Goldy

We all know Seattle area rents are going through the roof. There’s no surprise there. But what really jumped out at me from the latest statistics was this:

Apartments in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood saw the biggest increase in rents. The average asking rent was 12.3 percent higher over the quarter, rising to $1,628.

But Ballard also had a vacancy rate of 8.6 percent, the highest in Seattle. And when new apartments that just opened are included, the vacancy rate shoots up to 18 percent.

The apartment boom in Ballard has led to a doubling of the inventory over the past six years, said Tom Cain, head of Apartment Insights Washington. When the units now being built are complete, Ballard’s inventory will have quadrupled.

New units rent for a premium, and they’re part of what’s driving up market rents, Cain said.

Listen to the free market folks and you’d think the solution to Seattle’s worsening affordable housing crisis is simple: get out of the way of developers and let them build more units faster! And that somewhat makes sense. Supply and demand and all that. And yet the neighborhood with highest vacancy rate and one of the biggest booms in new construction, is also the neighborhood with the fastest rising rents. How does that work?

The problem is that the market incentivizes developers to focus on meeting the demand of high-end renters to the detriment of middle and low income households. The cost of borrowing and the cost of land remains the same no matter what you choose to build. Given these and other fixed costs, there’s just more profit to squeeze out of any given lot by catering to the highest end of the market the neighborhood will support. And so that’s what developers tend to do.

Thus if we rely on the market to address affordability in Seattle, it will necessarily constrain the growth in luxury housing prices first, before saturation at the high end of the market ultimately forces developers to target their product further down the income scale.

Yes, rents of older housing stock rise more slowly than rents of new, and all this expensive new housing will eventually be old. But as these units age, unless their rents increase more slowly than growth in median income, these apartments will never become more affordable.

Affordability is not just a product of how much we build, but of what we build. And private developers simply aren’t focused on meeting the demand for low and middle income housing.

Yes, the city should always strive to make the permitting process faster, cheaper, and more efficient. And we certainly need to let go of our nimbyist fetish with building heights. Seattle must become a taller, denser city. But simply getting out of the way of developers won’t solve our problem. If we can’t find a way to effectively incentivize developers to meet the demand for low and middle income housing, then the city is going to have to find a way to tap into its own access to capital markets to build more low and middle income housing itself.

Swim at your own risk?

The family of a man who drowned a year ago in the swimming pool at the Quality Inn & Suites Seattle Center has filed a wrongful-death suit against the owners of the hotel, claiming poor maintenance made the water unusually murky and contributed to a botched rescue operation by firefighters.

[…] The hotel operators, Seattle Hospitality Inc., last Friday filed a third-party complaint seeking to draw the city of Seattle into the suit as a second defendant, claiming the Seattle Fire Department failed to conduct an adequate water rescue and didn’t find Deboch in the pool after firefighters were summoned to the hotel.

Except it’s hard to perform an adequate water rescue when the water is so filthy that you can’t see the victim.

[…] Seattle firefighters arrived within 2½ minutes of the call, according to Fire Department records. They searched the pool using a rescue hook and thermal-imaging camera but found no sign of Deboch.

A Fire Department report states that firefighters “believed they were visually able to confirm that no victim was in the pool” and thought they could see the pool’s bottom.

A civilian also got in the pool to search for Deboch, but no firefighters entered the water, according to the report.

I worked three summers as a lifeguard (i.e. pool boy) at swimming pools at four different residential apartment buildings in Philadelphia, and I can tell you that we would’ve been fired had we allowed the water to get anywhere near that sort of condition. We checked chlorine and pH levels throughout the day, and would clear swimmers out of the pool if the chemicals ever got out of whack. Murkiness wasn’t even an option.

“There were more than a dozen people allowed back in the pool to swim,” Micah LeBank, the attorney representing Deboch’s family, said in an interview this week. “The hotel let people get back into that murky water and swim around, unable to see the body.”

That’s disgusting.

When Deboch still wasn’t found, his friends searched the pool again.

Tom Fleming, a 51-year-old off-duty firefighter vacationing at the hotel, joined in the search and cleared the pool of swimmers, according to the Fire Department report.

The Seattle Times reported last year that after about a 10-minute search Fleming felt something in the center of the deep end of the pool. He asked the hotel to turn off the pump and was able to pull up Deboch’s body.

“You could not see him until you got him 18 inches to the surface,” Fleming told The Times last year. “I was fishing around and even though he was at the very bottom, he was not always in the same spot. Finding a victim in a pool in that condition is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

Granted, water clarity at indoor pools is more difficult to maintain due to the lack of natural oxidation from sunlight, but that’s no excuse. The hotel was clearly negligent.* And their effort to make taxpayers liable by pulling the fire department into the lawsuit is offensive.

Given the time that had already elapsed, firefighters might have been able to pull the victim from the pool without permanent neurological damage, had they been able to immediately locate the body. But the cloudy water made a timely rescue—about a 10 minute window—all but impossible. From the facts presented in the press, there is no question that improper pool maintenance impeded firefighters’ ability to do their job.

Swimming pools are potential public health hazards, both due to the drowning risk and the spread of disease causing organisms like Cryptosporidium, Giardia, and E. coli. That’s why they’re so heavily regulated. So if a hotel is going to seek a competitive edge by offering guests the amenity of an indoor pool, then the hotel has both a moral and legal obligation to properly secure and maintain it.

The hotel should settle with the victim’s family and leave Seattle taxpayers out of it.

* My former editors at The Stranger never would have allowed me to use such direct language, for fear that the use of such a legalistic term like “negligence” might leave the paper vulnerable to a defamation suit. But my own personal experience as a former pool maintenance professional leaves zero question in my mind that it is negligent to allow guests into water so cloudy that they could swim for three hours without noticing the dead body at the bottom of the pool. And as a blogger, I feel that it would be negligent of me to shy away from bluntly speaking the truth.

After 37 years, longtime Ballard staple Louie’s Cuisine of China is closing, and I blame Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage! Although probably, its closure had something more to do with this:

The property was sold last month for $2.49 million, property records show.

In fact, restaurants and other businesses close all the time, and for all kinds of reasons:

Louie’s expected closure comes three months after the landmark Frontier Room, around since 1954, closed in Belltown. Last year the legendary Alki Tavern closed, and Funhouse music club was closed in 2012 to make way for a seven-story building near Seattle Center. Claire’s Pantry, a Lake City staple since 1974, closed in February 2013, and Piecora’s Pizza on Capitol Hill closed in April after 33 years.

In March 2010, the first restaurant in the Red Robin chain closed in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood.

Brace yourselves. In the coming years we’re going to hear all kinds of stories about businesses closing because they can’t afford to pay Seattle’s minimum wage. If $15 was already in effect, we’d be hearing it about some of the businesses above. But correlation is not causation, so you can cast all these anecdotes aside.

It will take a decade or more to truly suss out the impact of Seattle’s minimum wage by comparing local economic trends to both historical data, and to economic trends in other locations. But that won’t stop the scare stories from coming.

This is a decision that can only lead to violence:

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down a Massachusetts law that barred protests near abortion clinics.

The law, enacted in 2007, created 35-foot buffer zones around entrances to abortion clinics. State officials said the law was a response to a history of harassment and violence at abortion clinics in Massachusetts, including a shooting rampage at two facilities in 1994.

So here’s the kind of scenario that will eventually happen. A man is escorting a woman (wife, girlfriend, whatever) to an abortion clinic when the harassment begins, and as men sometimes do, he feels bound to defend her honor. Yelling escalates into shoving, shoving into punches. And then maybe somebody in the tussle decides to stand their ground, and pulls out a gun and starts shooting. Because if you don’t think that the kind of person who would stand outside a Planned Parenthood clinic and yell “whore” or “baby killer” at teen-age girls seeking health care, is also the kind of person who shows up armed, then you don’t know human nature. Because pro-life!

The whole point of blockading an abortion clinic is the threat of violence. It is an act of intimidation. And anti-choice extremists will rightly understand this decision as an invitation to intimidation.

Don’t invest in seaside roller coasters, warn the authors of Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States

By now you’ve all probably heard about the terrifying new climate report from a bipartisan group of ex-cabinet officials that outlines the impending economic horrors associated with climate change, on top of the usual environmental ones. For example, due to rising sea levels, as much as $681 billion worth of Florida real estate could be underwater by the end of the century. Literally under water, not the metaphorical you-owe-more-on-your-mortgage-than-your-home-is-worth thing. Although as a consequence, that too, no doubt.

Extreme heat, rising sea levels, intensified storms, and shifting rain patterns could cost hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives nationally. But it’s interesting to note that here in Cascadia, not so much:

The Northwest is among the least exposed to climate-driven agricultural, mortality, energy, and labor productivity impacts; however, the region is likely to experience an increase of 3 to 8 times the number of hot days per year by the end of the century.

I hate the heat, so shifting from our current average of 5 days a year of 95 degree weather or warmer to an additional 18 to 41 such days a year by the end of the century would really suck. But it’s all relative. In the same time frame, the Southwest could be suffering as many as 110 extreme heat days a year, and the Southeast as many as 138!

As for sea level, the Northwest might actually see it fall a bit over the next few decades, or rise only slightly, thanks to the reduced gravitational pull from Alaska’s shrinking glaciers! (Really. I’m not making that up.)

Yeah, our own snowpack is predicted to decline as more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow, but if we start planning now, that’s something we can manage. There’s plenty of opportunity for conservation, and a few more reservoirs could help even out the dry periods. Also, we could always tap in to the oft criticized Brightwater sewage treatment plant’s impressive greywater capacity (99.9 percent clean!) to help further reduce demands on potable water. (Thanks for planning ahead, Ron Sims!)

So compared to the rest of the country, we won’t have it so bad. And while it may sound cold-hearted to say so, that means global warming could give Seattle a competitive economic advantage.

Think about it. Where would you rather live or start a business? Relatively temperate 22nd century Seattle with our mild winters and mere three or four weeks of 95-plus-degree days? Or storm-battered, steadily-sinking Florida with its four and a half months a year of oppressive heat and equally oppressive humidity? And then there’s the arid Southwest, where summer temperatures already routinely exceed 110 degrees. Phoenix area boosters have long pitched their region as “the next Silicon Valley”—crank up the heat much further and they could achieve that vision quite literally as the surrounding desert melts into glass.

Look, I’m not making light of climate change. It’s a fucking disaster. But if you don’t think people are going to want to move to the Pacific Northwest to escape the brutal heat elsewhere in the country, you’re crazy. Rain or shine, Seattle’s weather is going to become one of its major selling points over the next half century. So if you think housing costs and traffic congestion are at crisis levels now, just wait and see how bad things get with a few million more people packed into the region.

Or rather, let’s not wait. Let’s plan.

So there’s this secluded little park, right on Lake Washington, an idyllic in-city location for a warm summer’s night barbecue. And you just leave your garbage for others to pick up?

Who the fuck does that?

I’m okay with the beer drinking, even though alcohol is banned in Seattle parks, as long as it’s done in moderation. And I’m even okay with the illegal fire you lit on the beach, though you could’ve cleaned that up too. But what kind of asshole enjoys a beautifully maintained public park and then just leaves empty beer cans and raw chicken packaging and the rest of their garbage behind? How does one walk away from this mess, past empty trash cans, without feeling totally ashamed of oneself?

Sure, life can be tough in the urban hellhole. And often unfair. But not in this place, at this time. You’ve just enjoyed one of the most pastoral public amenities a big city has to offer, and you trash it for your neighbors who follow? What the fuck?

Over at Slog, Brendan has been covering the farmed shrimp slavery scandal. The latest revelation? This statement from British supermarket giant Tesco: “Every retailer that sources farmed prawns from Thailand must now consider it likely that slavery exists in its supply chain.”

But me, I buy shrimp totally guilt free. Because I haven’t purchased farmed shrimp in years. In fact, with few exceptions (for example, locally farmed shellfish), I won’t knowingly eat farm-raised seafood at all.

What I learned from my extensive coverage of the melamine-spiked pet food scandal back in 2007 turned me off of farm-raised seafood for good. As I explained during the midst of the crisis, 81 percent of America’s seafood is imported, and about 40-percent of that is farmed, largely in China, which accounts for about 70-percent of global aquaculture production. And yet, despite the lack of adequate regulatory controls abroad, the US inspects less than 1 percent of imported food.

Environmental and human rights issues aside, much of the world’s farmed seafood is raised in squalid and unsanitary conditions. And there is a long and documented history of adulterated fish feed. I’m just not convinced that it’s safe.

So given the choice, I try to eat only wild seafood, preferably from the reasonably well-regulated (and thus hopefully sustainable) Alaska fishery. That means I don’t eat shrimp nearly as often as I used to back when I purchased the cheap imported farm-raised stuff at the local Asian market. Because I can’t afford to.

But at least when I do purchase shrimp, I don’t have to worry about who I’m hurting, not the least of whom, myself.

As I suggested this morning, Port of Seattle commissioner Courtney Gregoire proposed at today’s meeting a “total compensation” minimum wage for Sea-Tac Airport employees. Minimum total compensation would start at 13.72 an hour in 2015, with a minimum cash wage of $11.22, and rise to $15.50 an hour in 2017, with a minimum cash wage of $13.  In addition, airport workers would be guaranteed a minimum of 1 hour of paid leave for every 40 hours worked.

How does that compare to Seattle’s minimum wage? Well, it depends on who you work for:

The commissioners’ proposal gets airport workers to higher wage and minimum compensation levels faster than Seattle workers at businesses with 500 or fewer employees. But in the long run it pays airport workers less than they would earn at a minimum wage job in Seattle. It’s also not clear whether this proposal applies to the concession workers in the restaurant and retail areas of the airport, or only those working in secure areas. (Update: only those with access to restricted areas are covered.)

Interestingly, much of the stated justification for raising wage standards at Sea-Tac Airport was couched in security concerns. Sea-Tac managing director Mark Reis stated that less experienced workers have twice the number of security violations as more experienced workers, making the airport’s current high job turnover rate—particularly among entry level workers—a security concern in itself. About 6,000 airport workers have direct access to secure areas.

San Francisco International Airport had similar job turnover issues before it instituted its highest in the nation airport minimum wage. It has since reduced its turnover rate from 110 percent a year to just 25 percent a year, says Reis.

After the presentations, the five port commissioners all congratulated each other on a job well done, so it looks like official approval of the proposal will be just a formality. “People who are working behind security lines in permanent positions deserve to earn a family wage job,” emphasized business-friendly commissioner Bill Bryant.

But whether or not it’s too little, too late, remains to be seen. On Thursday the Washington State Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the appeal of a lower court’s ruling that SeaTac’s $15 minimum wage law does not apply to airport workers. If the court overturns the lower court ruling, not only will the workers immediately receive $15 an hour cash straight up, airport employers may be liable for millions of dollars in back pay.

UPDATE: Heather Weiner from Yes for SeaTac responds:

SeaTac voters have already spoken on this issue. The State Attorney General agrees that the City, not the Port, has jurisdiction on setting wage standards for people working inside their city limits. We’re looking forward to the hearing on Thursday.

So there.

UPDATE, UPDATE: For your reading pleasure, a copy of the commission’s draft resolution (pdf). Note that it’s in the form of an addendum to the appellate case being heard on Thursday, which supports the conclusion that this resolution may be more a legal maneuver than anything else.

Also of note is that the resolution only covers employees working in secure “Air Operations Areas” (so sorry, terminal concessions workers, not you), and that total compensation includes wages, tips, health insurance premiums, retirement contributions, and taxable educational expenses.

The Port of Seattle Commission meets at noon today, and while there’s no related item on the published agenda (pdf), a birdie tells me that commissioner Courtney Gregoire had been attempting to forge a majority in support of imposing a $15 “total compensation” minimum wage at Sea-Tac Airport and other port properties.

It would mark a dramatic of turn-around for the port, which for years had denied that it has any legal authority to regulate wages at the airport, before embracing the exact opposite legal claim in the immediate wake of the passage of SeaTac’s $15 minimum wage initiative. Last December, King County Superior Court Judge Andrea Darvas upheld most of SeaTac’s minimum wage law, but ruled that state law grants the Port of Seattle exclusive authority over wages on port property. Under this ruling, about 4,700 low-wage employees of contractors, concessionaires, and car rental companies on airport property are currently exempt from SeaTac’s $15 minimum wage ordinance.

Judge Darvas’s ruling is currently being appealed, and Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson has filed a very clever amicus brief explaining why the lower court’s interpretation of the law is wrong. Attorneys defending the initiative say they are confident they will win on appeal. But attorneys often claim they are confident. We’ll see.

If the port commissioners were to pass a minimum wage proposal today, the timing would be curious, coming just two days before the Washington State Supreme Court is to hear oral arguments in the SeaTac case. Could it be a move to reassure elected justices that airport workers won’t be left untouched by the $15 wave sweeping through the region? Does Gregoire, an attorney, sense a weakness in the port’s current legal position? Is it an attempt by port commissioners to get out ahead of an issue that has clearly left them behind? Or is it a policy decision, pure and simple?

Gregoire did not respond to my emails, so I have no idea.

Either way, a $15 total compensation minimum wage is clearly not the victory the SeaTac initiative backers are hoping for. It would be better than nothing, particularly for part-time workers who might ultimately take home $15 an hour in cash. But no doubt such a proposal wouldn’t include the many other workplace protections included in the SeaTac initiative. And of course, a benefit whose cost is deducted from one’s paycheck is no longer a benefit. It’s an expense. So it’s not really $15 an hour.

Still, the fact that commissioners would even consider imposing a $15 minimum wage, in any form, illustrates just how much and how quickly the political landscape has changed.

I suppose I’ve had a hard time articulating exactly why I’m so irritated at the way Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar have been allowed to bully their way into the Seattle market. But fortunately, economist Dean Baker does a much better job:

If Uber and Lyft force a re-examination and modernization of taxi regulation in San Francisco and elsewhere, they will have provided a valuable public service. However it can’t possibly make sense to have a stringent set of regulations for traditional cabs, while allowing Uber and Lyft to ignore them just because customers order these services on the Internet.

If we go the route of ending the requirement that taxies need medallions, there is also the question of what we do about the sunk costs for people like my cab driver, who is currently out $250,000 from buying a medallion. On the current path, these medallion owners will just be out of luck. Their life savings will be made worthless by young kids who are better at evading regulations than immigrant cab drivers; so much for the American Dream.

It is worth considering this issue in light of the larger issue of the growing inequality we have seen over the last three decades. Uber, like Amazon, has allowed a small number of people to become extremely rich by evading regulations and/or taxes that apply to their middle class competitors. Amazon and other Internet-based retailers have used their tax advantage to put tens of thousands brick and mortar stores out of business.

This is a pretty simple story. In a country where rules are enforced or not enforced to benefit the rich and screw the middle class, you will have increasing inequality and a middle class that is seeing few of the benefits of economic growth.

What we are witnessing is a giant transfer of wealth from tens of thousands of mostly middle class medallion owners nationwide into the pockets of a handful of clever, law-evading entrepreneurs and their venture capitalists. Uber’s gambit that local governments would not crack down on its illegal operations has paid off handsomely—it now enjoys an implicit market capitalization of $17 billion.

“This is not supposed to happen in a market economy,” says Baker:

To encourage efficiency, we would want a proper set of regulations and taxes and have them apply equally to everyone. The point is to encourage people to make profits by providing better products or lower cost services, not to get rich by finding clever ways to evade regulations.

There’s much more to Baker’s piece, and you really should read the whole thing.

The best thing about the Seattle Times hiring Erik Smith, is that finally there’s somebody on the paper’s editorial board with the courage to give a voice to Seattle’s downtrodden business community:

A rare voice on minimum wage

Howard Behar, former president of Starbucks, explains why he supports a referendum campaign that would send Seattle’s minimum-wage ordinance to the ballot.

That’s Smith’s column and kicker. Really. Because there is nothing rarer in American politics than the voice of a rich white guy.

Seattle’s business community didn’t put up much of a fight when the City Council passed its highest-in-the-country $15 minimum-wage ordinance this month — at least not the united opposition that might be expected in a city of lesser size.

Um, there’s a difference between not putting up much of a fight, and losing. And they didn’t completely lose, either. No, Seattle’s business community didn’t win a permanent tip credit or “total compensation”, or the lower $12 minimum wage for which many business leaders belatedly fought. But they did get what amounts to an eleven-year phase-in before all Seattle workers will earn the inflation-adjusted equivalent of about $14.50 an hour in cash take-home pay in the year 2025.

But at long last, Howard Behar has had it with that talk of “sticking it to the man.”

“First of all, it’s not just the man anymore,” he says. “It’s the man and the woman. But is that what we think this is about? We’re trying to get somebody?”

Well then, he should stop watching re-runs of The Mod Squad, because I’m not sure I’ve heard anybody actually use that phrase since the early 1970s. I mean, I love “the man” as an apt metaphor for the way society actual works, but then, I’m old. I’m over fifty. “Sticking it to the man” is about as much a part of modern American parlance as “groovy” or “the cat’s pajamas.”

And no, $15 was not about “trying to get somebody.” It was about trying to get somebody a living wage. The rhetorical focus was always on the plight of the working poor. That’s why fast food workers became the symbol of the movement.

If anyone is the man, it is Behar. He is the former president of Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffeehouse chain with more than 20,000 outlets worldwide. Though Starbucks is one of the world’s most recognizable brand names, it was not vilified during the campaign by union organizers and political activists in the same way as favorite corporate targets McDonald’s and Wal-Mart.

So wait. Behar is “the man”…? And nobody talked about “sticking it” to him…? Now I’m just confused.

The company prides itself on the fact that it pays a bit more than the current minimum wage, provides health insurance for its employees and recently implemented a college tuition benefit.

Starbucks baristas average less than $9 an hour nationwide, only 42 percent of employees are actually covered by Starbucks’ health insurance (less than Walmart!), and it turns out the company’s much ballyhooed tuition benefit program isn’t all that much of a benefit. Starbucks is far from the worst company in the world to work for, but it isn’t a charity.

Yet, with a corporate headquarters about a mile from Seattle City Hall, the company is affected by the raised minimum wage as clearly as the smallest espresso hut along Highway 99.

And your point is… what? Starbucks should get a volume discount?

In criticizing the Seattle plan, Behar is not speaking for the chain he helped build from 28 stores before his retirement as president in 2007 — his only direct financial interest in Starbucks is the one share of stock he keeps framed on the wall.

No, he’s speaking for his class. I’m no Marxist, but this is clearly a class struggle. And as multi-billionaire investor Warren Buffett famously said: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

A lifetime spent in business tells him the Seattle plan will hurt the low-wage earners it aims to help by raising the cost of living, and driving light manufacturing and distribution jobs beyond the city limits.

Ah, he’s just looking out for the little people. God bless him.

But while I don’t dismiss Behar’s business acumen, there just isn’t any data to support the claim that minimum wage hikes—even massive ones—have a substantial impact on employment.

That is why he is a major contributor to Forward Seattle, the organization gathering signatures to place a referendum on the November ballot to undo the ordinance. Behar agrees the wage should rise, but says the city ought to phase it in over a much longer period of time, perhaps at twice the rate of inflation until $15 is reached, for businesses of all sizes, uniformly.

So let’s do the math. Assuming our current annual inflation rate of about 1.75 percent (and that may be on the high side), it would take 14 years—not until the year 2028—before workers finally earned $15 an hour. But by then, $15 would only be worth about $11.78 in 2014 dollars. So in real dollars, Behar is proposing a $2.46 an hour raise phased in over a decade and a half.

Behar’s voice is important because so few in Seattle’s big-business circles have been willing to say a word. In smaller cities, small business dominates the Rotary clubs and the chambers. The silence from many Seattle-based business organizations reflects the fact that this is a regional headquarters city for so many large corporations. Some shrug — they pay more than minimum wage — and by taking a stand in Seattle they could bring picket lines elsewhere in the country.

You’re kidding, right? Twelve of the 21 non-elected members of Mayor Ed Murray’s Income Inequality Committee represented business, including the Seattle Chamber of Commerce, the Seattle Hotel Association, Nucor Steel, and Space Needle owner/hotelier Howard Wright. Alaska Airlines and the car rental, lodging, and restaurant industry spent a record $227 per vote in their failed attempt to defeat SeaTac’s $15 minimum wage initiative at the polls! The International Franchise Association is spending $1,000 an hour to file ridiculous lawsuits in an effort to bully other cities from moving forward. You call that silence?

“Business leaders are scared to death,” Behar says. “Because you know in today’s world what happens when they speak up? They are accused of being greedy, they are accused of not caring about people.”

Oh, boo fucking hoo! Workers are scared to death of being fired for attempting to unionize, but Behar is scared that some people might say he’s mean? Talk about asymmetry.

Behar calls the Seattle plan unjust and immoral — some reasons familiar, others not.

“Unjust and immoral?” You mean like paying somebody a poverty wage? You mean like the service industry practice of denying workers more than 29.5 hours a week so that they don’t qualify for benefits? You mean like the wage and tip theft that is rampant in the industry?

The Seattle plan will require big companies, chains and franchisees to raise wages faster than mom-and-pop operations, the idea being that big corporations can afford it. Franchisees are, of course, small-business owners themselves, a fact the Seattle ordinance ignores. And Behar notes that in a chain, each store is considered a stand-alone business and each is expected to turn a profit.

So, either Seattle chain outlets will raise prices in Seattle, just like mom-and-pop stores will — or, perhaps worse, they might allow that store in Cincinnati to subsidize the one in Seattle, and keep prices low until shakier independent merchants close their doors.

My god, when will America wake up to the holocaust that is befalling our nation’s persecuted big businesses? If only they had unlimited financial resources to buy high priced lobbyists, expensive advertising, and credulous editorial boards to defend their interests.

And, while the proposition was sold with the idea of reducing income inequality, the shock on the local economy will mean higher prices for things bought locally — buying power of a higher minimum wage is reduced.

So first we’re told we’re supposed to heed Behar’s warnings due to his “lifetime spent in business,” and then he throws this incredible piece of economic bullshit at us? Does he think we’re stupid?

If labor was the only cost of doing business, this argument might largely hold true. But of course, it’s not. Labor is about a third of the cost of a Big Mac. So if the entire cost of raising the minimum wage were passed on to McDonald’s consumers (and it won’t be), you’re looking at about a 19 percent price hike over the same period of time McDonald’s workers see their wages rise 56 percent.

Low-wage workers clearly come out ahead. And that’s just with burgers. The inflationary pressure won’t be zero, but big monthly expenses like electricity, utilities, cable, phone, and of course housing will see little direct impact from a hike in the minimum wage.

Behar says a proposition with such a dramatic effect on the city ought to bypass a council where special-interest groups hold sway. “The idea this got a fair hearing is garbage. Labor was going out the back door and business was sitting in the lobby.”

Again… you’re fucking kidding me, right? Is he really making the argument that corporate money doesn’t have enough influence in politics? That if Behar were still president of Starbucks, the mayor and every council member save Socialist Kshama Sawant wouldn’t take his phone call in New York minute?

The vilification of big business to promote an unworkable economic ideal hits him in the gut: “If we are a just society, we treat everybody the same.”

First of all, perhaps some people vilify big business leaders as “greedy” and “not caring about people” because capital-as-victim narratives like this make them come off as greedy and not caring about people? Just a thought.

Second, if Behar is really advocating for a “just society,” one in which we “treat everybody the same,” perhaps he should start with reforming Washington State’s most regressive tax system in nation? This is a system in which the bottom 20 percent of earners (you know, Starbucks baristas) pay 16.9 percent of their income in state and local taxes, whereas the wealthiest 1 percent (you know, Howard Behar) pay only 2.8 percent.

Does this sound like a just society in which we treat everybody the same? Of course not. And yet Behar has chosen to use his voice to champion the moneyed interests that benefit most from the status quo.

In a city where no one has spoken for big business on the issue, Behar does seem to be the man.

No one except all the big businesses I mentioned, and of course, the Seattle Times editorial board. Relentlessly. But nice attempt at an emotional bookend, Erik.

Deuteronomy 22:13-21
If a man takes a wife and, after lying with her, dislikes her and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, “I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity,” then the girl’s father and mother shall bring proof that she was a virgin to the town elders at the gate.  The girl’s father will say to the elders, “I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her.  Now he has slandered her and said, ‘I did not find your daughter to be a virgin.’ But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.” Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, 18 and the elders shall take the man and punish him. They shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver, and give them to the girl’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives.

If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death.

Discuss.

Remember how opponents warned that a $15 minimum wage would surely cost the city thousands of jobs, hurting the exact same low-wage workers the ordinance was intended to help? Well, in Seattle’s booming hospitality industry, not so much:

The former Red Lion Hotel in downtown Seattle sold Thursday for $130.7 million, or nearly $410,000 a room, the highest price ever paid in the metro area, according to hotel experts.

But the record price for the 319-room hotel, now known as Motif Seattle, could quickly be surpassed by the pending sale of the 120-room Hotel 1000: Two groups are buying it for $63 million or about $525,000 a room, according to a report this week in The Wall Street Journal, which didn’t identify its sources.

“It is the highest price paid (per key) ever for a hotel in Washington state,” said Chris Burdett, senior vice president of CBRE Hotels in Seattle, which was not involved in the transaction.

The record-price deals for downtown Seattle hotels are the latest good news for a surging hotel market that’s kicked off a wave of new construction. Downtown Seattle has roughly 12,000 hotel rooms; the construction of R.C. Hedreen’s mega-convention hotel and smaller hotels could add another 3,000 rooms to the inventory.

Wait. I thought the $15 minimum wage was supposed to destroy capitalism as we know it. And yet in the immediate wake of its passage, investors continue to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into an industry that is one of the city’s largest employers of low-wage workers. I’m so confused!

And it’s not just here in Seattle. Just weeks after SeaTac voters passed their $15 minimum wage, Cedarbrook Lodge, one of the initiative’s most vocal opponents, announced a $16 million 67-room expansion. It’s like the industry’s mouth is saying one thing while its money is saying something entirely else. Weird.

I can only conclude one of two things. Either paying hotel housekeepers and other low-wage workers $15 an hour won’t squeeze all the profits out of Seattle’s labor-intensive hotel industry, or all the smart capitalists investing hundreds of millions of dollars into our soon-to-be-living-wage hotel industry are in fact incredibly stupid.

The International Franchise Association’s hilarious lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Seattle’s $15 minimum wage ordinance prompted instant ridicule from actual lawyers. “Crazy talk,” laughed labor and employment attorney Dmitri Iglitzin. “Frivolous,” scoffed University of Washington School of Law lecturer David Ziff. “Bonkers,” wrote Ian Millhiser, the Senior Constitutional Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

But while most of the suit’s claims were based on absurdly broad constitutional reaches (like alleging that impinging on a business’s profits would violate its First Amendment right to commercial speech), there was one claim that gave some attorneys pause—that the slower phase-in schedules for businesses providing health benefits were preempted by the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). It’s not that the attorneys thought the claim had any merit, just that ERISA is an incredibly complex area of the law in which none of them had particular expertise.

Well in fact, there is plenty of relevant case law on this issue, and not surprisingly it turns out that the IFA’s ERISA claim is just as frivolous as the rest of its ridiculous suit. From Ironworkers Dist. Council of the Pacific Northwest v. Woodland Park Zoo Planning & Development:

We agree with the attorney general opinion that the prevailing wage statute does not require employers to establish benefit programs or make benefit contributions. The respondents concede, both in their briefing and at oral argument, that an employer can satisfy the statute by making cash payments in lieu of benefits. Because J.A. Jones ‘s preemption holding was based on the faulty premise that the statute requires employers to make ERISA contributions and to make them at a certain level, we do not adopt it. Rather, we follow other jurisdictions that hold that ERISA does not preempt prevailing wage statutes similar to Washington’s, which consider the amount of usual benefits in computing the total prevailing wage, but do not require that employers actually make such contributions. See Associated Builders & Contractors, Saginaw Valley Area Chapter v. Perry, 115 F.3d 386 (6th Cir.1997); Burgio & Campofelice, Inc. v. NYS Dep’t of Labor, 107 F.3d 1000 (2d Cir.1997); WSB Electric v. Curry, 88 F.3d 788 (9th Cir.1996), cert. denied, 519 U.S. 1109, 117 S.Ct. 945, 136 L.Ed.2d 834 (1997); Minnesota Chapter of Assoc. Builders & Contractors v. Minnesota Dep’t of Labor & Indus., 47 F.3d 975 (8th Cir.1995); Keystone Chapter, Assoc. Builders & Contractors v. Foley, 37 F.3d 945 (3d Cir.1994).

Each of these cases hold that prevailing wage statutes that consider the amount of usual benefits but do not require the establishment of benefit programs or benefit payments are not preempted by ERISA because they regulate wages, not benefits. Wages are a traditional subject of state concern and are not within ERISA’s coverage. Massachusetts v. Morash, 490 U.S. 107, 118, 109 S.Ct. 1668, 1674–75, 104 L.Ed.2d 98 (1989). Like the prevailing wage statutes in the above cases, Washington’s statute does not prescribe the type of benefit plans or amount of contributions. Nor does it impose any sort of administrative burden on ERISA plans. Most importantly, the employer can comply with the prevailing wage statute without any ERISA plan whatsoever. Accordingly, applying the Travelers analysis, we conclude that the prevailing wage statute does not “relate to” any employee benefit plans because Congress did not intend that ERISA control state wage regulation and the prevailing wage statute does not have an impermissible effect on ERISA plans.

That’s a lot of federal case law the Washington State Court of Appeals cites, and it all concludes the same thing: “Congress did not intend that ERISA control state wage regulation.” And while the above case deals with prevailing wage law rather than minimum wage law, the issues raised in the IFA suit are entirely analogous. IFA claims that the ordinance is preempted by ERISA because it “relates to” employee benefit plans, but the courts have repeatedly ruled that such wage statutes do not.

Minimum wage critics love to disparage “burger flippers” as unworthy of earning a livable wage, yet they have no qualms about paying attorneys $1,000 an hour to file a ridiculous lawsuit like this. Amazing.

How freaked out are the wingnuts at the prospect of gay-loving, pot-smoking, $15-minimum-wage-paying Sodoms and Gomorrahs like Seattle and San Francisco economically out-competing the gun-toting, free-market-loving regions of the country? Via email, my new friend Tom explains:

Looking at the election returns, few patriotic Americans remain on the Left Coast, and their relative numbers will be further reduced by the current influx of illegals occasioned by the feckless narcissist squatting in the Oval Office. Granted, the loss of even one human (by definition, this term excludes ‘progressives’) is to be grievously mourned, yet such would be more than offset by the social, financial, health and security advances inevitably following the extermination of the leftist scum and their fellow travelers. Damn shame there is no virus which specifically vectors those defectives with the survival-adverse gene mutation causing liberalism. Then again, perhaps Michael Savage is correct in his claim it is a mental disease and thus treatable. In either event, there is an immediate need for a cure if America is to survive.

Out of courtesy, I’ll keep Tom’s full name and email address to myself (along with the names of the online gun forums on which he frequently deals firearms). But that is some seriously fucked up shit.