My response is: We would love to be able to offer $35 an hour as starting pay, but are you in turn willing to pay premium prices for your next roof replacement? A lot of customers we get through online lead services like Thumbtack are people looking for the best deal. They want to collect proposals from four to five businesses and most of the time choose the cheapest one.

We want to compensate our employees fairly for the work they do and the risk they take, but we wouldn’t be able to stay in business if we doubled the hourly rate. It’s not just their hourly wage that becomes a factor. Insurance in the roofing industry is extremely expensive. Not only are we required to carry expensive general liability insurance, we also have to have workers’ compensation insurance for employees on the roof. That comes to 40 percent of their wage. And on top of that, there’s payroll tax.

We also do a lot of insurance restoration work like hail damage claims, and in those cases the insurance provider determines what they pay for labor and we work with it. If we come back saying it’s going to cost us way more on labor to do the job, the homeowner isn’t likely to want to cover the extra cost, especially not above their out-of-pocket deductible.

What do you think would happen if you did raise your prices to pay your workers more?

At the end of the day, if I were to say, “We’re a great company; we pay people double the prevailing wage, pay our insurance and taxes, buy the best materials for your house, and we give back to our community (we donate a percentage of our profits to our raise-a-roof initiative to donate roofs to families in need), but that means we’re going to charge you double for your roof,” I’m sure people (like the emailer) aren’t going to say: “Oh, that’s so great they pay their employees $35 an hour. Let’s write them a check for twice as much as their competitor because it makes us feel good!” They’re going to do what’s best for their bank account and their budget.

If you want to have lower-wage people paid more, you have to expect the price of the services to cost more; it’s not going to just come out of nowhere. That’s where the literal buck stops because no one wants to pay more of their hard-earned dollars. We still want to make a profit and not risk losing business because of increased prices.

Lastly, I would be willing to make a large bet that even if we did post a job for $35 an hour to do roofing in Omaha (it was 92 degrees this week), it would still be slim pickings. That’s why for us the H-2B program is a win-win: We get great workers whom we pay well above the minimum wage, and they are low-risk temporary immigrants who come here to do the job and go home to their families at the end of the season.