Coffee worker support nonprofit Go Fund Bean (GFB) has relaunched its GFB Wage Survey, which will be used to identify wage discrepancies in the coffee industry, compare actual wages to living wages, and more.
The U.S.-based organization, which focuses primarily on issues affecting baristas and other workers in retail or roastery environments, launched its inaugural survey last year. It followed a growing movement regarding barista wage transparency in 2019 that came to a screeching halt with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The underlying assumption throughout that movement, which has since been supported by GFB’s data, is that wages for a large share of coffee workers have failed to keep pace with costs of living and inflation, resulting in cost-of-living income gaps.
The group’s 2022 survey, which included data from 240 respondents, concluded that nearly half (49%) of hourly workers in the coffee retail and roasting industries “cannot comfortably pay their bills every month.”
Go Fund Bean, which is under interim executive leadership following an internal financial investigation this year, is keeping the 2023 survey open through the end of 2022. The group plans to publish raw data — with any potentially identifying information scrubbed — in January of 2024.
More information on the survey is available here.
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