Buchi to Firestorm: It is our intention to have integrity and to support our community

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Here’s the Buchi owners’ response to recent controversy over their living wage certification.

12/23/2010

To the Workers of Firestorm Cafe & Books,

Thank you for your letter.  We had already made the decision to withdraw from Living Wage certification.  The situation could have been handled better on all sides, but Kila and another employee did bring Living Wage to the forefront of our attention.  

To clarify, we did not seek out the certification.  Rather, we were informed that our existing pay rate met the criteria, and it was not a hard decision for us to say “sure, we will support the living wage effort by putting the symbol on our bottle.”  Then we went back to being our overly busy, understaffed selves and didn’t think about it again.  

We were totally unaware that we had a 50 cent/hour discrepancy between our Living Wage application and what we were paying until very recently.  It was an honest mistake caused by confusion in a meeting where we were discussing pay rates.  The person who filled out our Living Wage application mistakenly thought we’d decided on $10.50.  We apologize for this mistake.  Our agreements with our workers were $10.00/hour and we have always paid them what we agreed to.

We think the Living Wage question was a good one, and after reflecting on it we agree that non-essentials, including Buchi, should not be counted as compensation for a program that’s supposed to be based on meeting the basic necessities. We feel that the Living Wage policy which currently allows these non-essentials to be counted as part of wages, should be changed.

We can understand how Kila interpreted events the way she did, but her accusation that we fired her in retaliation for her call to Just Economics is simply not true.  By law, we can’t discuss the details of our relationship, but the decision to ask her to leave came before she made us aware of her call.  In fact, another worker who questioned our living wage qualification still works with us.

On a side note, we’d like to mention that we’re not an established company raking in money.  We’ve been in business almost two years.  In that period, we’ve dedicated all of our time and our life savings to build this company.  We still can not afford to pay ourselves even close to minimum wage, let alone a living wage.  Hopefully that will change soon, but money is not our primary motivation.  We despise big companies who make all of their decisions based on the bottom line, and do not agree with their values.  It is our intention to have integrity and to support our community in in every way possible.  And yes, we do publicly commit to support workers freedom of speech and association.

Jeannine and Sarah