Just Fare makes our starting wage a living wage, raising it to $22/hour
Just Fare makes our starting wage a living wage, raising it to $22/hour
The Bay Area is beautiful - we are tremendously lucky to call it our home. It is diverse, active, and green. It is also expensive. Expensive to live, and expensive to do business. Prior to the pandemic, rent prices had climbed to be some of the highest in the country; as we start to emerge, more people find themselves unhoused and unable to cover the cost of basic necessities.
Here in the Bay Area, and no doubt many other places in this country, it is possible to work a full-time job and still be unable to afford to live. That is simply unjust.
In 2016 we launched workplace catering and started employing hourly workers. This change prompted some important conversations about our priorities. Food businesses, and many hourly jobs, don’t typically pay a living wage.
A “living wage,” according to MIT, is defined as “the hourly rate that an individual in a household must earn to support themselves.” Because this term is broad and does not account for many things, like children, or the increased financial hurdles and hardships faced by marginalized peoples, we use the term generally here.
We wanted to navigate this journey differently. Anchoring our practices to well-developed values took center stage for us. Since then, we have ritualistically evaluated our practices to course correct and ensure that our business remains proof of our values. It is an easy thing to talk about, but it is not an easy thing to do.
As we speak in 2021, restaurants and culinary businesses all over the country are struggling to re-hire and maintain a full staff, in part because food industry employees are faced with the choice to put their health and wellbeing at risk for wages they can’t afford to live on. The choice may seem simple, but when it’s a matter of survival it is not. No one should be put in this position.
The choice for us as a society comes down to this: if we want to be able to eat out, if we want to continue to have Friday night dinner delivered, if we want to have our events catered and our workplace kitchens stocked — we are going to have to start doing things differently. We are going to have to start paying culinary and hospitality workers a wage that allows them to do this work and do more than just survive.
As we reflect on the last year, one that included a global pandemic and saw the main source of our income, our workplace catering arm, pivot and become a community kitchen while we waited for workplaces to resume, reevaluating our business meant diving deeper than ever before. As we come up to the surface it is clear: our values matter more now than ever. We must continue to prioritize our employees’ well-being alongside company profits. It’s often the hardest line to toe in a social-mission business, but this is who we are, who we always have been, and the reason we do business. It sounds inspirational (and we hope it is) but the reality also means a lower profit margin, adjusting our prices, and level setting executives’ wages.
As a relatively new employee at Just Fare, I can personally attest that with my previous employers, these things were in fact much more important than treating people right. This is the first time I haven’t felt like I needed to beg for a $0.25 raise, or that I really should just “be thankful that I have a job.” It’s an entirely different feeling to have my employer respect my time, value my contributions, and to compensate me as such. My hope is that, by witnessing Just Fare’s values — and this is the key part: how they are actively expressed through its business practices — other businesses will see that it is possible for them to be agents of justice, healing, and change within our communities. And employees will accept no less. There’s really no other viable option!
So, in spite of the challenges of the last year, and in alignment with our values, we have decided to raise our employees’ starting hourly wage to $22/hour.
This is more than $5/hour greater than the minimum wage in our town of Emeryville, California, which, at $16.84, also happens to have the highest minimum wage in the entire country. The living wage for Alameda County, where Emeryville is located, is $21.88. This increase means that we’ll spend an additional $100,000 annually on people expense across our business based on our current number of employees.
The Fare team at the end of 2019 — these are a few of the humans responsible for our delicious food and incredible service!
Our goal in paying a living wage is to generate more wealth, autonomy, and equity within our community. This will always be a moving target. Right now, we want to acknowledge that this is a huge accomplishment for us, and one that we believe is important to talk about. It is a coming home to the promise of our values after a year and a half of seemingly inescapable uncertainty. It is something we hope sparks discussion and ripples change throughout our industry.
And we hope it sends a message to all those reading that YES, it is in fact possible to do business in this country and treat people well. Actually, we are quite sure that, in the future that we are co-creating, this is the only way to do business.
If you’re still reading this, thank you. Please share this with your circles! Join us in creating a more just future for culinary and hospitality workers, a more just future for us all, and an abundance of delicious options for Tuesday’s lunch meeting and Friday night dinners.