(C) Daily Yonder - Keep it Rural
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The Price of Picking Blueberries [1]
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Date: 2023-11-30 13:36:28.159000+00:00
Milbridge, Maine, is pretty quiet for a lot of the year. A handful of businesses dot the downtown, which runs for less than half a mile along Route 1 as the road winds its way toward the Canadian border. With fewer than 1,400 residents, Milbridge doubles its size in the late summer and then again in the fall — first for blueberry season and then for wreath processing in October. Another key industry is the nearly year-round processing of sea cucumbers, which can help make stocks for stews.
When Juana Rodriguez-Vazquez got here with her family in 1998, she was in elementary school — one of only about 150 kids her age in Milbridge at the time — but she’d already seen much of the U.S. Orange season in Florida, apple harvest in Michigan, blueberry picking in Maine. The farms around Milbridge are dependent on people like the Rodriguez-Vazquez family because there aren’t enough residents to support the workload.
“When I was a kid, when we were traveling, I remember being out there in the fields with apples and oranges and green beans,” Rodriguez-Vazquez said. “A lot of the housing for employees, their housing is pretty much out in the fields.”
This October, about 1,000 workers arrived in the Millbridge area for the wreath season, just as the state’s Department of Labor (DOL) was hosting hearings and discussions on whether farmworkers should be included in the state’s minimum wage law.
They have long been excluded from the state’s regulations for minimum wage, an issue that lawmakers sought to address by passing a law that would have raised the base pay from the federal rate of $7.25 per hour to $13.80 per hour. But although the law passed, Democratic Gov. Janet Mills vetoed it earlier this summer, opting instead to write an executive order that would create a committee to make recommendations about how to compromise on the issue by increasing the minimum wage while maintaining industry desires, like a potential youth exception.
It’s the second time Mills has vetoed a bill that would have added minimum wage protections for farmworkers. But advocates for workers argue the process is flawed from the start, failing to provide legal protections for workers that speak out — favoring employers, who have freedom to speak publicly about their needs and who have the legal ability to fire workers who advocate for higher wages.
As a teenager, Rodriguez-Vazquez worked during each season that came up. Raking blueberries, making wreaths for a company that at the time supplied L.L. Bean, and processing sea cucumbers.
“They’re still getting the same pay that I got when I was 15,” Rodriguez-Vazquez said of the wreath workers working in Washington County.
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[1] Url:
https://ambrook.com/research/legislation/maine-janet-mills-farmworker-minimum-wage
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