Sid speaks on Accountability

Sid

Favorite drink: Italiano

Favorite album to play at work: Poolside by Nu Shooz- it puts everyone in a good mood. And Santigold when you need to bang out a rush.

“I moved to Portland in 2007 and got a job at a bagel shop. The owner was very uninterested in spending any extra money, so nobody got any coffee training. It was a rough start. I was 22, I had just moved to Portland, and that was the dream. To be a barista and play in a band at night, so that is what I was doing. It was great! But it was a horrible place to work and then I had a string of equally horrible places after that, until finally I landed at a wholesale café where I spent six years and learned the ropes of how you actually make coffee.”

“I sort of fell into coffee- of all the food service things I could do. I knew I wanted to do service cause I wanted to spend time on music and drag, so I was doing all this nighttime stuff, and being a barista gives you the freedom to do that. Eventually I started managing that café- I always want to be the best at anything that I am doing, so because I was a barista I was like, I want to be the best at this.  

After managing that café, I moved to a more prominent roaster in Portland, and that was when I got to really blow the doors open on specialty coffee. I made the move cause I was getting tired of managing, and I felt like I had capped out on how much I could learn about coffee at that café: you can only go so far when you are making 20 ounce mochas.

The training program at this roaster was incredible; it was awesome to go from a place where we really didn’t focus on coffee, to a place where you just could not ask enough questions. Anything you wanted to know, they would go into great detail about it, and they were so connected to their sourcing – I just got so immersed and it was awesome to suddenly be able to understand every single aspect of coffee and not just the barista side. It was empowering, and I worked for that roaster for three years.

Eventually the company wanted to hire a wholesale account manager, and me and another barista applied for it, but they ended hiring from outside of the company. The whole time we had been working there they were really pushing how big they were on promoting from within. ‘We will train you for the right job, if there is something you are interested in, just let us know. We will give you the training to get you there.’ And then they just didn’t hire either of the people who were interested, which was pretty disappointing. At that point I realized that this wasn’t really going anywhere for me, so I had to think about what it was it that I actually want to do.”

Sid considered what it was that they really wanted to do in coffee- did they want to train, or do wholesale? And then they realized that it was probably never going to happen with that employer. “I realized this company was only interested in diversity in the front of house- cause everyone that manages or does any sort of upper level work that isn’t at the front of house is white, Christian, and married. And with the exception of one person, it’s all men.”

One of the owners at Sid’s wholesale coffeeshop job had been a barista before being an owner and had a sense of the work that went into being a barista. “ But she also told me to my face, when I asked for a raise, that she could find a dozen people to do my job. And that’s common- when staff don’t feel supported, how can you expect them to give good service? It can feel like a super demeaning job- like literally being told you are replaceable.”

“My next employer tried to not do that, but eventually they got big enough that they gave up on that idea. It’s a weird juxtaposition to feel support through things like health care and easy scheduling- all the things you look for if you are going to work in the industry - and they were awesome about that stuff for a really long time and then it all dropped off and stopped.  You got the sense that they were looking at numbers really intensely and lost sight of the fantasy of the owner coming from being a barista- the owner of this company had also started as a barista and taught himself how to source coffee, he built everything with his own hands and was so involved and then got more and more separated and lost sight of the things you can’t quantify that make a shop interesting and good. That your staff will make you more money if they have flexibility, but you may end up taking a little bit of a hit when you have to call someone in for overtime every once in a while. They would be like, no overtime, don’t switch your shifts around- that’s the type of thing that makes people unhappy. And I think they stopped thinking about that.”

After ten years in the coffee industry Sid’s advice to baristas is “Be careful about when you compromise for a company. Sometimes the compromise is worth it, sometimes it pays off, sometimes it’s necessary. And sometimes they are just taking advantage of you. It can be really hard to figure out so try to stick to your guns if you can, try noticing when something doesn’t feel good. That doesn’t necessarily get you in the door, but if you want to be in coffee, I think that is something to keep in mind.”

“ It’s important to listen to your staff and make sure people know they have a voice. That is something that my former employer, again, had done at the beginning, and then stopped, and it was really noticeable. We used to have regular meetings and the staff could bring up any concerns they had. We felt supported and heard, and that they trusted us when we had ideas about work flow or whatever. That is really empowering and makes you feel like you are invested. And conversely when the orders come from the top down, like ‘this is how we are doing things now- sorry’- it immediately drops the bottom out and you start asking yourself, ‘what am I even doing here?’ Being a barista is an incredibly multifaceted job and it’s very difficult, but it gets billed like any old dude off the street can be a barista, like it is this easy minimum wage job entry level job, and that’s not the case. It’s intense emotional labor, it is intense reading of people, keeping your energy up, constantly shifting gears, meeting people where they are at, giving them what they want, and at the same time being super knowledgeable on the product itself and navigating coworker dynamics. A lot of this is stuff you don’t get training on. It should be a highly paid job because it’s a really intense job.”

“I think in general, the coffee industry needs more women in charge. I think as a rule, women are better at looking at how to support people beyond just making the schedule and the bottom line. And in order to better support women in positions of power, people in upper level management need to check their own implicit biases. That was one of the things I noticed most at my former employer. The deep implicit biases that were never checked and were totally unriddled. I watched a woman get fired for giving the exact same service that two men who had been working there for years had been giving. Which was direct, professional, not really smiling a lot, answering every question respectfully and knowledgably. And in doing that, someone perceived that she rolled her eyes at them- this customer was another Portland business owner- and so he complained to the owner, and the barista was fired on the spot with no warning. Her service was literally exactly the same as people who had been working there for years. And that was super frustrating to see because she was one of the best baristas I had ever worked with.

I don’t think they do this consciously, but that employer hires very much based on who they feel comfortable around. And so when you are most comfortable around white, married men, that is what you get. They don’t challenge themselves on that at all, they don’t see value in having a diverse staff, of varied opinions. So anyone who vocalizes different opinions immediately gets pushed out. That is why I got pushed out for sure.”

Sid was asked multiple times to help open a new location, but they didn’t want to move. They were comfortable at the location where they were, the shop was close to their studio and it facilitated the rest of their life.

“A couple months later though, they sent me an email saying ‘hey, effective this date you’re gonna be over at the new store,’ I met with them to talk about why they were moving me and they told me they needed a strong barista at the new shop, someone to set the pace and anchor the new team. I agreed to go over to the new cafe but then when a new hire I was too direct with complained, I was called into a meeting and was told I was on thin ice. They had never been transparent with staff about me acting in a support role, so it felt like a trap and like I wasn’t set up to succeed. It came right after I had asked for accountability around my female coworker getting fired. I had gone to management and said to them, ‘I want you to know there is buzz going around that this firing was really unwarranted, and can we address this, can we talk about the firing policy? Because now everyone is afraid they are going to get fired if they look at somebody wrong.’ And me asking for accountability was met with ‘oh, well, you need to go.’ 

It seems to me like the people at the top that I’ve encountered in my ten years in the coffee industry are so unwilling to look beyond their own little world, that anything that is a threat to it, they do what they can to remove it. It would be so much work to examine your implicit biases around your hiring practices and to actually do something about it. Like to looking beyond Instagram when you are hiring. Maybe posting where people of color who haven’t had access to coffee experience could get a leg in- that is work. So why would you do that work when you could just have a million tall tattooed white dudes work for you?

Instead of just thinking about sourcing coffee ethically, you suddenly also have to think about how to find a diverse staff, how to respect and keep them happy. That’s so much work, why would you do it. And white dudes have never been in a situation where they have been at the other end of it – of feeling out of place- so there is no impetus to do that work. There is no inkling. I’ve learned that from my own experience, growing up white in Eugene and never being challenged on anything. And then moving to Portland, having a diverse friend group, coming out as queer, coming out as trans, suddenly having more experience of oppression- then the bell goes off. And how do you have the bell go off for someone who has never experienced oppression? So much of it just seems like a complete blindness to other people’s experiences. And when somebody does challenge you it’s uncomfortable.

My nature is to always be the most inclusive that I can, and it’s hard to think of how to get through to someone if they don’t have that desire at their core. It is hard to take advice from people who you don’t relate to. But my life is so much richer having a diverse friend group, wouldn’t you want that also? And it has been absolutely uncomfortable at times to hear things from my black friends that I was like ‘oh fuck I never even thought about that,  I’m an asshole,’ but then you feel so much better after knowing it that you can support your friends in a better way and you as yourself have a richer experience in life. You gotta push through the discomfort, it is worth it. It is easier if you own the discomfort and that you might have fucked up, and there is only one way forward from that.”

“ The perspective I’ve gained going from being read as female to being read as male is absolutely nuts. I can’t talk about it enough, it’s so mind-blowing to me. Because I worked in service during my transition, I haven’t had a choice but for people to know about my transition, so I feel comfortable talking about it. Very few people met me post transition- a lot of people went through that with me and I don’t have a lot of customers that didn’t know that. The tourist ones that never knew me any other way- that was a different experience. I remember the first time that I must have started passing enough because a guy asked me where to go for breakfast and I started telling him a list of places and I thought to myself ‘god, this guy is letting me talk for a really long time- weird,’ and then I finished my sentence and he said ‘thank you sir,’ and I was like OH MY GOD-that’s why you let me talk! Holy shit. 10/10 times I would have previously been cut off after three options, and you let me give like 6 or 7 and then thanked me. It was mind-blowing.

 The thing that was the worst for me behind the bar was that the people in management who knew me pre-transition never stopped treating me the way they treat women. I never jumped the fence into getting respected, AND I was regularly misgendered. There was NO support around that. I had a manager who did support me a lot, but when he left, so did much of that support. When a new manager took over, he basically refused to correct regular customers on my pronouns. I had to pull him aside and ask him for support- but he couldn’t figure out how to do it. I think it was too intimidating for him, and I also think that was part of the reason why I got moved out of that shop. “

Something Sid would like to see more of in the coffee industry: “Companies holding themselves accountable. When I was a manager, I worked really hard to put a structure in place so that people knew how and when it was appropriate for them to talk to me about a problem they had and what was expected of them. But that was not the case at other places I’ve worked, and it is just so shitty because then you can really get away with whatever you want as an owner. Having clear expectations on both sides- you uphold your end, and your staff upholds theirs, knowing you can speak with your manager and you will be heard, and also a level of trust based on those outlined rules. Setting clear expectations really goes so far. It just shows you’ve thought about it and that you respect your staff.”

“ A woman asked one of my coworkers where he was from to which he responded ‘Wisconsin,’ and she said ‘no, I mean which part of Africa are you from.’ None of us had any training or empowerment to handle that situation in any way that was respectful to him. That sucks. No one was given permission to kick a racist lady out- which I get, it’s a fine balance and customer service by nature is super complicated, but if I get misgenedered for the third time by the same person, what power do I have? What is appropriate? Is it just my job, and I need to suck it up? Where is the line? How do you support staff through that? So it is extra work to support diverse staff in this way, and so when you have all white staff, I guess that just makes everything easier? You can put your ‘we support all races, all genders, all sexualities’ sign in the window, but will you have follow through? Will you train and support your staff? Will you correct misgendering? It’s a big step to recognize how much work true allyship takes and knowing that it is worth it, it does pay off.

I would really love to see people push themselves out of their comfort zones and put accountability structures in place. Really if I could change one thing about coffee, I think that would be it- clear expectations for a job- it’s better for everybody and it’s not that hard.”