– Where the Growth is Happening
– I’m just going to say it: Boo Canada.
– This WaPo piece on a Heritage Foundation panel hating Muslims has been going around, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point to it.
– It almost sounds crazy to write this, but 45 years ago today, the Seattle City Council tried to destroy the Pike Place Market.
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.
Please join us tonight for an evening of politics over a pint at the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally.
We meet tonight and every Tuesday at the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. The starting time is 8:00 pm, but some folks show up before that for dinner.
Can’t make it to Seattle? Check out another Washington state chapter of Drinking Liberally over the next week. The Tri-Cities and Shelton chapters also meet this Tuesday. The Lakewood and South Seattle chapters meet this Wednesday. And on Thursday, the Spokane and Spokane chapters meet.
With 206 chapters of Living Liberally, including eighteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.
– Enough is enough. Tell our legislators to commit to action on gun safety.
– I’m not usually one to heap much praise on car companies, but well done Tesla.
– I am not a fan of the 3 strikes law. At least there’s some possibility of clemency.
– Maybe trying to make sense of the Klan ideology is a fool’s errand, but trying to recruit military people because you think the government is overreaching and about to collapse, seems like one or the other.
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!
Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Chicago.
This week’s is a random location somewhere in Idaho. Good luck, and Happy Father’s Day!
NOTE: This will be the last Bird’s Eye View Contest in the current format. Some unexpected developments this week have thrown me an interesting curveball. Starting next week, this contest will either be on a short hiatus, or will be rebooted with some major changes. More details will be shared next Sunday.
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.
Thom: Boost the economy by forgiving student loans.
Gun Nutz:
Science: Giant solar flares may have disrupted communications on Friday.
Pap and Seder: The dumbing down of America.
Jon: VA computers.
George Will is an Ignorant Asshole:
Eric Schwartz: Senator Whoever:
The bear is loose: Obama escapes.
The Daily Show considers Google Glass.
Stephen: Sen. Cruz’s citizenship.
Stuck in an airport and All By Myself.
WaPo: Five questions with Bill Gates.
More on Cantor’s Stunning Upset:
How badly has Benghazi hurt Hillary Clinton? Not much.
White House: West Wing Week.
David Pakman: Nutjobber Tony Perkins is worried that Obama will seize government and cancel 2016 election.
WaPo: Five incredible upsets in political history.
Thom: The Good, The Bad, and The Very, Very Ugly.
Young Turks: What news does America trust?
Mental Floss: 39 facts about comedy.
The Right Wing Terrorizes an American P.O.W.:
Obama answers the question “Where do you see yourself in 10 years”.
WaPo: Late night laughs.
Alex Jones and friends think Obama is training military to attack Teabaggers (via Crooks and Liars).
Science: Solar roads?
Ann Telnaes: Republicans play with fire.
Alex Wagner: Students stand-up to hate-group, Westboro Baptist Church.
Thom with more Good, Bad, and Very, Very Ugly.
Jon: What the fuck is going on in Iraq.
Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.
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.
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.
- Imposing monetary or other contempt sanctions;
- Prohibiting expenditures on certain other matters until the Court’s constitutional ruling is complied with;
- Ordering the legislature to pass legislation to fund specific amounts or remedies;
- Ordering the sale of State property to fund constitutional compliance;
- Invalidating education funding cuts to the budget;
- Prohibiting any funding of an unconstitutional education system; and
- 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 laws that the legislature passed in the last session are now officially on the books. Seattleish has some highlights. Included are the ban on tanning for teens and the WA DREAM Act (that, yes I know the final bill was called something else). It seems pretty small bore compared to the problems we face. And give the makeup of the last legislature, it is. But it is mostly to the good.
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:
- Young asian woman smiling face
- Young hispanic man smiling at camera
- Portrait Of Young Happy Handsome Man In Glasses
- Friendly Female Barista In A Coffee Shop Serving Customers
- Young Pretty Woman Working As Florist In Shop And Smiling (Note: they color-adjusted the apron so it’s Starbucks green!)
- Attractive Female Business Owner On The Phone Behind The Counter Of Her Shop
- African American Woman Close Looks Up Smiles Into Camera
- 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?
– With how often I talk about how gross coal trains are, we can also remember that oil trains are also gross, and maybe we should have better disclosure.
– What the everloving fuck, Pat Robertson?
– I’m not as big on calling out a history of not voting by candidates. Policy ought to trump that. If the candidates are similar, it’s maybe a tiebreaker. But a campaign making excuses in a way that makes it seem they don’t understand they’re in a vote by mail state is maybe worse.
– Eric Cantor got what he deserved: A political fraud’s stunning demise
– Oh hey, the Backbone Campaign are having a fundraiser. It looks like fun.
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.
Eager to share our brilliant political commentary and blunt media criticism, but too genteel to link to horsesass.org? Well, good news, ladies: we also answer to HASeattle.com, because, you know, whatever. You're welcome!