Happy Labor Day from all of us at Phoenix Coffee! Today I’d like to share a few thoughts on the bookends of the coffee supply chain: our employees, and the employees of the farms that we source from.
As many of you are likely aware, Phoenix began transitioning to an employee-owned co-op model three years ago. While “Employee Owned” makes for a nice window sticker, I’m often asked how this works on a more tangible level—what it means for our employees, and whether it makes the day-to-day work any different.
To the “how it works” point: in October 2020, Phoenix was purchased by Evergreen Cooperatives’ Fund for Employee Ownership. Evergreen’s business model is to buy companies and redistribute shares back to the employees over the course of a seven year repayment schedule. Employees become eligible for ownership after working at least 28 hours a week for a year, and if they choose to become an employee-owner, they must pay a one-time $1000 membership fee. To reduce barrier for entry, this fee is paid for via a $0.50/hr payroll deduction (until the $1000 is paid). This is offset by a matching 0.50/hr raise (separate from standard accreditation/wage scale). If or when an employee-owner leaves the company, the $1000 is returned.
Any year that Phoenix returns a profit, a distribution will be split equally among all employee-owners, and each owner’s share is split between a cash “patronage refund” and a deposit in a patronage account managed by Evergreen, which can be distributed either when the account reaches maturity or when the employee-owner leaves the company. Additionally, employee-owners hold voting rights to representation on Phoenix’s governing board of directors. The board drafts Phoenix’s governing bylaws and manages the company’s general managers (including myself), who in turn manage the company’s day-to-day operations.
To the point of whether the cooperative structure makes day-to-day operations any different, I suppose the answer is both yes and no, depending on how anyone chooses to view their own relationship with work. At the risk of turning this into a personal blog for a moment, for much of my own working life, I was the sort of employee who only used work as a stop-gap activity to fund the things I’d rather be doing. Would being a co-op owner have changed my work/life relationship at that time in my life? Probably not. However, if I was going to be working at a cafe between nights out with friends and camping trips, might as well work at the one that kicks in a little extra passive income with no discernable difference in my day-to-day.
On the other hand, as someone now a little older, a little more dug into to the industry, and who isn’t yet an owner (haven’t been here a year yet!), I’m finding the co-op model to be an immense motivator. It’s much easier to get out of bed in the morning knowing that the impact of my work is a payout for a bunch of my friends and coworkers rather than the usual trickle-up. Would my workplace responsibilities change under private ownership? No, but my feelings towards them certainly would. I love that there’s a pathway, defined by our own bylaws, that could allow a second year barista to become my boss. They’d just have to make the case to their coworkers, and if they’re effective enough to do that, chances are they’d be a great fit for the board.
To bring it back to whether the co-op model changes anything tangibly, I suppose what I’m getting at is that the cooperative model allows for more possibilities in the work/life balance space. For years, the Phoenix employee handbook has opened with: “Everything in this handbook falls, in some fashion, under the umbrella of “mutual respect.” Respect your co-workers; respect their time, contribution, commitment, and individuality”. I consider the cooperative model to be a reflection and an extension of that respect. We have employees with so many different lives outside of Phoenix. Our baristas are also writers, actors, gardeners, photographers, musicians, potters, and so many things that I’m sure I’m forgetting and I hope that the cooperative model lets Phoenix be the best amorphous vessel for their time that it can be.
Abruptly pivoting to the far opposite end of the supply chain, I want to also highlight this dynamic via how we value and portray labor at farms around the world. If you’ve read this far already, chances are that you’ve also consumed enough coffee media to be very familiar with the visuals of coffee farms—steep fields of cherries being picked by hands, drying patios under the sun, wet mills, etc. Photos of farmers doing the arduous and labor-intensive work of picking and processing coffee are common in coffee marketing, and they’re often shared with the best intention—a small glimpse into a far-away place with the goal of visualizing and humanizing the opposite end of the supply chain. What I’d also like to acknowledge is the fine line between between honoring and commodifying their existence.
I recently listened to a wonderful conversation between Lucia Solis (@lluciasolis) and Pranoy Thipaiah (@kerehaklu) from episode 56 of Lucia’s podcast Making Coffee with Lucia. Lucia is a coffee consultant and fermentation specialist and Pranoy is a fifth generation operator of the Kerehaklu farm in Karnatka, India (stay tuned for a very cool coffee at Phoenix from Pranoy’s farm in the coming days). While the entire conversation is a great listen, the final few minutes touch on commodifying labor is a very coffee-specific that I think is extremely important for us to digest as actors in this industry:
Pranoy: “If you were to ask [the farmers], in their language, ‘would you rather be photographed at the Sunday market or at work on this farm?’, everyone’s gonna say ‘at the Sunday market’. Cause like you and I, we’re gonna be next to or in the ferment tanks, in not our best cloths, in our clothes we don’t mind getting dirty and things like that. And so it’s just not this one incident, but it’s a dynamic where you feel like you can’t say no. It happens to me as well where buyers visit like, ‘I’m here, I’m buying your coffee, I expect to take these photos and I expect you to say yes.’ You’re in a weird place because if you say no, you’re thinking about the fact that it’s rude, or ‘will they not buy my coffee because of this?’ Now, I’m very particular. I’m like ‘Hey, these are the photos you can take. These are the people who speak English, these people don’t speak English. If you want to communicate with them, I’m here, my dad’s here, my manager is here. They can translate for us. But yeah, it’s not right. You can’t walk into someone else’s workplace and take photos of them and use that to portray to your clients.”
Lucia: “You’re right. When we are taking pictures on a coffee farm, when we work there, or at the mill, it is our worst clothing. And, you know, we’re dirty and sweaty and tired because you’ve been physically working and dealing with the realities of processing coffee…when that’s the only picture of you that exists, and that’s the image that we have of people in these places, then, we’re just associating who they are based on that image–dirty, tired, and in this disheveled state. You don’t really get to see the person as a whole person. And like you said, these people have other lives. For me, working in the coffee farm in Colombia, I would see everybody working, and then on Sundays we would go to the town and go to the market and shop for groceries, and everybody came to town, the producers and the pickers, they would come to town in their Sunday best. Hair slicked back, really nice button up shirts, their shoes polished, I mean, they looked like completely different people, and there was so much pride in their appearance! But if we’re only ever seeing them in their work clothes, we’re painting such a picture of this type of work and I think that we we don’t realize how much, inadvertently, it erodes dignity and allows us to only see people in one way.”
Just like our employees at here in Cleveland, these people are so much more than a face on an instagram post with a #singleorigin. I’m not at all trying to guilt trip anyone who has engaged with this portrayal of labor—those origin photos are part of why I became excited about coffee in the first place. I simply want to take this space today to echo the sentiment that people are so much more than their labor, no matter or where the labor is. Hope everyone is able to have a relaxing holiday, and thanks for reading.
-Toby