POLICIES HAVE THE POTENTIAL...
to be both helpful and harmful. When deployed appropriately, they can create healthful boundaries and manage expectations; they can uplift, protect, and advocate. And yet, they have their limitations. They do not always honor the nuance of complex situations.
Last week, we recapped our ever-evolving policies toward solidifying a Good Food Job as one that pays a decent wage. We've been scaling up our minimum hourly requirement, with the intent to post only those jobs that pay a minimum of $15 / hour, starting in January 2022.
Our efforts come from an equity mindset - creating value for the worker, and ensuring that there is equal access to the knowledge that comes from food jobs, by nature of providing a solid base wage.
As we continue to correspond daily with employers about whether their positions comply with our requirements, we must acknowledge a conundrum: this policy disproportionately affects many of the small businesses that we aim to support - most specifically, small farms and independent restaurants.
As we wrestle with how these new policies impact small businesses, we want to share some truths that keep coming up for us (with much gratitude to the many folx who have reached out over the last few months to give us feedback and perspective):
1. There are many systemic issues that need to be addressed.
With regard to farming, the equation doesn't add up. Either small sustainable farmers need to be subsidized for the non-tangible benefits that they provide (think clean air and water, land preservation, carbon sequestration, maintaining bucolic landscapes, providing nutrient dense food, etc.) and / or large industrial farms need to be charged for the ills that they cause the world (pollution via pesticides, taking more from the land than they give back, depleting soils, etc.) which often allow them to operate at a scale that provides lower priced products.
In the case of restaurants, tipping has created a system of reliance on lower overhead for labor. But tipping quite literally tips the scales of power away from the people providing service. Because this is the norm, cultural shift creates an incredible hurdle, and there is still a stigma attached to higher menu prices and / or a service fee.
In both farming and restaurants, the end goal is to adjust consumer values so that the price of food more closely aligns with the cost to produce it and serve it.
2. And yet the issue of fair wages can't simply be solved by raising prices. Doing so causes a different set of access issues, with regard to people-and-planet-healthy food going only to those who can afford it. Those consumer values need to be adjusted to encompass meeting all people at an equitable point - one example of this is a sliding scale of pricing that we've seen modeled in some businesses and organizations - so that food access truly becomes a human right. We recognize the scale of the problem, and know that it won't happen overnight, nor will it rely on one individual or organization for effectiveness.
3. The above points touch on so many issues of social justice and equity, but one that we keep returning to is the imbalance of power and equity between business owners and employees. Farms and restaurants are prime examples of this in part because they are low-wage, hard-working positions, imbued with a passion for the work and its intangible benefits.
What frequently goes unstated is that the business owners in each situation hold the kind of equity and access to opportunity that many of their team members strive for - such as ownership of land or ability to take risk through entrepreneurship - but the jobs they provide don't allow team members to build that same kind of equity or access. There are many examples of employers breaking the mold on this, and we continue to look to them as models for how it can be done differently.
4. We need to honor the labor of these industries. Whether physical and / or emotional labor, working in the field or waiting tables is some of the hardest work one can do. These professions deserve the rights and protections afforded to so many other areas of employment - paid time off, sick days, and benefits, to name a few, and if we collectively as a society want to support them then the weight of this burden can not solely fall on each individual operator.
It would be easy to subscribe to the myth of a one-size-fits-all solution, but what we have learned about policy shifts is that although such myths are tempting, it's more useful to continually look for the lessons and teachers in that myth, rather than expect it to be a neat and convenient ending, in and of itself.
We will not solve these issues overnight, but we will continue to shed light on them and help pave the way for change.
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