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Jackson Lab Boosts Pay for Hourly Workers

Bar Harbor-based Jackson Laboratory is giving its hourly workers — some 600 of them — a raise.

Jackson Lab is a private nonprofit that focuses on genetic research — and on the provision of laboratory mice to labs around the world. Officials say the lowest hourly was adjusted upward, as of last week, to $15 an hour, and that some 43 percent of the workforce in Maine and around the country will get a boost.

“This was driven by really doing the right thing by the people who are doing the right thing for us,” says Charless Hewett, the lab’s chief operating officer.

Hewett says workers at the lowest end of the wage scale, most of them in animal care, are getting a 30 percent pay hike. And he says their productivity in recent years has boosted the bottom line enough to justify the pay hikes without having to shave other operating expenses.

Retaining workers, he adds, hasn’t been a problem, but better pay could help with recruitment.

“We are who we hire. Finding good people is always a challenge,” he says. “Our upcoming move to Ellsworth will help with that because it will help us to draw people from further afield.”

The company recently purchased a former Lowe’s department store in Ellsworth, where it plans to move some of its mouse production in 2018.

The company’s most recent budget rose to $294 million. The wage hike will add $3.8 million to its payroll costs.

Correction: Jackson Lab's chief operating officer is Charles Hewett, not Hewitt.

A Columbia University graduate, Fred began his journalism career as a print reporter in Vermont, then came to Maine Public in 2001 as its political reporter, as well as serving as a host for a variety of Maine Public Radio and Maine Public Television programs. Fred later went on to become news director for New England Public Radio in Western Massachusetts and worked as a freelancer for National Public Radio and a number of regional public radio stations, including WBUR in Boston and NHPR in New Hampshire.