The politics of a cafe

Episode 10 — The CafeShow notesThe story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. Identifying details are changed. Real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below.REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODEAustralia- The launch of Hospo Voice on 21 May 2018 in Melbourne by United Voice (now United Workers Union) as Australia's first digital union, organising hospitality workers around wage theft, sexual harassment, and working conditions.- The wave of high-profile Melbourne hospitality wage theft cases exposed through 2018 and 2019, including the A$7.83 million underpayment admitted by George Calombaris's Made Establishment in July 2019, the approximately A$4.5 million in unpaid wages exposed at Heston Blumenthal's Dinner by Heston in 2018, the A$1.6 million underpayment settled by Neil Perry's Rockpool Dining Group, and smaller-venue cases at Barry Cafe, Chin Chin, and other Melbourne venues organised through Hospo Voice campaigns.- The Victorian Wage Theft Act 2020, passed 16 June 2020 and in force from 1 July 2021, the first Australian state legislation to make deliberate underpayment of wages, superannuation, or other entitlements a criminal offence. Penalties include fines of up to A$198,264 for individuals, A$991,320 for companies, and imprisonment of up to 10 years.- The Closing Loopholes (No. 2) Act 2024 (Cth), with federal wage theft criminal provisions in force from 1 January 2025.- The 2019 Global Climate Strikes in Australian capital cities, drawing an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 participants on 20 September 2019, the largest climate mobilisation in Australian history at that time.- The Australian specialty coffee direct trade movement through the 2000s and 2010s, with operators including Market Lane Coffee, Padre Coffee, Single Origin Roasters, Coffee Supreme, Seven Seeds, and Pablo & Rusty's building direct producer relationships and progressively publishing pricing paid to producer partners.El Salvador- The arrival of British migrant James Hill in El Salvador in 1889 and his establishment over the following half century of one of the world's great coffee plantation dynasties, documented in Augustine Sedgewick's Coffeeland (2020).- The transformation of El Salvador into the most intensive coffee monoculture in modern history, with coffee accounting for over 90 per cent of the country's exports by the mid-twentieth century, built on land enclosures that displaced Indigenous Pipil communities and on a plantation labour model that withheld food to compel longer working hours.- The 1932 La Matanza massacre in western El Salvador, in which government forces of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez killed an estimated 10,000 to 40,000 people, predominantly Indigenous Pipil farmers and rural workers, in the coffee-growing departments of Ahuachapán, Sonsonate, and La Libertad, following a peasant uprising led in part by Communist Party organiser Agustín Farabundo Martí. The massacre remains the political watershed of El Salvadoran coffee political economy and the political reference point of the FMLN movement that fought the 1980-1992 Salvadoran Civil War.Latin America (broader frame)- Eduardo Galeano's documentation in Open Veins of Latin America (1971) of five centuries of European and later United States extraction from Latin America, organised around the commodity flows (the "veins") of gold, silver, sugar, rubber, coffee, fruit, copper, tin, petroleum, and others, all running northward through political and economic structures of dependency.- The banning of Open Veins of Latin America by the military governments of Chile (after the 11 September 1973 coup), Argentina (after the 24 March 1976 coup), and Uruguay (under the 27 June 1973 civic-military dictatorship), and the imprisonment and exile of Galeano, first to Argentina in 1973, then to Spain in 1976, returning to Uruguay after the 1985 democratic transition.Ethiopia- The Ethiopian highlands as the genetic origin of Coffea arabica, with coffee grown today across the Sidama, Yirgacheffe, Limu, Jimma, Sidamo, and Harrar regions. Approximately 90 per cent of Ethiopian coffee producers are smallholders, with coffee farming supporting the livelihoods of approximately 15 million people across the country. Ethiopia is the fifth largest coffee producer globally and Africa's largest.- The founding of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (OCFCU) in 1999, now comprising 405 cooperatives representing over 370,000 farming households across Oromia Regional State, which accounts for 65 per cent of Ethiopia's total coffee-growing land.- The founding of the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU) in 2002, comprising 23 member cooperatives representing over 300,000 farming families across 62,004 hectares of coffee land in the Gedeo zone.- Peer-reviewed climate science projections that approximately 39 to 59 per cent of Ethiopian coffee-growing area could become unsuitable for production by 2080 under current emissions scenarios, with the expanding range of the coffee berry borer beetle adding further pressure, and with similar patterns documented across Central American coffee regions, Brazil, and East African producing countries.REFERENCES[1] Augustine Sedgewick, Coffeeland: One Man's Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug (New York: Penguin Press, 2020), https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316748/coffeeland-by-augustine-sedgewick/; Kathryn Hughes, review of Coffeeland, The Guardian (2020); Lizabeth Cohen, review of Coffeeland, New York Times Book Review (2020).[2] Thomas P. Anderson, Matanza: El Salvador's Communist Revolt of 1932 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971); Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Erik Ching and Rafael Lara-Martínez, Remembering a Massacre in El Salvador: The Insurrection of 1932, Roque Dalton, and the Politics of Historical Memory (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); Jeffrey L. Gould and Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago, To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-1932 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).[3] Eduardo Galeano, Las venas abiertas de América Latina (Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 1971); Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), https://monthlyreview.org/9780853459910/; Isabel Allende, foreword to the 25th anniversary edition (1997).[4] Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire Trilogy (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982-1986); Tania Pellegrini, "Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015): An Obituary," Latin American Perspectives 42, no. 5 (2015): 7-10; Isabella Cosse, "Cultural and Political Resistance in 1970s Latin America," Latin American Research Review 49, no. 2 (2014).[5] Green Left Weekly, "Hospo Voice gives voice to hospitality workers" (May 2018), https://www.greenleft.org.au/2018/1183/news/hospo-voice-gives-voice-hospitality-workers; Junkee, "Australia's First Digital Union Is Here To Help Hospitality Workers Fight Wage Theft And Abuse," 22 May 2018, https://junkee.com/hospo-voice-hospitality-union/159371; Anthony Forsyth, The Future of the Trade Union Movement in Australia (Sydney: Federation Press, 2022).[6] Fair Work Ombudsman, public enforcement actions against MAdE Establishment, Rockpool Dining Group, and Dinner by Heston, 2018-2020, https://www.fairwork.gov.au/about-us/news-and-media-releases; ABC News, "Calombaris reaches a $200,000 contrition payment after $7.83m wage theft," 18 July 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-18/george-calombaris-restaurant-wage-theft/11320540; United Workers Union, "Fine dining disaster: Dinner by Heston worker exploitation revealed," https://unitedworkers.org.au/archive/fine-dining-disaster-dinner-by-heston-worker-exploitation-revealed/; Laurie Berg and Bassina Farbenblum, Wage Theft in Australia: Findings of the National Temporary Migrant Work Survey (Sydney: UNSW and UTS, 2017).[7] Wage Theft Act 2020 (Vic), in force 1 July 2021, https://www.legislation.vic.gov.au/in-force/acts/wage-theft-act-2020; Wage Inspectorate Victoria, https://www.wageinspectorate.vic.gov.au/; Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024 (Cth), wage theft criminal provisions in force 1 January 2025, https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2024A00022/latest/text; Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, criminalisation of intentional wage underpayments, https://www.dewr.gov.au/closing-loopholes.[8] School Strike 4 Climate Australia, https://www.schoolstrike4climate.com/; ABC News, "Climate strike rallies attract hundreds of thousands in cities across Australia," 20 September 2019, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/climate-strike-protests-rallies-australia/11530456; Somini Sengupta and Jamie Tarabay, "Protesting Climate Change, Young People Take to Streets in a Global Strike," The New York Times, 20 September 2019.[9] "Coffee production in Ethiopia," Wikipedia general reference, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_production_in_Ethiopia; International Coffee Organization (ICO), Ethiopia country profile, https://www.ico.org/; F. Anthony, M. C. Combes et al., "The origin of cultivated Coffea arabica L. varieties revealed by AFLP and SSR markers," Theoretical and Applied Genetics 104 (2002): 894-900.[10] Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (OCFCU), https://www.oromiacoffeeunion.org/; Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU), https://www.ycfcu.com/; Fairtrade International, "Cooperatives help to balance the imbalance in trade," 14 May 2025, https://www.fairtrade.net/en/get-involved/news/co-operatives-help-to-balance-the-imbalance-in-trade-.html.[11] Justin Moat, Jenny Williams, Susana Baena et al., "Resilience potential of the Ethiopian coffee sector under climate change," Nature Plants 3 (2017): 17081, https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2017.81; Aaron P. Davis, Tadesse Woldemariam Gole, Susana Baena and Justin Moat, "The impact of climate change on indigenous Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica): predicting future trends and identifying priorities," PLOS ONE 7, no. 11 (2012): e47981, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0047981; Christian Bunn, Peter Läderach, Oriana Ovalle Rivera and Dieter Kirschke, "A bitter cup: climate change profile of global production of Arabica and Robusta coffee," Climatic Change 129 (2015): 89-101; International Growth Centre, "The economic and environmental future of Ethiopian coffee," 9 September 2024, https://www.theigc.org/blogs/climate-priorities-developing-countries/economic-and-environmental-future-ethiopian-coffee.[12] Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), https://sca.coffee/; Market Lane Coffee, producer partner pricing, https://marketlane.com.au/; Padre Coffee, direct trade documentation, https://www.padrecoffee.com.au/; Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte, The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development (London: Zed Books, 2005); Daniel Jaffee, Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).FURTHER READINGAugustine Sedgewick, Coffeeland (2020). Definitive recent history of coffee as a global commodity, tracing the political and labour economy of El Salvador and the formation of the modern coffee consumer market.Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America (1971). Foundational text in the political economy of Latin America, tracing five centuries of European and US extraction through the commodity flows of the continent.Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (1985). Foundational work on commodity politics; the methodological reference point for the kind of political economy of taste, labour, and consumption that Coffeeland builds on.Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (2009). On the political consciousness of the generations that came of age in the 2000s and 2010s, and the cultural difficulty of imagining alternatives to capitalism.Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even (2020). On burnout, precarity, and the political affect of millennial workers in the contemporary economy.Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger (2017). On the global political affect of the early twenty-first century and the broken promises of modernity.Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything (2014). On climate, capitalism, and political possibility.Anthony Forsyth, The Future of the Trade Union Movement in Australia (2022). Includes Hospo Voice as a case study in digital union innovation.Laurie Berg and Bassina Farbenblum, Wage Theft in Australia (2017). The major Australian survey-based study on wage theft, particularly among temporary migrant workers.Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte, The Coffee Paradox (2005). On the structure of global coffee markets and the gap between producer and consumer economies.Daniel Jaffee, Brewing Justice (2014). On Fair Trade coffee, certification politics, and the political economy of ethical consumption.Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank (eds.), From Silver to Cocaine (2006). Multi-author historical study of Latin American commodity chains, including coffee.Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds (revised 2010). Detailed history of coffee from its origins in Ethiopia through the modern global industry.Elisabeth Jean Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (2003). Cambridge University Press study of the Salvadoran civil war and its political ground in the coffee oligarchy and the 1932 massacre.Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, "Ch'ixinakax Utxiwa" (2012). Foundational Indigenous Latin American political thought on the practices and discourses of decolonisation.All works, organisations, scholars, court rulings, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended.About the hostLiv Roe is a civic and political adviser based in Melbourne. She works with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic context of their work. Book a consultation at livroe.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com