While some critics view the living wage as do-gooder mumbo-jumbo, Ms. Castillo views it as a godsend. In her years earning the minimum wage, she said she felt stuck on a treadmill — never able to advance, often borrowing to buy necessities.

“A lot of times there was only enough for my kids, and I’d go to bed hungry,” she says. “But now I have money to buy meat, oatmeal and milk.”

With higher wages, she says, her family can move up in the world. She is now able to borrow $1,000 to begin building her future home and feels able to fulfill her dreams of becoming a minister at her local evangelical church.

“I hope God will continue to bless the people who brought this factory to our community,” she says.

IN many ways, the factory owes its existence to an incident a decade ago, when Joe Bozich was attending his son’s high school basketball game. His vision suddenly became blurred, and he could hardly make out his son on the court. A day later, he couldn’t read.

A doctor told him the only thing that would cause his vision to deteriorate so rapidly was a brain tumor.

So he went in for an M.R.I. “My doctor said, ‘The good news is you don’t have a brain tumor, but the bad news is you have multiple sclerosis,’ ” he says.

For three days, he couldn’t see. He worried that he would be relegated to a wheelchair and ventilator and wouldn’t be able to support his family. At the same time, a close friend and his brother died, and then one of his children began suffering from anxiety.