I dreamed I was dozing on a bench during my shift. All around me were cafés serving Americanos, flat whites, cortados and espressos. Cheese specialists making cheese with names you can barely pronounce, from milk that comes from cows with their own personal masseur. I heard the chatter of fresh, hip people slurping oat-milk flat whites, talking about where they got their tan.
It's wonderful that Berlin has so many people with enough money to afford a lifestyle that's not just fulfilling but good for the planet too. People who can support all that fair-trade coffee sipping, guilt-free, because they paid six euros for a coffee that traveled from the other side of the world.
Doing something good for the world costs money. And in between sit us, the bike couriers. We deliver fairly (expensively) priced natural products to wherever they're consumed. But is it fair that we, the ones doing the carrying in between, are constantly worrying whether we can pay our rent? Whether we'll get sick?
In my dream I woke up and shouted: “What about us? Which slice of the cake do we get? Our tan lines are all wrong and they sting like hell!”
In a city like Berlin, where luxury and sustainability go hand in hand, the people who make that lifestyle possible get forgotten. We deliver your organic bread and your natural wine, but our working conditions are a world away from the glamorous surroundings we work in.
In my dream I demanded justice. In reality, we still have to keep demanding it. For a sustainable future to be possible, it has to be sustainable for everyone. It's not enough to pay six euros for a coffee if the people who get the beans to your table can barely live on their wages. Justice starts with recognizing the invisible hands holding society together.
So next time you're sipping your six-euro oat cappuccino, think about why it costs that much — and why it doesn't cost more.