On October 1st Maine’s minimum wage rose 25 cents, to seven dollars per hour. While this doesn’t necessarily do anything for farm workers, cabdrivers, domestic workers, camp counselors, and others whose jobs are exempt from the new regulation, it’s good news for nearly 26,000 Mainers who according to the state department of labor currently earn the minimum wage.
Where I lived 35 years ago people we had a word for people who earned seven dollars per hour. It was “wealthy.” When I turned 16 the minimum wage was less than thirty percent of what it is today. In the small town where I grew up there were two jobs available for high school students: cutting grass for the town’s recreation department or doing farm work for the local apple orchard. The one and only store in town was permanently staffed by its cantankerous 85 year old proprietor and his equally cranky 82 year old wife.
My first job was at the orchard. I was a manual laborer who picked fruit, pulled weeds, dug irrigation ditches, tore apart splintered apple crates and fashioned new ones out of the usable pieces, and performed other duties the fulltime employees considered too menial or distasteful to handle themselves. Many of those chores were so disagreeable that I sometimes questioned whether or not it was worth getting out of bed in the morning to earn my lofty $1.85 per hour.
One particularly loathsome job was harvesting peaches. Then as now peaches tended to ripen during the hottest portion of the summer, so it wasn’t surprising that the pickers perspired heavily. That meant that the microscopic bits of peach fuzz on our picking fingers would migrate via the rivers of sweat that cascaded down our bodies and settle pretty much anywhere there was a fold in our skin. By day’s end a peach picker felt like someone who had rolled around naked in fiberglass insulation for an hour or so. It took a great deal of painful scrubbing to rid oneself completely of the itch. One day a group of us found out that the professional peach pickers from Jamaica who worked at the farm were making a princely 35 cents per basket of peaches picked, while the rest of us were slaving for the paltry minimum wage. The field boss, tired of our complaining, offered us the opportunity to get paid at the same rate as the imported pickers were. The lesson we learned that day was that like most other jobs, picking peaches isn’t as easy (or in our case as lucrative) as the pros make it seem.
Another repulsive chore was cleaning the cider mill. Fulltime employees made cider every Friday afternoon in the fall, and when time allowed they cleaned the mill themselves. However, if 4:30 arrived and the job wasn’t completed, the room where the apples were pressed was locked up until sunup the following day. What awaited the unfortunate employee who had to clean it 15 hours later was the overpowering smell of rotted, fermenting pressed apples, and also hordes of yellow jackets big enough to wear license plates and mean enough to have made them. On more than one occasion I arrived at 7:30 AM on a Saturday to discover that I was the unfortunate employee who had been nominated to make that disgusting cider room shine. You knew when the boss asked you for the names of your next of kin as he was handing you a hose and a raincoat that it was going to be an unpleasant morning
Despite these and other odious tasks I never did any less than my best at work, and some months after my employment began the orchard’s head honcho confirmed that working hard without complaint (save for the peach-picking incident) was indeed the right thing to do. Telling me he was impressed with my honest toil and good attitude, my boss rewarded me for my diligence by raising my wages 15 cents per hour. I was ecstatic, and after work raced home to tell my mother.
When I gave Mom the news she was far less overwhelmed than I’d anticipated she’d be. Puzzled by her indifference, I asked why she wasn’t a bit more impressed by my accomplishment. “Read this,” she said, handing me that day’s newspaper. I glanced down and saw a headline that read, “Minimum wage for Agricultural Workers Rises to $2 per Hour.”
Andy YoungReturn to main page
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