Goldy

“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.

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.

 

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.

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.)

 

It is an irony that a nation that makes such a show of celebrating its war dead does such a crappy job of taking care of our war living. The real scandal is not that the Veterans Administration has failed to do better with the limited resources it has, but that we spent so lavishly sending armed forces to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with so little thought to how we would take care of these veterans upon their return.

Remember all those hundreds of billions of dollars in additional appropriations that were routinely passed during the Iraq war with very little congressional debate (because to question it would have appeared unpatriotic and anti-troops)? That’s the sort of attitude our lawmakers need toward VA funding if we’re going to adequately take care of our veterans over the next several decades.

Yes, yes, and double yes:

IF public policy were based just on what we know works, universal pre-kindergarten education would already be the law of the land. The public duty to educate children would not, magically, kick in at age 5 for kindergarten. High-quality preschool would be a foundation for school readiness, leveling academic disparities across race and income lines.

But such a utopia is not to be found. The Washington Legislature is moving, slowly, in that direction; Congress, less so. Cities have begun to redefine the public duty to the tiniest of students. That is why the City of Seattle’s proposal for a universal, high-quality preschool experiment seems promising.

At the risk of sounding ungracious, my own complaint with the Seattle Times editorial board on universal preschool is that they didn’t take the lead on it sooner. For all their strong words in favor of charter schools, increased testing, and other so called “reforms,” high quality early learning is the only educational reform absolutely proven to work. If the editorial board had focused more on improving education and less on busting the teachers unions, perhaps Seattle might have moved toward universal preschool a couple years sooner.

Genesis 6:6-7
The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.”

Discuss.

Seattle City Council members are being lobbied hard by a group of immigrant and minority small business owners—mostly Asian—fighting to weaken the city’s proposed $15 minimum wage ordinance. So I just thought I’d take a moment to drill down to the core of their argument and remind council members that there is nothing particularly noble nor rational about defending the rights of immigrant business owners to pay poverty wages to immigrant workers.

And that’s basically what these immigrant business owners are demanding.

I suppose somewhere in the ID there might be a white suburban teenager busing tables or washing dishes or stocking shelves, but we all know that’s not the workforce we’re talking about here. Whereas minimum wage workers in general are disproportionately people of color, minimum wage workers at immigrant owned small businesses are almost entirely so. Thus any concession we make to immigrant business owners largely comes at the expense of their immigrant workers.

Yes, I know, this is a nation that was largely built on the backs of cheap immigrant (and slave) labor. And many of these immigrant business owners worked crappy, poverty-wage jobs themselves when they first came to this country. They were exploited when they first arrived, and now it’s their turn to do the exploiting. It’s the American way. Hooray!

But that doesn’t make it right.

Besides, the same economic arguments that apply to other businesses apply to immigrant owned ones as well. The personal stories of the owners may be more compelling than that of the guys my ex-colleagues at The Stranger have pimped for, but the economics are no different. Some immigrant owned businesses might struggle to pay their workers $15 an hour. Some might lay off workers. Some might move out of the city. Some might close up shop. But most will figure out a way to adjust and to thrive. Because that’s the American way too.

In a 5-4 decision, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled today that Sea-Tac Airport workers have the right to sue their employer for providing lunches that fail to accommodate their religious beliefs:

Due to security concerns, the workers at Gate Gourmet can’t bring their own lunches to work. Nor can they leave work on their 30-minute lunch breaks.

Instead, the company provides their lunches. While there are ostensibly vegetarian and non-vegetarian options, the workers say the vegetarian options include animal by-products and allege the company switched from turkey meatballs to beef-and-pork meatballs without telling them.

Omiallah, is it possible to be a more awful employer? This is a company that is actually in the business of providing meals that comply with special dietary needs—from Gate Gourmet’s own fucking website:

Our chefs hail from different regions and countries and are experts in their respective native cuisine. With Gate Gourmet, you can count on a partner with expertise in ethnic and cultural cuisines as well as dietary and religious customs. Gate Gourmet can provide any type of special meal to cater to any specific dietary need, in full accordance with IATA specifications.

And yet they couldn’t bother to do the same for their own Muslim workers? What an utterly reprehensible display of disrespect!

One of the ironies* of the $15 minimum wage movement is the oversized role that Alaska Airlines and its Sea-Tac Airport contractors played in pushing the issue over the top. For years, airport workers had been protesting their low pay and abusive work conditions to no avail. The SeaTac $15 initiative was initially conceived as a means of pressuring Alaska to force its contractors to the negotiating table; organizers never believed they’d really have to go to the ballot. But Alaska chose to play hardball, and the rest is history.

* (A further irony is that a nation that wets itself at the thought of Islamist extremists appears to go out of its way to put Muslim immigrant workers behind airport security gates, only to pay them crappy wages, feed them pork, and fire them for praying on the job. Given our obsession with airport security, you’d think that if we can’t bring ourselves to respect these airport workers as actual, you know, people, we might think it in our self-interest to at least try to pretend.)

According to the latest census estimates, Seattle’s population grew by 2.8 percent last year, the fasest rate among the nation’s 50 biggest cities. And that’s not all:

Seattle didn’t just surpass other big U.S. cities in 2013. For the second consecutive year, it outpaced its suburbs — and the new census data show this trend is accelerating.

Seattle grew at double the rate of surrounding King County between 2012 and 2013. That is significantly faster than in the previous year’s census estimates, which clocked Seattle’s growth at 25 percent faster than its King County suburbs.

Among all places in Washington with at least 50,000 residents, Seattle had the fastest rate of growth, and was followed by: Sammamish (2.2 percent), Auburn (2 percent), Richland (1.7 percent), and Redmond (1.7 percent).

Clearly, Seattle’s tax-and-spend liberalism is destroying our city and driving people away! Or something. Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn off the WiFi router?

Pediatric neurosurgeon and accused stalker Monica Wehby easily beat second place Jason Conger 50 percent to 37 percent yesterday in Oregon’s Republican US Senate primary, after voters ran out of time to make an informed decision.

A police report detailing allegations that Wehby repeatedly stalked her ex-boyfriend at his home, entered without his invitation, and harassed his employees, did not emerge until Friday, May 16, the last day in which Oregon voters could be reasonably assured of putting their ballot in the mail and having it arrive by the state’s Tuesday, May 18 received-by deadline.

Wehby will go on to be trounced by Democratic incumbent Senator Jeff Merkley in the November general election.

Every election season our state’s editorial boards chime in with demands to switch Washington’s postmarked-by Election Day ballot deadline to Oregon’s more restrictive received-by deadline. The argument is that forcing voters to return their ballots sooner would result in faster election results. But as I’ve repeatedly explained, it won’t. Our elections departments can’t keep up with the volume of ballots that already arrive during the final couple days of the election. All switching the deadline would do is disenfranchise thousands of additional Washington voters.

But the Wehby incident illustrates another disadvantage to Oregon’s received-by deadline: it effectively shortens the election season by three or four days, leaving many voters unable to respond to late-breaking news like Wehby’s stalking scandal. In Washington, you can drop your ballot off at your neighborhood post office as late as Tuesday afternoon and be reasonably assured that your vote will eventually be counted, but in Oregon you damn well better put your ballot in the mail by Friday, Saturday at the absolute latest. Sure, first class mail sometimes arrives next day when mailed within the same urban center, but sometimes it doesn’t. So you’d be crazy to post your ballot on a Monday.

In practice, Tuesday’s proximity to the weekend essentially moves Oregon’s vote-by-mail Election Day to the previous Friday.

There are many advantages to a vote-by-mail election, not the least of which being the vastly reduced opportunities for voter suppression. But there is no reason to exacerbate the system’s weaknesses in pursuit of maybe reporting election results a tiny bit faster.

I am not a reporter and HA is not a news site. Just thought I’d take a moment to make that clear.

It’s been a couple months now since I left The Stranger and yet I’m still getting phone calls, text messages, and emails asking me to show up at some press event or another, or badgering me about why I haven’t shown some important issue enough love, and the answer of course is, because it’s not my job. Absent a steady (if meager) paycheck, I’ve been forced to take on some regular contract work that leaves me free to pursue my journalistic passions without conflict or compromise, but which doesn’t leave me much time to do it.

So to be clear, I have not returned to HA as a full time blogger. I will continue to post to HA on a regular basis—mostly political commentary and media criticism—but I simply cannot afford to write for free full time. And since there’s only so much time in the day, my first obligation when divvying up my work schedule has to be to the people who are paying me money.

It sucks, but that’s the way capitalism works, folks.

The five-plus years I spent as a full-time independent blogger were the most gratifying work years of my life (my three-plus years writing at The Stranger a bit less so), and if there are patrons out there willing to subsidize my folly, I would gladly recommit myself to the project. But for the moment, I can’t. And so to all my friends in the broader progressive community who have come to rely on me to cover your issues and events, well, tough nuts. I’ve got bills to pay and deadlines to meet. Welcome to the new HA.