As a Portland Metro Janitorial Service provider, we’re impacted by the 2016 legislation to increase the Portland minimum wage by $1.50. This change took place last Saturday. This move is a positive for all of our staff, since regardless of their wage before the minimum wage increase, their income has gone up. We feel strongly that you can’t increase the wage of the newest employees without honoring the service and dedication of the longer-term more experienced members of our team; it breaks the “contract of faith” longer term employees have with a business, so across the board our cleaning crews have benefited from the minimum wage increase.
As a business, this increase represents a significant cost in labor cost, and as a labor driven business, that impacts our bottom line. Unlike some of our competitors though, we didn’t take the “opportunity” to hike up our rates, passing blame to the legislation to unhappy customers. Instead, we did undertake a thorough analysis of all components of cost in our business, looking at where we could make efficiencies and to see if we could offset any of the cost increase in labor. Of course, at the end of the day, our costs have risen, but whereas many of our competitors applied the full percentage of the wage increase to their entire contract, we realise that labor s but one factor of our operating costs. As a result of this, our contract increases will be very modest.
We’re not in the business of gouging customers; we’re in the business of cleaning and providing the best value cleaning we can. We do this by training and keeping great janitors and by serving our clients through transparency and accountability. We hope you appreciate this stance and look forward to serving you for years to come.