Archives for May 2014

It could use a thorough fisking, but it’s a beautiful sunny Saturday, so I don’t want to waste more than a few precious moments calling bullshit on the Seattle Times‘ latest bullshit editorial: “Redefine franchises under Seattle’s minimum-wage proposal.”

The politics of this decision is clear. Seattle is the first city to move swiftly toward a $15 minimum wage, but not the last. National labor activists will export the model created here. Treating franchises as what they are — small businesses — would eliminate the opportunity to burn [McDonald’s CEO Don] Thompson in rhetorical effigy elsewhere.

Well, the editors are half right. The goal always has been to export the model created here to the rest of the nation, so labor negotiators have been careful to avoid creating any anti-worker precedents. But the provision determining the size of a business based on the total number of FTEs of the national chain rather than that of the individual franchise or retail store has nothing to do with burning the McDonald’s CEO in effigy. It’s all about protecting the interests of the fast food workers whose courageous walkouts first sparked the $15 minimum wage movement.

Under the currently proposed ordinance, all fast food workers would be phased in to $15 by 2018. Count franchises as separate small businesses—as the Seattle Times proposes—and no fast food worker would be fully phased in until 2025. That’s bullshit.

While it is true that local franchisees operate as individual businesses, it is totally misleading to downplay their close connection to the national chains. Giant, multinational corporations like McDonald’s and Subway have defined the low-wage business model on which their franchisees operate. Seattle’s $15 minimum wage law puts pressure on local franchisees to put pressure on corporate headquarters to readjust that model so as to accommodate paying a living wage.

Do you really think that these national chains are going to abandon Seattle? Of course not. They will be forced to find a way to help their franchises here thrive, despite paying higher wages.

And that is a model that we sure as hell want to export to the rest of the nation.

Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter: How the far right took over the Republican party.

White House: West Wing Week.

Chris Hayes: The G.O.P.s hopeless fight against science:

David Pakman: Ted Cruz’s nutburger father blames end of school prayer for teen pregnancy & crime.

Sharpton: Rebrand update on the GOP’s new ‘leadership” team

VA Scandal:

• Mark Fiore: VA Hotline Updates.
• Young Turks: Shinseki resigns
• WaPo: Vets speak out on the VA scandal
• Young Turks: Sarah Palin on VA scandal, “Illegal immigrants get better health care than veterans”

Michael Brooks: Mitch McConnell’s amazingly deceptive ObamaCare distortion.

The G.O.P. summer of scandal.

Young Turks: Boehner, “I’m not qualified to debate science so I reject it!

Maddow: The latest Republican Senator to run away from CNN.

100 Seattle cops file lawsuit against city and Justice Dept.

ONN: The Onion Week in Review.

Chris Hayes: The GOP’s miserable campaign for ‘junk-food’ in schools.

Ari Melber: The Republican ‘overreach’ of 2014 could flop badly in the midterms.

Ann Telnaes: Manning Up.

The Only Way to Stop a Bad Guy With a Gun, is the Bad Guy With the Gun:

• Ann Telnaes: The Sick, the Bad, and the Ugly.
• David Pakman: The truth about gun safety
• Michael Brooks: Joe the Plumber to shooting victim family, “Your dead kid doesn’t trump my gun rights.”
• Thom: The truth about the second amendment
• Young Turks: Response to disgusting UC Santa Barbara shooter supporter
• FAUX News edits out grieving father’s criticism of NRA and politicians.
• David Pakman: Glenn Beck blames progressives on CA shooting
• Thom: Not one more

Mental Floss: 26 famous art heists.

Obama: Jay Carney steps down (via Crooks and Liars).

Suzie Sampson: Let it Go!:

Young Turks: Congressman Louie Gohmert calls gays intolerant, just like Nazis!.

Sharpton: KY Sen. Mitch McConnell doesn’t realize KYNECT is part of ObamaCare.

Ana Kasparian: “Abortion Barbie” posters hit LA streets.

Ann Telnaes: We’re Number 1…for the wrong reason.

Rich Webster: Marco Rubio is not an abortion scientist.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

I don’t know if any of you have the experience of trying to explain the fake superheros who “patrol” Seattle streets to your out of town friends and relatives? If you’re like me, you probably have to punctuate it with things like “I’m not making this up.” So I’m a bit loathe to point and laugh, if only because I’m not sure they would be able to tell the bad kind of attention from the good. But if the Rain City Superheros are going to disband, then thank goodness Seattlish is there to make fun of them.

Real-life “superhero” Phoenix Jones, who was once called “a giant bee with a latex fetish” by Daily Mail imprint Metro, has posted a long, meandering, allcaps Facebook post (as he is wont to do) announcing what seems like good news: His unilateral decision as Ultimate Pretend Superhero Overlord is that the Rain City Superhero Movement must die.

In case you were wondering if your voter’s pamphlet was going to be adorable, wonder no more (Spokesman-Review link). Good job to the young artist. And I suppose the democratic process.

I suppose considering the woes at the Veterans Administration, resigning is the honorable thing to do, and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki is nothing if not an honorable man. And so in the best “the buck stops here” tradition, Shinseki has resigned, despite the fact that many of the VA’s problems long predated him, and have only been exacerbated by congress’s failure to adequately fund the care of our returning veterans.

No doubt Republicans are gleeful at snagging an Obama administration scalp. That’s the way the game is played in the other Washington. But I do find it curious that the same Republicans who angrily demanded Shinseki’s resignation for failing to fix the VA, never demanded the resignations of the bank CEOs who destroyed our economy.

Weird.

“We won!” the headline screams in an email from 15Now.org celebrating the passage out of committee of Seattle’s imminent $15 minimum wage ordinance. If this isn’t an unambiguous declaration of victory, I don’t know what is:

Seattle has now become the first major U.S. city to pass a $15 an hour minimum wage. This historic achievement was the result of a powerful grassroots movement built from below. The message is clear: When we organize we can win!

15 Now spearheaded the campaign in Seattle, and now we are building 15 Now nationwide. We spent $150,000 to win in Seattle. To take this fight across the country we need to raise another $150,000. Please donate $15, or more, to help us end poverty wages.

So, does that mean they are dropping their charter amendment to pass an even more worker-friendly $15 minimum wage in Seattle? Not so fast.

“No decision has been made about the Charter Amendment yet,” 15 Now consultant Jeff Upthegrove said on Facebook in response to my earlier prediction that the group would pivot and move on. And despite the celebratory tone in the email above, along with the apparent shift toward a national focus, 15 Now volunteers are still gathering signatures.

I know the cool kids area all cynical about Kshama Sawant’s motives and actions, but she really has tried to help build a democratic organization, and for all her influence, it’s this democratic organization with all its various stakeholders that ultimately has to make the decision to pull the emergency brake on the ballot measure. That can’t happen overnight. Possibly not by Monday. Maybe not until they’re certain of whether there’s an opposing initiative headed to the ballot.

But while this compromise ordinance with its long phase-in and its temporary tip credit certainly doesn’t meet the strict definition of $15 now, don’t think for a minute that most of these activists don’t recognize what a huge political victory this is, and how much better off millions of hard-working Americans would be if the rest of the nation followed our example.

My mental health would be better if I didn’t go on the Washington State House and Senate GOP Caucus web pages. I mean it’s so nice out, and I could be enjoying a walk or a bike ride. Instead I’m pissed at a couple throwaway paragraphs some staffer for the Senate wrote. Really, I’m only taking issue with one paragraph. They’re making hay out of the fact that the state hasn’t done anything in the year since the I-5 bridge over the Skagit River collapsed.

It’s been one year since a truck with an oversized load struck a beam on the I-5 bridge over the Skagit River, sending a section plunging into the water below. But very little has changed to prevent another similar accident from happening again on any number of bridges across the state.

Agreed. It’s problematic that the state hasn’t fixed the maintenance backlog. Hey remember when the Democratic House passed a pretty conservative, freeway heavy, transit package that would have addressed some of that? Then remember how the GOP Majority Coalition GOP in the Senate didn’t pass a transit package? The GOP is the problem here.

I don’t know you guys. Do they think if they point out that there’s a problem people won’t notice their hand in causing the problem?

With a unanimous 7-0 vote today, the Seattle City Council passed out of committee a modified ordinance raising the city’s minimum wage to $15 for employees at some large businesses by 2017, with all other workers being phased in to an inflation adjusted equivalent by 2025. Despite a series of amendments weakening the proposal, and her strident advocacy for $15 Now, Socialist council member Kshama Sawant voted “yes.” So much for her being unable to compromise.

The council will officially vote on the ordinance at its Monday meeting, but that is just a formality. A $15 minimum wage has passed in Seattle.

An amendment giving city regulators authority to approve a teen sub-minimum wage mirroring that of the state (currently 85% of minimum for workers under age 16) was approved 4-3, with Sawant, Mike O’Brien, and Sally Bagshaw voting no. An amendment moving the start date from January 1, 2015 to April 1, 2015 also passed 4-3, with Sawant, O’Brien, and Harrell voting no. (Council members Nick Licata and Tom Rasmussen were both absent and on vacation.)

That said, several Sawant and O’Brien amendments strengthening enforcement did pass the council, as did a Sally Clark amendment that removed adjustment formulas for wage schedules post-2018 and replaced them with a hard schedule based on a presumed 2.4 percent inflation rate. Since inflation will likely average less than 2.4 percent over the next decade, this latter amendment will likely prove a minor net plus for workers.

This ordinance is far from perfect. But it is historic, as is the fact that it will pass the council by a unanimous vote. Furthermore, it is now possible that the ordinance might not see any serious challenge at ballot box. With Sawant on board, $15 Now will likely drop its initiative and pivot to defending the ordinance while pushing the movement nationwide. Meanwhile, the business-backed One Seattle has reportedly decided not to file an opposing initiative of its own.

So I guess a $15 minimum wage is “thinkable” after all.

National (and international) headlines will likely tout this as “the highest minimum wage in the world.” Well, maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised if our wage is surpassed by the time the first workers hit $15 in 2017, let alone by the time the wage is fully phased in in 2025. But Seattleites should kvell with pride at our leadership on this issue, and the role we’re playing in improving the lives of the working poor nationwide.

With the Seattle City Council meeting today to discuss (and possibly vote on) the proposed $15 minimum wage ordinance, I thought it useful to take a moment to drill down to the heart of the problem with a training wage: It disempowers workers by imposing a monetary penalty on those who choose to change jobs.

Think about it. Most fast food employees work multiple part-time jobs, so it might take four to six months (or even longer) to work through their training wage hours at each employer. But let’s say they are unhappy with their manager, or find another minimum wage job closer to home—switching jobs would restart their training wage clock to zero. That means another four to six months (or longer) of sub-minimum wage.

Employers know that. They know that after putting in their training wage time, employees will be loath to take a 25 percent pay cut for the privilege of working someplace else. This would shift the already lopsided balance of power in the employment relationship even more in favor of the employer. And if there wasn’t already such a large balance of power disparity, a minimum wage wouldn’t be necessary in the first place.

The fact is, it’s not really a training wage. Most minimum wage hires aren’t like apprentice plumbers or electricians, learning a new and complicated craft. They are service workers, largely in the restaurant, hospitality, and retail industry, who have prior experience doing the same work. It’s not like manning a drive-thru window at McDonald’s is all that much different from manning a drive-thru window at Burger King. Yet every new hire could be paid a “training wage” regardless of their real-world work experience.

A training wage serves as an artificial disincentive to labor mobility, and as such distorts the labor market in favor of the employer.

If you could effectively target a training wage to those few new hires with no relevant work experience, then that might be a different story. But you can’t. So in an industry with up to 200 percent annual turnover, it just makes no sense to financially penalize workers every time they change jobs.

 

– I’m not sure at what point we should just fire everyone in SPD who can’t follow the use of force policies.

– I didn’t even realize Tacoma Link not being free was on the table, but it’s nice to see businesses stepping up.

– Saying that women have put you in the friend zone implies that even a little non-sexytime time spent around women is tortuous. It implies that spending time around women, just talking to them or listening to them is time wasted. It implies that women are not women–not potentially interesting friends or colleagues, but sex robots who’ve granted or denied you permission to insert your girder.

– Today in Sally Clark is such a problem, Sally Clark is such a problem.

– Missing your bus stop is the worst.

The cheap labor capitalists on the Seattle Times editorial board are at it again:

THE comedian Louis C.K. has a brilliant rant about an airline passenger who bemoans problems with in-flight Internet. As Louis C.K. said, grumping about the airline Wi-Fi ignores the miracle of flight itself. “Everyone on every plane should just constantly be going, ‘Oh my God! Wow!’ You’re flying! You’re sitting in a chair, in the sky!”

We should all be impressed that the new generation of editors at this genteel family newspaper are young and hip enough to enjoy foul-mouthed Louis C.K.. Good for them. Though to be fair, from a consumer perspective, the airlines do suck way more than they have to, and as a technology, flying is no more magical than, say, electricity. So this is far from one of the comedian’s more brilliant rants.

Advocates pushing for a $15 minimum-wage are at a similar moment. The Seattle City Council, with backing from Mayor Ed Murray, is racing toward a radical economic policy that would have been unthinkable even a year ago.

Um, it was very thinkable even a year ago. In fact, a year ago, Kshama Sawant was running on a $15 minimum wage as the centerpiece of her insurgent Seattle City Council race at the same time organized labor was running a $15 minimum wage initiative in nearby SeaTac. And both of them won! That’s the very definition of “thinkable.” So I’m not sure why we should use the editors’ year-old paucity of imagination as an argument for watering down the measure now.

Yet Councilmember Kshama Sawant, and some of her allies in labor, are grumping about proposals to make this radical policy slightly more palatable for the business community.

“Grumping?” Really? Are they really equating defending the interests of working people with being grumpy? Maybe if Sawant just took a nap or something she’d stop sulking over efforts to pay teens and immigrants a sub-minimum wage… is that what the editors are implying? Remember: pro-worker = grumpy, pro-business = well rested! Way to infantilize the colored woman on the council, Seattle Times!

At the City Council’s first hearing on Murray’s $15 proposal last week, other council members pondered allowing a sub-minimum wage for 16- and 17-year-olds, as well as allowing a lower wage for a month or two of training.

Huh. How curiously nonspecific. A few paragraphs later the editors claim the sub-minimum wage is “usually defined as 85 percent of the standard wage,” but that’s not what state senate Republicans proposed last session. Their business-backed bill would have paid a training wage of 75 percent of the standard wage for the first 680 hours of work. That’s about four months of full time work. But as I explained at the time, it would pretty much mean that a college student working a part-time job would never earn the standard minimum wage.

Also screwed by a training wage would be every worker in high turnover industries like fast food and chain retail where annual turnover rates range up to 200 percent. With the typical worker getting no more than 30-hours a week, these jobs might never pay the full minimum wage. Which of course, is exactly the point.

The training wage idea is strongly backed by micro-businesses in Seattle’s ethnic minority community to facilitating training of new immigrants with limited English.

Except, the fact is, these ethnic minority owned “micro-businesses” (again, intentionally vague and nonspecific) are almost exclusively hiring immigrants from the same ethnic minority community. They speak the same language. So how exactly does paying them less money “facilitate” anything but poverty?

The teen wage idea acknowledges that employment rates for workers aged 16 to 19 in the Puget Sound have fallen by half since 2000, according to the Brookings Institution.

First, there is no correlation between teen employment and the minimum wage. None. Second, teen employment has fallen dramatically everywhere in the US since 2000, as our ever crappier economy has forced more and more adults into minimum wage jobs. What would the editors prefer—that a 26-year-old single mother lose her job so that her employer can pay a 16-year-old 25 percent less?

In response, Sawant said a lower minimum wage for teens means “condemning those low-wage workers to not having the best start in life.”

Sawant said, “The whole idea of $15 is to go forward. A training wage takes it backward.”

What’s missing from that analysis is this fact: Those earning a training wage would make slightly less than what would be the highest minimum wage of any city in the country.

And what’s missing from the Seattle Times analysis is the fact that the precedent of a training wage in Seattle would be seized upon by Republicans in Olympia (and some cheap-labor Democratic collaborators) as an opportunity to create a training wage statewide, cutting the already stagnant wages of tens of thousands of Washingtonians.

It may be an unwelcome burden to some, but Seattle’s $15 minimum wage ordinance is setting an example for the state and the nation. What we do here will surely influence what lawmakers do elsewhere. And that is what Sawant is talking about when she astutely warns that “a training wage takes it backward.”

Under Murray’s proposal, Seattle’s minimum wage would be more than $18 an hour by 2025 — $6 more than what the state minimum wage, which automatically rises with inflation, would be. Even with a subminimum wage — usually defined as 85 percent of the standard wage — teens and trainees would be making more than $15 an hour.

Okay, now the editors are just pulling numbers out of their collective ass, guessing at the training wage discount, mixing 2025 dollars with 2014 dollars in the same paragraph, and willfully inflating the inflation rate for maximum effect. By the same logic, we could just argue for leaving Seattle’s minimum wage law unchanged, because the status quo would have all workers making at least $15 an hour by 2034! Hooray!

The Seattle City Council should allow both. That would not make the council sellouts to business. It would acknowledge that Seattle is about to take off on a flight unfathomable just a year ago.

Again, it’s only “unfathomable” if you are totally out of touch with the will of Seattle voters.

Furthermore, sub-minimum teen and training wages are unacceptable to Sawant and organized labor not because they are “grumpy,” but because it would create a wage-stealing loophole big enough to drive a Walmart delivery truck through. Study after study finds that low-wage workers are routinely cheated, and these sub-minimum wage loopholes are nothing if not a recipe for cheating workers.

And finally, let’s be clear about what this teen and training wage proposal is really about. It’s not about accommodating immigrant-owned micro-businesses. It’s about destroying the delicate compromise worked out by the mayor’s Income Inequality Advisory Committee—a compromise that already takes 11 years to phase all workers in to what would be the equivalent of only $14.50 an hour in today’s dollars. Tack on a subminimum teen and training wage, and that whole deal falls apart.

Which I’m guessing is what the Seattle Times editorial board wants. Because I suppose it’s unthinkable to them that the far less business friendly $15 Now initiative could possibly pass.

– Public Internet is the fight of the future.

– Maybe it has something to do with the Memorial Day weekend or a rainy day after a long spell of nice weather, but there have been an outrageous number of serious traffic collisions in Seattle and around Washington State in the past day. Here’s just a sample:

– Shorter Commissioner Tom Mielke: We have to keep arresting people for marijuana related crimes because we don’t want additional policing. (h/t on the article)

– Mars Hill is such a problem (h/t)

– Solar Tax Quacks

– Here’s Some Real Talk: ‘If Gay Guys Said the Shit Straight People Say’

Well, duh…

Again, I applaud Seattle City Council member Tim Burgess for the admirable work he’s done pushing this issue forward. But I still find it a little stunning that it took this long for our local electeds to realize what a winning political issue this is.

No doubt support wouldn’t quite be this strong statewide, as the “why should I pay to educate your kids?” crowd is a bit stronger in the red counties (not to mention the “universal preschool is a government plot to indoctrinate our kids” loonies). But dollars to donuts support would be north of 65 percent, and by statewide standards that’s a landslide. So if I were Jay Inslee I’d seriously think about running on universal preschool in 2016.

How many more people have to die before Washington Post critic Anne Hornaday strikes again?

How many students watch outsized frat-boy fantasies like “Neighbors” and feel, as Rodger did, unjustly shut out of college life that should be full of “sex and fun and pleasure”? How many men, raised on a steady diet of Judd Apatow comedies in which the shlubby arrested adolescent always gets the girl, find that those happy endings constantly elude them and conclude, “It’s not fair”?

Movies may not reflect reality, but they powerfully condition what we desire, expect and feel we deserve from it. The myths that movies have been selling us become even more palpable at a time when spectators become their own auteurs and stars on YouTube, Instagram and Vine. If our cinematic grammar is one of violence, sexual conquest and macho swagger — thanks to male studio executives who green-light projects according to their own pathetic predilections — no one should be surprised when those impulses take luridly literal form in the culture at large.

I mean, if Hornaday can make an argument for blaming Elliot Rodger’s tragic murder spree on “the toxic double helix of insecurity and entitlement that comprises Hollywood’s DNA,” then I can certainly make a go at blaming such tragedies on dangerously complicit commentary that totally ignores the role of, you know, the gun.

Rodger reportedly stabbed to death his two roommates and a guest at his apartment, and then shot to death two women and a man before turning the gun on himself.

I’m not saying that Hornaday doesn’t have any valid points about sexism in Hollywood, and she does at least make a nod to the role of mental illness in this tragedy. But she doesn’t even mention the role of the gun, or the role of our nation’s stupidly dangerous gun culture. And in that sense she helps contribute to the enabling of future such tragedies.

The Seattle Times has a feature on 82-year-old Al Ramey, who’s been driving Metro buses for 61 years, making him the longest tenured transit driver in the nation. Which is great, and all. But this particular section jumped out at me:

At age 82, he continues to drive one daily round-trip on the popular Route 150, connecting Kent, Southcenter, Sodo and downtown Seattle.

The longtime Burien resident officially retired in 2000, and currently receives a $2,795 monthly pension, records say. Ramey says his extra income from part-time driving pays for vacation cruises with his wife.

“And I’m not a sit-at-home guy,” he says.

So, if he’s been driving for 61 years, and he officially retired in 2000, that means he’s getting only $2,795 a month in pension benefits after 47 years of full-time service? That seems curiously out of line with the allegedly sky-high pay and extravagant benefits on which the paper’s editorial board disingenuously pins all of Metro’s financial problems.

Surely, $2,795 a month isn’t too much to ask in return for a half-century of driving a bus. Doesn’t sound extravagant to me.

(And as to the inevitable comments in the thread about double-dipping or something, Metro couldn’t operate its peak service without part-time drivers. If it’s not Ramey behind the wheel, it’ll be somebody else.)