Maine's last minimum wage increase took effect this past New Year’s Day, upping the state's minimum hourly pay rate from $14.65 to $15.10. It also increased minimum wage for service workers to $7.55 per hour.
When I was in high school the term used to describe people earning $7.55 per hour was “filthy rich.” The year I turned 16 the minimum wage was less than 24 percent of what it is today. Where I grew up there were two job choices for high school students who, like me, lacked a driver’s license and/or access to a car. One was cutting grass for the recreation department. The other: performing manual labor for one of the two orchards in town.
I picked fruit, pulled weeds, dug irrigation ditches, and performed other duties the fulltime employees at Aspetuck Valley Orchards considered too menial or distasteful to handle themselves. Many of those disagreeable chores made me wonder if it was worth getting out of bed each morning to earn a mere $1.85 per hour.
One particularly loathsome job was harvesting peaches, which then as now ripen during the hottest portion of the summer. Peach pickers perspire heavily while they work, meaning the microscopic bits of peach fuzz on our fingers would migrate via the rivers of sweat that cascaded down our bodies, ultimately settling anywhere there was a fold in the skin. By day’s end I felt like I had rolled around naked in fiberglass insulation for an hour or so, and it took a great deal of painful scrubbing to rid myself completely of the itch.
One morning a group of us learned to our dismay that the professional Jamaican peach pickers we worked alongside were making a princely 35 cents per basket of peaches picked, while the rest of us earned the paltry minimum wage. Our boss, leering evilly, offered to pay us at the same rate as the imported pickers that day. What we learned: like most jobs, picking peaches isn’t as easy as the pros make it seem, nor (at least in our case) was it anywhere near as lucrative to get paid at the same rate they did.
Another repulsive chore was cleaning the cider mill. Fulltime employees made cider every late-summer or early-autumn Friday afternoon, cleaning the mill when they finished. However, when 4:30 arrived, if the job wasn’t completed, the room was locked up until the following morning. What awaited the unfortunate weekend employee assigned to clean it 15 hours later was the overpowering smell of rotting, fermenting apples, and also hordes of yellow jackets big enough to wear license plates and mean enough to have made them. On the too-frequent Saturdays I was assigned that particular chore I knew it was going to be a grim morning, possibly because the boss would ask me for names of my next of kin before handing me a hose and a raincoat, and then telling me to get started.
Despite these and other odious tasks I always worked my hardest, and some months later the orchard’s head honcho confirmed that tirelessly toiling without complaint was indeed the right thing to do. Telling me he was impressed with my effort and good attitude, the orchard’s Big Kahuna informed me he was raising my wages by 15 cents per hour.
Ecstatic, I shared the exciting news at the dinner table that night, but my usually supportive mother seemed oddly underwhelmed. Puzzled, I asked why she wasn’t more impressed. “Read this,” she said, handing me that day’s newspaper.
The front-page headline read “Minimum Wage for Agricultural Workers Rises to $2 Per Hour.”
Andy YoungReturn to main page
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