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May 10, 2016
                          Allen Lund Company Newsletter
                            Written by your perishable experts 

In This Issue
Rising Wages, Rising Problems?
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Rising Wages, Rising Problems?

When I was in college, my school was in the middle of dozens of farms. Driving down the main street into campus you would see strawberry and cilantro fields along with hundreds of workers sweating under heavy clothes to protect them from the sun. The cafeteria at my school reaped the benefit of being placed in the middle of farm country as we had fresh produce served that was grown literally a few yards away from campus. Driving past the farms day after day and seeing the people who worked so hard to put fresh fruit and vegetables on our tables really made me think about how much effort goes into growing produce.

Recently, I have seen a lot of headlines about the push for an increase in the minimum wage, which makes me think about how much these people working on the farms were making for their backbreaking work. A job that requires a lot of physical labor should always pay well, as that kind of work can have physical affects that last a lifetime. Recent analysis has been brought forward in which people have tried to delve in to how a significant increase in the minimum wage would affect daily life, and how it will affect cost to consumers. Think about it this way: when you pay employees more you have to charge more for the product being sold to be able to pay your employees. It's a frustrating cycle to break out of because companies are looking for a specific profit margin in order to deem themselves successful.

According to an article published in 2015, in the 1970's, California farm workers were the highest paid in the U.S. and on average were paid ($5.25/hour) almost twice as much as the minimum wage at the time ($2.90/hour). If that ratio still existed today, farm workers would be paid around $16/hour which is nowhere near the current rate. Today's farm workers don't make enough money to pay rent, provide meals, and still send money back to their families in Mexico. During growing season they will travel to different counties or states, following the crops, and will sometimes succumb to lack of money and will sleep in their cars or create temporary encampments. However, it should be mentioned that some employers pay their farm workers by contracts, meaning that they get paid by the amount they pick/harvest, rather than a bottom minimum wage. Huffpost Latino Voices gives us a prime example of this method of payment: in the matter of harvesting raisins, workers must fill a "table" with grapes, the "table" being a large sheet of paper in order to lay the grapes out in order to dry. In order to fill the "table" the workers must intensely gather grapes, which is a lot of work, and they are able to collect an average of 12 "tables" an hour, at .45 cents a "table". So, for an hours works they are being paid around $5.40, which is far less than minimum wage.

As far as the produce goes that is on your table...if farm workers were paid a minimum wage of $15 an hour the price of produce would inevitably go up. As price goes up demand goes down. Another thing to consider is that companies might start to mechanize their planting/reaping process in order to make things more cost effective, and lay off human labor. Like any new policy that comes into play, there is controversy. On the one hand the people that work in the fields work extremely hard and should be paid sufficiently for the hard work that they do to feed the world, but some would argue that an effective increase in wages would have more consequences than meets the eye. 




Kailyn Wolf
Production Coordinator, MarCom

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Kailyn Wolf began her career at the Allen Lund Company in 2014 as a Production Coordinator within ALC Marketing and Communications. She has a BA in English from California State University of Channel Islands.

About Allen Lund Company: Specializing as a national third-party transportation broker with nationwide offices, the Allen Lund Company works with shippers and carriers across the nation to transport dry, refrigerated (specializing in produce), and flatbed freight; additionally, the Allen Lund Company has an international division, which is licensed by the FMC as an OTI-NVOCC #019872NF, and a logistics and software division, ALC Logistics. 
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