’s equally obviously evil not to do it, i don’t think getting rid of baristas is going to help much, considering that’s a LOT of jobs just gone?Uhhhhh……..1) You really can’t say that being a barista isn’t a fulfilling occupation. For you it might not be, but for my old co-worker Cory who was the 2012 World Cup Coffee Tasters Champion I’m sure it is. Radicals need to remember that we don’t get to define the idea of what constiutes “fulfilling” labor based on our own subjective tastes. Doing so is incredibly presumptuous, dismissive, and—ironically—classist, as those jobs casually disregarded as “unfulfilling” are ones usually occupied by low-wage or undereducated workers who retain the right to define their own sense of happiness, worth, and fulfillment despite the fact they’re in an occupation someone else would deem so beneath them that they might as well not exist.2) We’ve had automated coffee machines for years. You can find them in the basement of every airport and behind bars at every reststop in the west. They haven’t replaced baristas yet, and they probably never will. Why? Because coffee shops are more than just places where we get coffee (lots of regulars at coffee shops don’t even drink coffee!). They serve social and cultural functions as well. The barista may not “create anything of real value,” but neither do the vast majority of the workers in a post-industrial society—which is, of course, what we have in the West. As a service economy, service-workers are the working class. I’m kind of surprised to see their premature extinction being advocated here, especially given the crippling effect automation had on the livelihoods of industrial workers in the 70’s and 80’s and how hard the labor movement and other leftists fought against many of those measures. Automation created incredible job insecurity and undermined the collective strength of unions. Automation is one of the reasons the rust belt is rusting. You know what automation looks like? Automation looks like Detriot. It looks like Youngstown. It looks like Flint. Automation is not evil, but it is something whose effects need to be seriously considered before being advocated by people concerned with economic disparity.3) There is no evidence to suggest that getting rid of baristas or other service personal will do anything to increase the wages of workers involved in other steps of the production chain. Or even to reduce the cost of the product. 4) Is that coffee machine going to invite me to see his band play on Saturday night and then possibly eat me out in the bathroom of a shitty punk rock club? If not, vive le barista! -- source link