Creating Good Jobs - Wage and Benefits Increases for our Team

Since our founding, Wash Cycle Laundry has focused on our triple bottom line mission: People, Planet, and Profit. By working with us as your laundry and linen service, you are directly helping the people that make up our team. We wanted to share with you some recent changes we've made to our compensation structure, so you can learn more about the impact of each of your dollars.

1. Over the past year, we've increased both the minimum and average wage for Wash Cycle Team members.  The starting hourly rate for our team in Philly is $10.10/hour, which is 40% above the city's mininum and in line with President Obama's suggestion for the new national minimum wage. However, our average wage at Wash Cycle Laundry is even higher -- $11.45/hour as of July 1, 2015. This marks an increase in wages of 15% over the past year.
2. We're enrolling our team in health benefits.  Starting in July 2015, we've begun enrolling our full-time employees in health benefits. Even though the Affordable Care Act does not require a company of our size to offer benefits, we still think this is a pretty important thing to do!
3. Our employees are eligible for paid sick leave. We participated in the Mayor's Task Force on Paid Sick Leave Policies in Philadelphia, and helped shape the new regulations offering this benefit. Now, our hourly employees accrue paid time off at a rate that exceeds our city's standards. Beyond taking care of our team (or helping them take care of their families), this is ensuring you have healthy people folding your laundry and riding it back to you on a bicycle.

In addition to these three new improvements, we've shifted our cycling team to a Route Management model. Seen throughout the linen industry, this means that we have a dedicated cyclist for each customer. You'll have  a familiar face that knows the ins and outs of our account, and the fastest way to get there (while observing all traffic laws, of course.) And it bears repeating, in case you weren't already familiar with our hiring goals, that we were founded with the intention to provide jobs for our community's most vulnerable job seekers. Nearly 50% of our team have a history of incarceration, welfare dependence, addiction, or homelessness. Our retention and rate of promotion within the team prove that this mission is more than good-natured, it's good business. In 2013, Gabriel Mandujano was appointed by Mayor Michael A. Nutter to the board of Philadelphia Works, the agency that administers $50 million of State and Federal WIA and TANF funding on behalf of the City of Philadelphia.