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Ever since Sven Beckert published Cotton: A Global Empire in 2015 there has been a veritable flood of both academic and popular histories about commodities and the effect that’ve had on the world. Many of these books, there have been ones about sugar, coffee, corn, potatoes, you name it, have been quite popular, filling up bestseller lists. You could fill out a decent pantry just by buying the stuff these books talk about.
Most of these books do not stop at just describing the various ways in which these commodities affected the world. Their authors go a step further. They claim that “[X] product changed the world,” or “made the modern world,” or some other formulation of that message. Some of this is not their fault of course. Authors don’t always have the biggest say in the titles of their books. Publishers often suggest, or even force, titles on authors. They want to chase what sells, trying to attract buyers however they can. For most of these books, however, the titles don’t lie. The authors, overall, do argue that their chosen product, be it cod, mauve dye, or tobacco, defined the modern world, or saved the West.
While I don’t really agree with the premise that one, let alone sixteen, commodities can really explain the modern world, the books do sell well, so who am I to argue? They usually make for a good read, and, if the author is any good, provide at least a few fun facts you can bring up, when it’s appropriate, during various social settings. In any case, this newsletter isn’t about my issue with commodity flow history. It’s about coffee.
I drink a lot of coffee. Probably too much if I’m being honest. Not an Honoré de Balzac amount of coffee, he supposedly drank fifty cups a day, but certainly above the ADA recommended levels. It's good, and I like the taste, so why would I stop? More importantly, I get a headache if I don’t have a cup by like ten A.M. and I really don’t want to have to deal with withdrawal headaches, so I’ll stay drinking that crap.
I’ll pause here to let my dear readers know how I take my coffee. That’s information that every one of you has been jonesing for, I’m sure. I usually drink it black and hot, with no sugar or cream. In the summer I have been known to partake in a cold brew or iced coffee on occasion. As an extra special treat, I will also occasionally go to this place right around the corner that does a half-horchata, half-cold brew that is to die for. Check out Same Day Café if you ever get the chance, they know what they’re doing.
Coffee is one of those commodities that a lot of take for granted, despite it having a horrible history. Mass coffee and caffeine consumption, in general, are intertwined with slavery and European colonization in such a tight way that it makes them impossible to talk about separately. The reason we can drink coffee in the amount we do is the same reason that the American Civil War was fought, slavery. If you want to learn more about those connections, read The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug, or Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed our world, or, The Devil’s Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee, or, Coffee: A Global History. I’m sure one of those books talks about it. If they don’t, then they’re not worth reading.
This isn’t just a historical issue. The labor issues around coffee are still here today. Coffee is just one symptom of a larger problem of course, but that doesn’t mean that the symptoms aren’t worth looking at. Coffee growers around the world, especially in Latin America, are kept in poverty through low wages, corporate greed, and military force. More than once, workers on coffee plantations in Brazil, and elsewhere, have been forced into slavery, harvesting coffee beans for our consumption. There have been small in-roads toward breaking the corporate hegemony over coffee production, but conditions are not even getting close to ideal for coffee workers across the globe.
The US too has recently seen a rash of organizing and labor efforts around coffee. The ongoing unionization efforts of Starbucks workers is one of the biggest success stories of the American labor movement in recent memory. This is despite the rampant and often illegal union-busting tactics of Starbucks’ C-Suite, and the unwillingness of the federal government to crack down on Howard Schultz and others for doing so. It’s not just Starbucks that is going through unionization efforts. Smaller chains and single stores in places like Chicago, and Milwaukee have also begun to unionize often quite successfully. These efforts have even begun to spread into places in the American south that were long seen as anti-union strongholds.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for any amount of time, I’d hope that it’s obvious that I think this is a great thing. Hopefully, it signals something larger, a mass increase in union participation across the United States. If the massive amount of money Starbucks is spending to try and stop their stores from unionizing is any clue, then at least Schultz is worried.
It’s easy to see where that fear comes from. Coffee is a huge deal in the US. Millions of people drink it every day, multiple times a day. Even if you don’t drink coffee, it’s next to impossible to avoid seeing, or smelling it. It’s ubiquitous. If that ubiquity got leveraged by union members to help normalize and spread worker power, well, that’s basically Schultz’s worst nightmare
All of this is to say that in some small way, coffee does help describe the current labor landscape in the US. Workers fighting for better pay and working conditions, and winning, all while people with billions of dollars try to stop them from getting a dollar or two more an hour. If that’s not a good description of current labor conditions then I don’t know what is. I still wouldn’t give a history book about coffee to an alien and expect them to know how the modern world was made, but at least they’d have a head start.
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