Should farmworkers make $26 an hour in Santa Barbara County?
CAUSE (the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy) thinks so.
“If you asked any farmworker in our county what’s the biggest challenge they face, it’s low wages,” CAUSE Co-Executive Director Hazel Davalos told the county Board of Supervisors on Aug. 27.
Of course it is. This place is expensive. Ask anyone what they think the issues are and they’ll answer: low wages and a high cost of living. Food is expensive. Housing is expensive. Gas is expensive.
The average hourly wage for teachers is $29 an hour—and they need a master’s degree. Should a farmworker make almost as much as a teacher, who is required to have at least a bachelor’s degree and be certified, who is responsible for your children almost eight hours of every day? Probably not, and they also complain about low wages.
For an economy to be sustainable, CAUSE, it takes many things. Worker wages aren’t the only thing to consider. How those impact farms, the produce that ends up on market shelves, and how much people are paying for food are also things that impact economies and determine their sustainability. Wages don’t live in a vacuum.
Even though we all wish they did. We could just make as much money as we want, then, and it wouldn’t impact what we pay for goods and services! Wouldn’t that be nice?
The question of a sustainable economy is about everything, including the intersection of capitalism and the government and whether we think the government should step in to regulate wages for specific industries, picking and choosing who gets to make more money while leaving others behind. Clearly, in California, we do. Fast food workers now make $20 an hour—except if they work at Panera (thanks Gavin Newsom!)—which is wild.
It comes down to how much we think food should cost. Everybody is impacted by that.
“Money,” as Santa Maria’s 2nd District City Councilmember Mike Cordero put it. “The common denominator in solving these problems is money, and none of us ever have enough money.”
He wasn’t talking about farmworker wages, of course, so it’s an out-of-context quote. The Media is at it again! Sue me! (Don’t really sue me, please.) But the sentiment applies. Money is really what an economy comes down to. It’s also what homeless services come down to, which is what Cordero was talking about.
Santa Maria doesn’t have enough money to pay for its own homeless services, so it relies on the county to do that dirty work—something the two candidates running against him don’t like. Political will and available government funding go hand-in-hand, wouldn’t you say?
Cordero sounds like he’d rather spend the city’s money elsewhere. Plus, Cordero added, homelessness is difficult to come up with a solution for. Right? But we’ve got to try, amirite?
We do, and that’s what Sentinel Peak Resources is doing. It’s trying to truck oil through Santa Barbara County after watching ExxonMobil fail miserably when it tried to do the same.
The difference between the two proposals? Sentinel Peak already has the ability to truck oil because it’s already operating oil facilities in the county. What it needs is a permit to build a truck rack. m
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