Goldy

You know, what the headline says. Really.

No doubt there are local business owners who genuinely fear for their own profit margins, but nationally, this is an ideological conflict. And if the economies of cities like Seattle and San Francisco continue to thrive despite imposing the highest minimum wage in the nation, it would strike a substantial blow against free market dogma.

No, just because a $15 minimum wage works here in Seattle doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for Yakima. But this is about more than just the minimum wage. This about undermining the deregulatory, low-tax, supply-side orthodoxy that has guided US economic policy since the Reagan administration, and that has played a major role in creating the crisis of income inequality we face today.

It’s also about being proven right or wrong. And everybody hates to be proven wrong.

Finally, I can move back to Philadelphia!

PHL Local Gaming — one of the five contenders for that ever elusive casino license in Philadelphia — has announced a potential new feature for its LoSo Entertainment Center: a 615-foot-tall Skyspire with rooftop restaurant and observation deck, both of which would be reached by gondola. The tower would be designed to look much like Seattle’s Space Needle, though it would be 10 feet taller (take that, Seattle!).

Except for the casino part, it sounds great.* Though personally, rather than the Skyspire, I would opt for the Polercoaster, which instead of those stupid gondolas would wrap the tower with a 615-foot vertical roller coaster!

* Note: Not really.

I did an interview with Fox News about Seattle’s $15 an hour minimum wage, which of course is bringing a lot of new readers to HA. For example, Tom, who via email, goes out of his way to establish himself as an Old Testament Christian. Genesis 18-19, to be exact.

Here’s hoping the next earthquake, or better yet, wild fire, will wipe out everything within 50 miles of the existing coast …. If it should, I promise to celebrate even more joyfully than I did the death of the Chappaquiddick swim champ – toasting it with a grin on my face, a song in my heart and an appropriately delightful aged single malt I can savor in my memory for years as I recall the pleasure taken in the demise of the vile scum infesting this Republic.

Not sure what you have against the Olympic Peninsula, but hey, thanks for the constructive criticism, Tom!

As for the rest of my new Fox friends, please feel free to use this post as an open thread in which to wish death and/or destruction on us freedom-hating liberals.

Yet another reminder that for the vast majority of Americans, guns don’t make you safer:

JIM MCMAHON would leave home and forget how to get back.

Sometimes, he would stay in his room and lie on his back in the dark because the pain in his head was so excruciating. At his darkest moments a few years ago, when it was just about too much to handle, the former Chicago Bears quarterback thought about killing himself.

“I am glad I don’t have any weapons in my house or else I am pretty sure I wouldn’t be here,” McMahon said. “It got to be that bad.”

I know, I know… the gun nuts will scream in the threads that I want the guvmint to take away their guns. That’s not the point of these posts at all. What I want is to educate Americans that guns don’t make you safer. Especially handguns. They just don’t.

If you’re a hunter or a sportsman then you need a gun. I’ve got no problem with that. Hunting is at least as moral as factory farming (assuming you intend to eat your kill), and I know from personal experience that target shooting can be loads of fun. But if you’re just some average Jane or Joe purchasing a handgun for personal protection, you’re making a big mistake. Having a handgun in the house dramatically increases the risk of you or a loved one being a shooting victim. Men in particular are much more likely to shoot themselves than an intruder.

The best way to reduce gun violence is to reduce easy access to guns—particularly handguns. And the best way to do that is to change Americans’ attitudes towards guns so that we’re less likely to keep one lying around the house.

No doubt Starbucks’ new tuition reimbursement program is better than a kick in the teeth, and I suppose the company deserves some credit for doing more than many of its competitors. But forgive me for not sharing in the credulous headlines. First of all, the program isn’t nearly as generous as first reported. Second, if limiting low-income students’ options to taking online courses from a single university is the “new model” for higher education that Arizona State University president Michael M. Crow envisions, I seriously doubt it will do much to address our nation’s growing opportunity gap.

It’s hard to suss out the exact details of the program from Starbucks’ publicly available documents (pdf), but it appears that the cost to the company will be far less than the $30,000 per employee benefit some headlines have touted. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Starbucks expects to spend an average of $3,250 per student per year in upfront scholarships (presumably per academic year rather than calendar year, as these are per credit grants), plus reimbursements to juniors and seniors of “however much it needs to cover any other unmet tuition costs.” Tuition reimbursements will only be paid to employees after completing 21-credit blocks—the company says that the “vast majority” of employees will receive less than $5,250 in tuition benefits in any given year.

But at between $480 to $543 per undergraduate credit, ASU’s online classes don’t come cheap. The 120 credits necessary to get a four-year Bachelors degree, comes to about $15,000 a year for a full-time online student—a couple thousand dollars a year more than resident tuition and fees at the University of Washington. So it’s not a bargain. Starbucks and ASU expect that most students will qualify for federal grants and other financial aid—hence the lower than sticker price cost to Starbucks for juniors and seniors—but even upperclassmen expecting full reimbursement will likely have to take out student loans to cover upfront costs.

If you’re a Starbucks employee just a semester or three shy of a college diploma, this program could prove a boon. But for freshmen and sophomores, not so much. Community college credits are cheaper, even accounting for the Starbucks subsidy, plus come with the added benefit of a live classroom and campus experience. Nothing against distance learning as a supplement to a traditional college education, but it hardly seems worth paying a premium for online courses.

I doubt most Starbucks executives would choose an online-only college education for their own children. So why should that be good enough for their employees?

So yeah. Starbucks’ “College Achievement Plan” is better than a kick in the teeth. It’s not nothing. And other highly profitable companies should be ashamed for not making at least as much effort to better the lives their workers. But it does relatively little to address the core problem facing low-income youth today: Low wages and skyrocketing tuition costs.

To put this into perspective, Starbucks’ estimated average cost of $3,250 in tuition subsidies per student per academic year would be the equivalent of paying a full-time student an additional $3.12 an hour on a part-time 20-hour week. But for a full-time barista earning only 3 credits per term (ASU tells students to expect to put in 18 hours a week in work per 3-credit class), Starbucks’ tuition benefit drops to only $0.78 per hour. The benefit for most Starbucks workers who take part in the program will be somewhere in between.

By comparison, Starbucks baristas average less than $9 an hour in pay nationally, a little higher here in Washington State. Thus a $15 minimum wage would do far more to make college affordable than Starbucks’ complicated tuition benefit program, while giving workers the choice of which college or university to attend, and more than just the 40 areas of study that ASU offers online.

The flip-side to this equation is that programs like this wouldn’t be necessary at all if we had not abdicated our responsibility to adequately fund our state college and university systems. “If it’s all about state legislatures appropriating more money, guess again,” says Crow cynically, but that’s awfully self-serving coming from the president of a university that just signed an exclusive deal with Starbucks to provide online degrees to potentially tens of thousands of workers.

Many of today’s lawmakers worked their way through college at a time when one could. Higher pay and lower tuition is the key to making college broadly affordable again, not corporate altruism.

The only thing keeping us from making a public university degree affordable again is the will to tax ourselves to pay for it. The revenue isn’t there because taxes as a percentage of income are at an all time low. We can afford to pay to properly educate our young the way we did in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s if we once again choose to adequately tax the wealth and incomes of billionaires like Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Skyrocketing tuition is the result of a policy decision, not a natural disaster. If we as a society choose to make higher education affordable again, we can.

But we don’t.

And that is why, far from excited by Starbucks’ announcement, I came away rather depressed. For however altruistic Starbucks’ intentions may be, and however many workers might ultimately take advantage of the program to complete their degrees, this is a model that ultimately takes away options from America’s youth, while easing pressure on the current generation of decision makers to give future generations the same educational opportunities that we enjoyed.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has scheduled a 1:15 press conference today to announce the results of “for-hire industry mediation,” and from what I’ve been hearing from folks on the taxi industry side of table, its pretty much a capitulation to Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar: No caps on the number of so-called “ride-share” vehicles and a relaxation of already relaxed inspection and insurance requirements.

If, like my ex-coworker Dominic, you despise Yellow Cab, and can’t wait for the traditional taxi industry to die, this is a huge victory. But let’s not pretend that’s not what’s going to happen.

This “mediation” was allegedly made necessary by the initiative Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar filed in the wake of the city council’s new ordinance imposing a cap on the number of vehicles per network. Which is ironic, because by addressing administrative issues rather legislative issues, the TNCs’ initiative is likely outside the scope of the local initiative and referendum process. The taxi industry has filed suit, but Murray doesn’t appear willing to wait for the results.

I guess what really pisses me off about this is how incredibly dishonest the process has been. We are essentially moving toward total deregulation of the taxi and for-hire industry without ever seriously debating making that policy decision. But you know, as long as Capitol Hill hipsters don’t have to wait too long for a ride on a Friday night, I suppose it’s worth the disruption to the thousands of Seattleites lacking the credit cards and smartphones necessary to use these services, and the hundreds of Seattle families who are about to lose their livelihoods. So no need to debate this any further, I guess.

UPDATE: Yup, that’s pretty much what happened. Murray led off his press conference bragging about an agreement that allows “all players to compete fairly,” and yet it uncaps the “ride share” companies while leaving the taxi industry capped (albeit with an additional 200 over the next four years).  Hard to see that as a level playing field.

Murray did bring the flat-rate/for-hires onboard by giving them hailing rights, but the traditional taxis have been totally screwed. From the time they first started appealing to the city a year ago to enforce the law and prevent others from stealing their fares to today’s press conference, they have seen their livelihood snatched away from them. Perhaps the new technology makes that inevitable. But it’s a farce to present this as some sort of compromise that works for all sides. The taxi industry has been totally fucked. This idea that the city will make for-hire licenses “property” like medallions is completely worthless if one can’t make a living from the license.

So congratulations to Uber, Lyft, Sidecar and their high priced lobbyists. You won!

Exodus 21:7
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are.

Discuss.

I am not an attorney, so when I initially characterized the International Franchise Association’s $15 lawsuit as “hilarious,” “laughable,” and “frivolous,” I suppose my lack of a JD was permission enough to shrug off my analysis. But I’ve yet to hear a real lawyer disagree.

Labor and employment attorney Dmitri Iglitzin described at least one IFA claim as “crazy talk.” And writing on his own blog, University of Washington School of Law lecturer David Ziff responded to various IFA arguments with offhand dismissals like “frivolous,” “non sequitur,” and “Wowsa. Seriously.”

But one of the more interesting analyses—and a somewhat unsettling one—comes from attorney Ian Millhiser, the Senior Constitutional Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Writing at ThinkProgress, Millhiser originally titled his post “The Completely Bonkers Lawsuit Seeking To Kill Seattle’s Minimum Wage & Repeal The Twentieth Century,” before revising it to something a bit more lawyerly. So he agrees with me that that arguments are facially bonkers. Read the whole thing.

But it’s that part about repealing the Twentieth Century that really caught my attention.

So the Seattle lawsuit relies on arguments that are either silly, dangerous or both. It calls for a wholesale transfer of power away from the American people. And it would repeat some of the worst mistakes of American governments’ past. Indeed, many of the arguments raised in the plaintiffs’ complaint are so absurd that they raise an important question — why should anyone care that this lawsuit was filed? People file silly lawsuits all the time. One guy once filed a federal suit against “Satan and his staff,” claiming that “Satan has placed deliberate obstacles in his path and has caused [his] downfall.” But there was never much risk that a federal judge would issue an injunction against the Devil.

The answer to this question is that the Seattle lawsuit does have one thing going for it that the guy who sued Satan did not. It is being litigated by Paul Clement, the conservative superlawyer that we have rather archly referred to as the “Solicitor General of the Republican Party.” Clement is the go-to lawyer for Republican interest groups seeking to implement Republican policies through the judiciary, and he has a knack for making ridiculous legal arguments sound plausible to conservative judges. Recall that Clement nearly convinced the Supreme Court to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act, largely relying on a legal theory that one very conservative judge mocked for having no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.”

As Millhiser points out, lawyers are usually reluctant to sign their names on to such outlandish legal arguments. But…

Clement, however, is such a successful attorney in large part because he has his finger on the pulse of the conservative legal thinkers who dominate the Supreme Court of the United States. He is a better judge of how far he can push the justices than nearly anyone else in the country. And, if he thinks that the kind of arguments that he makes in his brief can be made with a straight face, then that is saying something quite significant.

The conventional wisdom, based not just on speculation but on the justices’ own statements, is that the Roberts Court is quite conservative but it certainly isn’t prepared to revive the judicial overreach that pervaded the Lochner Era. One of the best lawyers in the country, however, appears to have concluded that this conventional wisdom is wrong. If Clement turns out to be correct, that should frighten anyone who works for a living.

Understand that for the IFA’s arguments to stand, the court wouldn’t just have to find the franchise provisions unconstitutional, but minimum wage laws in general. Everywhere. Local, state, and federal. For that was the status quo between 1905 and 1937, the era in which Lochner held sway.

So yeah, based on the past 75 years of jurisprudence, the IFA lawsuit is indeed hilarious, laughable, and bonkers. But that’s assuming the ultra-conservative Roberts Court isn’t radical enough to toss out our nation’s entire regulatory structure.

What the headline says:

The Washington Supreme Court on Thursday ordered lawmakers to explain why they haven’t followed its orders to fix the way Washington pays for public education.

The court has ordered the state to appear before it on Sept. 3 and show the court how it has followed its orders in the 2012 McCleary decision or face contempt.

Of course, the legislature is in contempt of the court’s order on McCleary, but the court doesn’t really have any good options to enforce it. Of the remedies Chief Justice Barbara Madsen lists in her rather terse order summoning “the State” to appear before the court at a September 3 “show cause hearing,” only the first is appealing, none would be effective, and several would realize the Republican wet dream of using McCleary as an opportunity to starve the rest of state government.

1. Imposing monetary or other contempt sanctions;
2. Prohibiting expenditures on certain other matters until the Court’s constitutional ruling is complied with;
3. Ordering the legislature to pass legislation to fund specific amounts or remedies;
4. Ordering the sale of State property to fund constitutional compliance;
5. Invalidating education funding cuts to the budget;
6. Prohibiting any funding of an unconstitutional education system; and
7. Any other appropriate relief.

I’m all for imposing contempt sanctions. Throw the house and senate leadership in jail, if you can. That at least would be a spectacle on a scale worthy of the impending crisis. But simply forcing the state to spend money it doesn’t have would only pull billions from social services, higher education, and other critical programs, while selling state property in order to fund current expenses is nothing less than one generation ripping off all those generations that precede or succeed it.

No, the only solution is more revenue. And if the court can’t effectively order the legislature to raise taxes (or eliminate tax exemptions), then there’s no solving this crisis.

A few months ago I asked if state Democrats were prepared for the impending McCleary disaster? Of course, it was a rhetorical question. The answer is clearly “No.”

The International Franchise Association didn’t just file one of the most hilarious lawsuits ever in their futile quest to overturn Seattle’s new $15 minimum wage ordinance, they also created a pathetically lazy video to support it! As the folks at Working Washington quickly discovered, every single person shown is taken directly from the popular stock footage library, Pond5:

1. Young asian woman smiling face
2. Young hispanic man smiling at camera
3. Portrait Of Young Happy Handsome Man In Glasses
4. Friendly Female Barista In A Coffee Shop Serving Customers
5. Young Pretty Woman Working As Florist In Shop And Smiling (Note: they color-adjusted the apron so it’s Starbucks green!)
6. Attractive Female Business Owner On The Phone Behind The Counter Of Her Shop
7. African American Woman Close Looks Up Smiles Into Camera
8. Man Looking At Seattle Skyline

That’s pretty much a laundry list of politically correct inclusiveness picked straight from the Pond5 catalog. Not a single actual real business owner or worker in the bunch.

So how much did the IFA spend to hack together a video like this? My guess is a lot. One of the signers on yesterday’s absurdly crappy complaint was former Bush Administration Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, who reportedly charges more than $1,000 an hour for his service. So no doubt the IFA paid top dollar for this crappy video too.

Which raises the question: If America’s franchises can afford to pay $1,000 an hour for crap like this, why can’t they afford to pay $15 an hour to their own employees?

The Washington DC based International Franchise Association has filed its promised lawsuit challenging Seattle’s $15 minimum wage ordinance, and while I’m not a lawyer, I have to say that in my expert opinion, much of the 34-page complaint (pdf) is downright laughable.

For example, Count IV, which preposterously alleges that the ordinance is preempted by the Lanham Act, the primary federal statute protecting trademarks, because it interferes with a trademark holder’s “right to control the quality of the goods or the services sold under its trademark.” Or Count I, which clearly contradicts the plaintiffs’ primary claim—that franchises should be treated like any other small, locally owned business—by arguing that to do otherwise would discriminate against interstate commerce. Or perhaps most hilariously, Count VIII, which alleges that the ordinance violates the First Amendment, because its higher labor costs would reduce the money available to spend on the franchisees’ constitutionally protected commercial speech:

[T]he Ordinance will curtail franchisee commercial speech in at least three important respects. First, by increasing the labor costs of franchisees, the Ordinance will reduce the ability of franchisees to dedicate funding to the promotion of their businesses and brands. Second, the increased labor costs the Ordinance mandates may cause some franchisees to shut their doors, reducing the amount of relevant commercial speech they engage in to zero. Third, and relatedly, the Ordinance will likely cause potential franchisees to forgo purchasing a franchise because of the associated higher operation costs, again eliminating all associated speech.

“That’s crazy talk,” says attorney Dmitri Iglitzin, a labor and employment lawyer who represents groups defending SeaTac’s $15 minimum wage ordinance. Iglitzin says that the First Amendment claim actually surprised him. Indeed, it’s so blatantly frivolous, he suggests, that it could even end up pissing off the court. “I don’t just throw everything I can imagine into a claim and hope that it sticks,” says Iglitzin about his own legal strategy.

Iglitzin doesn’t think much of the complaint’s other seven counts either, which include vague appeals to the Commerce Clause, the Equal Protection Clause, and the state constitutional prohibition on granting “rights and immunities” to specific corporations. Iglitzin characterizes the remarkably nonspecific alleged violation of Washington State corporation law as “equally nonsensical.” When asked if there was anything in the complaint that gave him pause,  Iglitzin said: “There’s really not.”

Iglitzin did say he would take a deeper look at Count V, which claims that the ordinance’s separate schedules for employees receiving health benefits is preempted by the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). He doesn’t believe the claim has merit, but “ERISA is a complicated area of the law,” he concedes.

“If I saw a lawsuit that was just ERISA, I might have thought that maybe they saw something that I didn’t see,” says Iglitzin. But overall, “it seems like a pretty frivolous lawsuit to me.”

I’m not an attorney, but I’ve seen enough of these things to fashion an informed opinion. And I have to agree. It’s frivolous. I mean, how can anyone take seriously a legal document that authoritatively cites a Seattle Times editorial?

In fact, much of the complaint reads more like it was drafted by PR consultants than lawyers, with nearly a quarter of its pages devoted to detailing the alleged woes of the named plaintiffs, and how the Seattle ordinance unfairly discriminates against their franchise businesses. But unfortunately for the plaintiffs, there’s nothing illegal, preempted, or unconstitutional about these sorts of distinctions.

Under Seattle’s ordinance, “small” businesses—those with 500 or fewer employees—phase in to $15 slower than larger businesses: 7 to 10 years versus 3 to 4. The bone of legal contention in this lawsuit is the provision that counts the number of employees based on the entire franchise network, rather than the number employed at single franchise store. But whether or not this is unfair or disadvantageous to franchise owners, it is not illegal.

Government regulations discriminate between different businesses all the time—based on size, industry, location, and whatever. In fact Washington State already has an entire chapter of the RCW devoted specifically to regulating franchises! There’s nothing novel about these sorts of regulatory distinctions. The only possible legal question, Iglitzin insists, is whether these distinctions are rational.

“There is a reason why you open a Burger King franchise rather than a Goldy’s Hamburgers,” explains Iglitzin, “and that is because there is value in being part of a larger network.” The franchiser provides branding and advertising, legal and administrative support, even payroll and human resource guidelines. Franchisees benefit from preexisting good will, and franchisers have both the incentive and the ability to assist franchisees in adapting to higher labor costs.

The legal test for both the “equal protection” and the “rights and immunities” claims is “is there a rational argument for treating franchisees differently?” says Iglitzin. And his answer is an emphatic yes.

“It is self-evident that franchisees are different from other employers,” says Iglitizin. And so it is perfectly legal to write regulations that treat franchisees differently.

The Franchise Association’s complaint was filed in the US District Court of Western Washington. And FYI, there is not a single word in its 34 pages challenging the minimum wage itself, only the regulatory distinction between franchisees and other businesses. So yes, the fast food industry has capitulated on $15.

UPDATE: No, I’m not an attorney. But David Ziff is. And he also thinks that there’s “not much merit” in the complaint, and for a lot of the same reasons.

Seattle may have been the first city in the nation to approve a $15 minimum wage, but San Francisco may be the first city to get there, at least for all its workers. The dominos continue to fall:

San Francisco voters will decide in November whether to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2018.

The mayor, city supervisors and business and labor leaders announced on Tuesday that they had reached a deal on a ballot measure for the increase.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am. San Francisco is yet again setting the bar on workers’ rights,” said Supervisor Jane Kim, who helped broker the deal. “All San Francisco employers will be paying $15 an hour by 2018. There will be no tip credit, no health care credit. These are pure wages workers will be bringing home to their families.”

[…] The city’s current minimum wage is $10.74 an hour. Under the ballot measure that will go before voters, it would increase to $12.25 next May, then to $13 in July 2016 and $1 each year after that until it reaches $15 in 2018.

Under Seattle’s recently passed ordinance, minimum wage workers at companies with more than 500 FTEs will earn $15 an hour as soon as 2017, 2018 for workers who receive benefits. But workers at companies with 500 or fewer FTEs won’t fully phase in to an inflation-adjusted equivalent wage until 2025. That means that when all San Francisco workers will be earning a minimum of $15 in 2018, tens of thousands of Seattle workers will still be earning as little as $11.50 an hour. On the other hand, since Seattle’s minimum wage is pegged to $15 in 2017 dollars, rather than 2018 in San Francisco, Seattle’s inflation-adjusted minimum wage will ultimately be a little bit higher.

Personally, I much prefer San Francisco’s more straight forward four-year phase-in than the convoluted multi-schedule phase-in Seattle settled on. But either would be a huge victory for low-wage workers.

But of course, the bigger story is that thanks in part to the history-making effort here, the fight for $15 is on the verge of victory in another American city. On to the next battle.

Over at my alma mater Slog, there’s a guest post up by Dave Hoover, a Colorado police sergeant and uncle of Aurora theater shooting victim A.J. Boik, urging support for Washington’s Initiative 594:

In Colorado, we responded to the unacceptable reality of gun violence by requiring background checks on private sales. It’s the best thing we could have done to honor the lives of our loved ones. Washington has an incredible opportunity this year to prevent future acts of gun violence by passing Initiative 594’s common sense background checks.

Since 2013, Colorado’s background checks on private sales have worked well for everyone in our community. Ninety-eight percent of the over 11,000 private sale background checks performed have been approved while 227 prohibited purchasers were stopped from purchasing firearms. I have personally used the system twice: once to purchase firearms and once to sell them. It’s a simple and convenient system that keeps firearms out of the hands of those who shouldn’t have them—felons, abusers, and the dangerously mentally ill.

It’s a moving and thoughtful piece. Read the whole thing.

(Presumably up next on Slog, following the equal time doctrine they adopted on the minimum wage debate in the immediate wake of my departure, will be an anti-594 guest post from a potentially disenfranchised mass shooter.)

Holy fuck, Virginia Republicans are crazy:

One of the cruel ironies of the minimum wage battle is that some of the people most responsible for winning a $15 minimum wage aren’t benefiting from the victory. It is fair to argue that without the SeaTac $15 minimum wage initiative helping to define the terms of the debate, Kshama Sawant might never have won her $15-fueled run for Seattle city council. And had not both the SeaTac initiative and Sawant won in November, the mayor and the council would not have felt nearly as much pressure to pass a $15 ordinance so quickly, if at all.

Yet thanks to a post-election ruling from a King County Superior Court judge, thousands of Sea-Tac Airport workers have not been delivered the wages and workplace protections the initiative promised.

Plaintiffs argued, and the judge agreed, that RCW 14.08.330 grants the port “exclusive jurisdiction” over airport operations. And the plain language of that statute certainly appears to support that interpretation. But an amicus brief (pdf) filed by Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson says not so fast.

Ferguson argues that the apparently plain language of RCW 14.08.330 must be interpreted in conjunction with conflicting statutes, specifically RCW 49.46.120, which allows local minimum wage laws that are more favorable to workers to supersede state and federal minimum wage laws. Ferguson’s argument is a clever one. Yes, RCW 14.08.330 grants the port “exclusive jurisdiction,” but only “subject to federal and state laws, rules, and regulations.” RCW 49.46.120 is a state law, and one that grants minimum wage jurisdiction to local governments. Connect the dots, reasons Ferguson, and RCW 14.08.330 grants minimum wage jurisdiction to the City of SeaTac via RCW 49.46.120.

Ferguson argues that since the statutes conflict, “the Court has to look to the legislative intent in passing RCW 14.08.330 to discern the precise scope of the Port’s ‘exclusive jurisdiction:'”

Here, this Court has already explained the Legislature’s intent in enacting RCW 14.08.330. Shortly after the law passed, this Court held: “The effect of this section, when read in the light of the entire Revised Airports Act, is merely to preclude [other local governments] from interfering with respect to the operation of the Seattle-Tacoma airport.” King Cnty. v. Port of Seattle, 37 Wn.2d 338, 348, 223 P.2d 834 4 (1950).

Under Ferguson’s reading, unless SeaTac’s minimum wage ordinance interferes with the operation of the airport, it is permissible. Which brings us to Ferguson’s second—and I think more persuasive—argument: that without jurisdiction there can be no “exclusive” jurisdiction.

For years, port commissioners had insisted that they had no legal authority to set a minimum wage at the airport, so sorry, there was nothing they could do about the horrendous wages and job conditions of airport workers. It was only after the SeaTac initiative passed that the port reversed itself, not only arguing that it, not the City of SeaTac, had jurisdiction over minimum wages at the airport, but joining Alaska Airlines and the other plaintiffs in arguing that such jurisdiction needn’t be considered at all.

The judge agreed, ruling that RCW 14.08.330 gave the port exclusive jurisdiction while leaving unsettled whether the port had the legal authority to set a minimum wage.

Citing both prior case law and, well, logic, Ferguson calls bullshit on that:

If the Port has no jurisdiction over such wages, it cannot as a matter of logic have exclusive jurisdiction over them. And as a matter of legislative intent, if the Legislature gave the Port no authority over this topic, it is hard to imagine that the Legislature intended to oust the authority of other local governments recognized in RCW 49.46.120.

[…] In interpreting the Port’s powers, it is important to remember that: “The Port, as a municipal corporation, is limited in its powers to those necessarily or fairly implied in or incident to the powers expressly granted, and also those essential to the declared objects and purposes of the corporation. If there is a doubt as to whether the power is granted, it must be denied.” Port of Seattle v. Washington Utils. & Transp. Comm’n 92 Wn.2d 789, 597 P.2d 383 (1979).

In essence, Ferguson argues that for the court to rule the port has “exclusive” jurisdiction over setting a minimum wage at the airport, the court must first rule that the port has any jurisdiction over setting a minimum wage at all. And nothing in state statute explicitly grants the port such power. Therefore, says Ferguson, the limited scope of the port’s “exclusive jurisdiction” leaves jurisdiction over the minimum wage in the hands of the City of SeaTac.

Clever, clever.

Of course, I’ve only summarized the major points of Ferguson’s 17-page brief. There’s a lot more to it. So read it for yourself.

As for the plaintiffs, their reply (pdf) is perhaps telling:

Neither of the arguments made by the Attorney General was raised by any party to this appeal.  This Court does not consider arguments that are raised only by amici curiae.

The plaintiffs go on to insist that the two statutes should not be read together, and that the scope of the port’s employment regulation authority is not at issue in the appeal. It is largely a procedural defense against some very compelling arguments.

So, how will the court rule? Initiative sponsors seem pretty confident that they will prevail on appeal. Put a gun to my head and I’d have to agree. But this isn’t a slam dunk case.

Oral arguments will be held before the court on June 26, with a decision expected later this year.