The future of Fair Food

 

The pic above is Nicki, Hema and Robyn celebrating getting their forklift licenses. When I look at them I see the future of  Fair Food.

Each of these women started on our packing line and are now working in or training for senior roles.

Between the three of them they are responsible for staff management, grocery procurement, order packing, transport logistics, waste recycling and to a large extent the culture of our workplace.

Hema, Robyn and Nicki have all demonstrated leadership which has in turn been nurtured with ongoing training. Again and again I see every dollar that Ceres invested in them returned many times over.

We like to think of Australia as an egalitarian country but so often work seems to break down along gender and colour lines and it feels like it’s getting worse.

Today a couple of hundred thousand people (mostly from Asian countries) are on temporary work and student visas.  They’re Ubering us around, Deliveroo-ing our food and doing the worst jobs on our building sites, farms and in our restaurant kitchens.

We talk a lot about preventing waste these days but the precarious residency and no-condition gig-economy jobs we reserve for people new to our community is throwing away an opportunity to see who they really are.

Diversity in an environment builds strength and resilience.  It creates niches for many more types of life to thrive.  It makes for a more interesting, vibrant, beautiful and productive world.

I had a look at last week’s timesheets at Fair Food

–  there are 18 different nationalities

–  55% of us were men and 46% women

–  38% of us were new migrants or people seeking asylum and 43% of us were people of colour.

–  60% management or supervisor roles were held by women and 43% by a person of colour.

The result of all this is that Fair Food has a staff retention rate of around 90% a year and has been Victoria’s largest online organic grocery for the last half dozen years.

There’s got to be something in that.