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The best part about leaving The Stranger is that nobody can make me write a wrap-up of the Rodney Tom shit-show in Olympia. Just sayin’.

Having already lost the local debate on the minimum wage in general, and on $15 in particular, the business interests on Mayor Ed Murray’s Income Inequality Advisory Committee have largely adopted a strategy of attempting to redefine the meaning of the word “wage” itself. The restaurant industry has long pined for a “tip credit” (or “tip penalty” from the perspective of workers) in which tips are counted towards meeting the minimum wage. But that wouldn’t lower the labor costs of businesses that rely on non-tipped employees, and so a strong push is being made to adopt the more sweeping notion of “total compensation.”

I’ll delve more deeply into the tip penalty debate in a subsequent post, but for the moment I want to focus on total compensation, which in addition to tips, would count the cost of providing  health insurance, sick leave, vacation leave, 401K matches, and other non-cash benefits toward the employer’s requirement to pay a minimum $15 an hour wage. And to better understand the impact of adopting a $15 an hour total compensation minimum wage, it is useful to start with a real-life example:

Let’s say you are a dishwasher working full-time at a midrange Seattle restaurant, earning $10.50 an hour plus $3 an hour in pooled or shared tips. You’re taking home the equivalent of $13.50 an hour, plus benefits. I guess there are worse jobs, but it’s hardly a living wage.

Now let’s say we pass a $15 total compensation minimum wage.

Based on the monthly price I’ve been quoted for COBRA, minus my share of the premium that had been deducted from my paychecks, I can estimate that I had cost The Stranger about $1.60 an hour for our so-so medical and dental coverage—let’s assume that’s typical for a restaurant. Then there’s a shift meal, with a retail price of $12.00, or another $1.50 an hour over the course of an 8 hour shift. Add two weeks vacation for another $0.40 an hour. Paid sick leave, that’s another $0.20 an hour still. I’m sure there are other benefits I’m missing, but this is more than enough to make my point. That’s already $3.70 an hour in benefits just there.

So… $10.50 an hour in wages, plus $3 an hour in tips, plus $3.70 an hour in benefits, and after our wonderful new $15 minimum wage ordinance passes, you’ll magically be making $17.20 an hour! That’s great! Except your take-home pay won’t increase a penny. In fact, some unscrupulous employers may seize this as an opportunity to actually lower wages. Hooray for total compensation!

Of course, not all employers are going to be dicks about it. But in this imbalanced labor market, some will. Wage and tip theft are already rampant. So if you don’t think that some employers are going to be eager to creatively use a $15 total compensation minimum wage as an opportunity to cut labor costs, then you don’t know fuck about capitalism. (Or human nature.) 

But wait—it gets even worse.

Your $15 minimum wage would be indexed to inflation, but the cost of one of your biggest benefits—health insurance—will inflate at many times that rate. Health care inflation is currently at a historic low of about 6.5 percent, but the Consumer Price Index is only expected to rise about 1.75 percent during 2014. That means that the costs of your benefits will rise significantly faster than the putative minimum wage, pushing the effective wage floor ever lower in inflation adjusted dollars over time. For example, after five years at the inflation rates above, the official minimum wage would rise about 9 percent to $16.36 an hour, while the cost of your dishwasher benefits will have gone up about 21 percent to $4.48 an hour, bringing your official total hourly compensation to $17.98—again, without raising your take-home pay a single penny!

Total compensation effectively shifts the burden of healthcare inflation from the employer, entirely onto the employee. And as benefits make up an increasingly larger percentage of total compensation, real take-home wages will steadily fall. For low-wage full-time workers, a total compensation minimum wage would be a formula for expanding the income gap, not closing it.

Admittedly, the impact on part-time workers is different. Lacking the cost of benefits to subtract from total compensation, low-wage part-timers could see their effective wage floor rise substantially. This in turn would remove from employers some of the economic incentive they currently have to shift low-wage full-time work to part-time work. So that’s one possible positive impact of total compensation.

But as a policy for raising the effective incomes of all low-wage workers—which is what the $15 minimum wage movement is presumably about—a total compensation minimum wage miserably fails. It would provide little or no immediate wage hike to most full-time workers while eroding the effective wage floor over time. But most importantly, it would be a lie. Mayor Murray and other leaders have promised voters $15, but total compensation only gets to that number by redefining the meaning of the word “wage.”

And that would not be a promise fulfilled.

– Wayne LaLaPierre’s speech at CPAC was troubling. Even by speech at CPAC standards.

– War-mongering is self-justifying. If you bungle a war in Iraq, it does not mean you need to sit back and reflect on the bungling. It means you should make more war, lest Iraq become a base for your enemies. If Vladimir Putin violates Ukrainian sovereignty, it is evidence for a more muscular approach. If he doesn’t, than it is evidence that he fears American power.

– Because the city of Seattle has been so awesome on civil rights issues, they really need new things like facial recognition software for video surveillance. The logic is solid.

– The amendment does not define “vicinity”. Nor does it specify a cap on how much a city can charge for Restricted Parking Zone (RPZ) permits. In theory, the City of Bellevue could deem the whole city to be in the “vicinity” of Sound Transit infrastructure, declare the whole city to be an RPZ, charge $1 million per annual permit, and require Sound Transit to pay the entire cost of these $1 million annual parking permits.

– The Very Real Consequences of Young People Not Voting

– The worst part about Putin’s power grab is that it’s totally copyright infringement.

When the Washington State Supreme Court handed down its historic McCleary decision, ruling that the state had failed to meet its constitutional “paramount duty” to provide for the ample funding of our public schools, Democrats cheered at the opportunity. The court ordered the state to add billions more to K-12 spending. Finally we would reverse decades of foolish disinvestment. Hooray!

Except, it’s beginning to look like Republicans and their drown-government-in-a-bathtub agenda are going to end up the big winners.

The indisputable mathematical truth is that we simply cannot meet McCleary and maintain existing government services at constant levels, without raising new revenue. It can’t be done! And anybody who tells you otherwise is either a liar or an idiot. Washington state has a structural revenue deficit. There is absolutely no way we can magically fund McCleary through economic growth alone. The math doesn’t work. Which means there is no way the state doesn’t eventually find itself in contempt of court.

It is going to happen. It is inevitable. Barring a farfetched pro-tax Democratic sweep in this November’s legislative elections, the state will not meet the McCleary mandate.

So how will the court react? Legislators enjoy immunity, so the court can’t throw them in jail on contempt charges, as much as they might deserve it. And the court lacks the authority to levy taxes itself. So the only remedy really available to the justices would be to order drastic across-the-board cuts in discretionary spending in order to repurpose those funds to our public schools.

Which is exactly what the Republicans want!

The Republicans correctly view McCleary as an unparalleled opportunity to defund the rest of state government in the disingenuous name of educating our children. But as the Washington State Budget & Policy Center correctly observes, such a policy would force “devastating cuts to health care, public safety, child care, and other important investments kids need in order to succeed in the classroom.” It would be a total fucking disaster.

But the alternative—doing nothing—would be a disaster too. For if the Supreme Court is proven toothless in the face of legislative insubordination, then the system of checks and balances inherent within our constitution would be forever broken.

Washington State is headed toward a constitutional crisis. There is no avoiding it. And Democrats better start preparing themselves to handle this McCleary crisis a helluva lot better than they handled the McCleary opportunity.

Primary Colors, an organization dedicated to electing more liberal Democrats, has released its list of the 90 “Good Democrats” in the US House—those representatives who consistently vote more progressive than their districts. And of Washington State’s six Democratic House members, only Jim McDermott makes the list.

That’s pretty impressive for McDermott, considering that he already represents Washington’s most progressive district. And that’s pretty pathetic for the rest of the delegation.

Of course, the conventional wisdom is that McDermott isn’t a very effective congressman. But could it be that the conventionally wise just aren’t nearly as progressive as the 7th Congressional District voters who routinely reelect McDermott by overwhelming margins, and so they dismiss (or even resent) what he brings to the table?

And could we do a crappier job as a state of recruiting and supporting progressive candidates?

Sad to see (Spokesman-Review link).

Sen. Tracey Eide, a Federal Way Democrat, said she will not run for re-election this year, opening up a seat in one of the state’s swing districts.

Eide, an 18-year-veteran of the Legislature, has served for the last two years has shared bipartisan leadership of the Senate Transportation Committee. During that time the Legislature has tried, without success, to find a package of major transportation projects and related tax increases that would satisfy both the Democrat-controlled House and the Senate controlled by a coalition that is predominantly Republican.

There is no requirement that people stay in their office, of course. And God knows that state legislature in general, and the Senate in particular, are all kinds of fucked. But it may be a tough seat to hold on to. I don’t know the district well enough to speculate on who’ll run. The district is represented in the state house by a Democrat and a Republican. I don’t know if either of them are interested in the Senate.

– Washington lawmakers are allowed to accept free meals on an infrequent basis — but that’s never been defined. A Senate bill to have the Legislative Ethics Board decide what infrequent means also died. It never got a hearing despite having a dozen sponsors.

– “Six different pods are participating in the hunger strike, and apparently there’s about 150 people per pod,” she said. “The number 130 strikes me as very low.” (TNT link)

– I sometimes, and inexplicably since I’ve never lived in Oregon and have a WA phone number, get random GOTV from the Oregon GOP. Recently they polled me about Greg Walden. I told them that I hoped someone primaries him and that I was born in 1956. Anyway, I’m glad he’s going to have a serious opponent.

– Obviously, the CIA shouldn’t spy on Senators, but it’s too bad that that’s what it took to get Senators to notice problems with the CIA.

– Honor codes at evangelical universities have some really shitty outcomes (the link has some descriptions of sexual violence).

– I hadn’t heard of Portolan Charts, but now I’m fascinated.

I’m all for a vigorous public debate, so I certainly don’t mind letting restaurateurs air their views on a $15 minimum wage. But when Tom Douglas makes the alarming claim that Seattle could lose a quarter of its restaurants should a $15 minimum wage pass, I just think it is fair to point out that there’s no historical data to support it.

While our proposed 60 percent hike in the minimum wage is certainly steeper than most, it’s not the steepest. Thanks to 1988’s Initiative 518, Washington restaurants endured an even more imposing 85 percent increase in labor costs, and survived with no evidence of mass layoffs or mass business closures. Indeed, over the following decade, growth in restaurant employment actually outpaced total growth in employment statewide.

I’m not saying that a $15 minimum wage wouldn’t hurt some businesses. I’m just saying that there is no historical evidence to support the dire warnings of mass business closures.

There. I said it. By any reasonable reading of the municipal code, Lyft, Sidecar, and uberX drivers are operating illegally in the City of Seattle. They are are unlawful. They are illegal. They are against the law. And this basic statement of fact is absolutely crucial to understanding that, rather than crushing innovation in the service of protecting the status quo, what the city council is really in the process of doing is legalizing an industry that has thus far operated in brazen violation of the law.

Whooh. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to get that off my chest.*

There is likely no issue on which I more broadly pissed off Stranger readers, than my coverage of the proposed taxi and “ride-share” regulations. Capitol Hill hipsters apparently love booking rides on their smartphones almost as much as they love to hate on traditional taxis, and so the coverage they wanted and expected was one that would unflinchingly embrace this disruptive new technology, while telling the decrepit old regulated taxi industry to go fuck itself. And I totally agree, based on my own anecdotal experience, that these new “transportation network companies” or “TNCs” (as they are referred to in the proposed ordinance) generally provide a far superior user experience than Yellow Cab and its cohorts.

But having plunged into this issue with no predispositions, and having ultimately wrapped my mind around an exceedingly complex policy debate, that is not the coverage I could provide. More nuanced critics accused me of being “anti-urbanist;” the less nuanced attempted to dismiss me as being in the pocket of the taxi industry (as if there’s any money in that). But the truth is that the taxi industry provides essential transportation services to a customer base that the TNCs cannot or will not serve. And the truth is—and this at the heart of the issue the council is addressing—the TNCs are operating illegally.

“No matter how sexy these services are,” council member Bruce Harrell proclaimed before voting to cap the number of TNC drivers, “they are unlawful in the City of Seattle.” And Harrell, an attorney, did not choose his words carelessly. It is a criminal offense in the City of Seattle to pick up paying passengers without a for-hire license, punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine. The Seattle City Attorney’s Office determined last year that TNCs “are subject to for-hire vehicle licensing and regulation requirements.” While the city has yet to enforce these regulations on TNC drivers, it might not take more than a handful of prosecutions to chill the industry.

So whatever limitations the council might impose on the TNCs in the ordinance it is expected to pass next week, above all what the council is doing is legalizing an industry that has heretofore operated without licensing, without inspection, without training, without guarantees of adequate insurance, and in blatant violation of the rule of law. So it’s not like the TNCs aren’t getting anything in return.

The TNCs angrily denounce proposed caps, accusing the council of limiting competition in order to protect the taxi industry. And they are right. That has always been part of the challenge facing the council: how to legitimize the popular TNC services without undermining the still indispensable taxi industry. Not everybody has a smartphone and a credit card. A recent study found that taxis, which accept cash and scrip, serve a disproportionately older and poorer customer base, as well as our crucial tourism industry. Taxis operate accessible vehicles, and provide discounted fares through Hopelink and other social service contracts. They also provide a livelihood to their traditionally immigrant drivers and owners.

However superior uberX might be at getting you home after a night of heavy drinking, it is in the public interest to maintain a healthy taxi industry as well.

How do we sustain the taxi industry in the face of all this new competition? Seattle disastrously experimented with taxi deregulation in the 1980s, removing all caps and price controls only to see prices rise, service deteriorate, and incomes fall in the face of a Malthusian collapse—so there is understandably little support on the council to repeat that experiment in the interest of accommodating the TNCs. And “if we are regulating one half of the market,” argues council member Nick Licata, “we can’t ignore the open-source half” without creating an unlevel playing field.

That is the delicate balance the council is attempting to strike: a regulatory structure that allows the TNCs to legally enter the market while giving the taxi industry the breathing space necessary to adapt to a new reality. Apps like TaxiMagic and particularly Flywheel are already close to providing the same slick user experience TNC customers have come to expect; Yellow Cab, by far the city’s largest taxi association, is in the process of upgrading its dispatch system with plans to release its own competitive app later this year. There’s no question that the innovative TNCs are forcing the the taxi industry to improve its service. There’s also no question that the council will need to revisit taxi and TNC regulations in the years to come.

Maybe the proposed TNC cap is too low. Maybe it is too high. Maybe, ultimately, caps will prove unnecessary at all. But the goal is to transition into a market where both the TNCs and the taxis can peacefully and profitably coexist. And the first step is legalizing the TNCs currently unlawful operations.

[Read more…]

As you know, the Seattle Chapter of Drinking Liberally has been searching for a new home for the past couple of months. In the process we have visited eight Seattle pubs looking for a place that works well for our group.

Last week, the group picked two finalists (Roanoke Park Place Tavern and Traveler Montlake), and we will revisit each one over the next two week.

This evening (Tuesday) we will make our second visit to the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, 2409 10th Ave E, Seattle. We meet at 8:00 pm, but some folks show up even earlier than that for dinner.

Can’t make it tonight? Check out another Washington state meeting of DL over the next week. The Tri-Cities, Vancouver, WA, and Redmond chapters also meet on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the Bellingham chapter meets. On Thursday the Bremerton chapter meets. The Centralia chapter meets on Friday. And next Monday, the Aberdeen, Yakima and Olympia chapters meet.

With 215 chapters of Living Liberally, including nineteen in Washington state, four in Oregon, and three more in Idaho, chances are excellent there’s a chapter meeting somewhere near you.

It didn’t take long after my departure from The Stranger for my former colleagues to start going McGinn all over Kshama Sawant in a half-hearted attempt to, I dunno, look all serious and independent at her expense? Or something.

Coincidence? Feel free to speculate all you want.

The post could use a thorough fisking, but suffice it to say that Dom’s thesis is silly. Refusing to answer a question is not the same thing as saying “no.” Besides, to imply that Sawant’s steadfast support for $15 now somehow equates to a refusal to compromise would be like saying that I oppose Obamacare because I passionately support a single-payer system. What we want in life and what we ultimately accept are often two different things. How we get there is the game that’s currently afoot, and by refusing to compromise early, Sawant is playing the game a helluva lot better than Democrats did on health care reform.

But I must say that I am generally amused by the larger air of consternation from political and media know-it-alls over both Sawant’s posturing and her relentless execution of the 15Now.org campaign. Oh, the powers that be should be concerned, but not for the reasons they imagine. For the conventional perception of Sawant as an accidental council member is obstructing their view of what is arguably the most ambitious grassroots organizing effort Seattle has seen in the ten years I’ve been covering local politics—and a very real threat to the Democratic Party’s virtual monopoly on city government.

For the record, 15Now.org serves three distinct (though related) purposes:

The first and most obvious purpose is to prepare to fight a ballot measure campaign. Whether this is the $15 minimum wage now initiative—with no exemptions or phase-ins—that the organization threatens, or a campaign to defend a Sawant-blessed council-passed compromise ordinance from a business-backed effort to repeal via referendum, makes no difference. Sawant and her Socialist Alternative comrades believe that something is likely to go to the ballot in November, and so they are building a campaign organization to support or oppose it. That’s just plain smart.

The second purpose served by 15Now.org—the one that so many establishment types and their surrogates appear to resent the most—is strategic. Do you think Sawant really wants to go to the ballot? Of course not. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” wrote Sun Tzu in The Art of War, and that is Sawant’s goal during these minimum wage negotiations. To this end, 15Now.org serves as the threat of force necessary to make diplomacy possible. Either produce a compromise ordinance that Sawant can accept, or face the hundreds of volunteers she is organizing throughout the city in a public battle over the already popular $15 minimum wage. Does the business community really want to take that risk?

Which brings us to the final purpose of 15Now.org, and the one that eye-rolling establishment types appear to miss entirely, despite the fact that it is occurring right under their noses: Sawant is using the $15 minimum wage issue as an opportunity to build the equivalent of a political party capable of pushing her socialist agenda far beyond the minimum wage issue itself.

Want to know why folks always show up at Sawant events? Because her volunteers are relentlessly contacting the growing list of fellow travelers they are assembling. Before every event I get an email. And a text message or three. And a bunch of tweets. And a robocall. And most impressively, a live person calling me to ask me to show my support. Seattle has rarely seen such an effective GOTV campaign for a local issue, and never outside of an election campaign cycle.

At every event 15Now.org volunteers are there with clipboards signing up even more volunteers and supporters. They’ve already organized eight neighborhood “action groups” scattered throughout the city, with a goal of organizing as many as 100 over the next few months. This is the equivalent of the established parties’ LD system—semi-autonomous neighborhood groups available for door-belling, phone-banking, fund-raising, and everything else that makes a party function. It’s a low bar, sure, but after just a few months it is safe to say that 15Now.org has already surpassed the Republican Party in terms of actively participating members within Seattle city limits.

To be clear, Sawant and her Socialist Alternative colleagues are not one-issue activists. They are using this one issue as a means of building a permanent organization capable of pushing forth their broader agenda on affordable housing, progressive taxation, and more. And their sights are not set simply on Seattle. Socialist Alternative chapters in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and elsewhere are using 15Now.org‘s efforts here as a model for expanding the campaign nationwide. The word “now” may be prominently emblazoned in the organization’s domain name, but their emphasis is clearly on the future.

It is an outrageously ambitious goal. But those who laugh at Sawant as naive and out-of-touch and easy pickings for a Democratic machine-backed challenger in 2015, are in for a shock. For outside of the quadrennial statewide coordinated campaign, there is no Democratic machine. Only labor can man the type of campaign organization 15Now.org is attempting to build, and if you think that labor is going shiv an incumbent Sawant in favor of some mushy Dem, think again. Sawant is useful to labor, even if they don’t fully trust her, because she drags the whole council to the left.

You don’t need to be an ideological ally nor a pollyanna about their prospects to be impressed by what 15Now.org is doing. But you do need to be an idiot to ignore it.

“Imagine having a job where you’re always on duty, and can never fully relax or you just may drown,” he wrote. “Having to fight through waves and currents of praise and criticism, but mostly hate. I can’t even count how many times I’ve been called a ‘dumb —–.'”

Never thought I’d have much in common with a professional athlete, but these sentiments expressed by Arizona Cardinals running back Rashard Mendenhall in explaining his retirement at only age 26, have really struck an empathetic cord with me. Personally, I feel like I’ve gotten a helluva lot more praise than criticism over years (and the criticism I’ve gotten was mostly stupid), but still, I know the feeling. And it’s exhausting.

Mendenhall says he’ll travel the world and write, the first part of which I can’t do, because unlike him, I didn’t earn $2.5 million last year. But I do find his optimism and sense of adventure in the face of such a dramatic life change to be a bit inspiring:

“As for the question of what will I do now, with an entire life in front of me?” he wrote. “I say to that, I will LIVE! I plan to live in a way that I never have before, and that is freely, able to fully be me, without the expectation of representing any league, club, shield or city.

“I do have a plan going forward, but I will admit that I do not know how things will totally shape out. That is the beauty of it! I look forward to chasing my desires and passions without restriction, and to sharing them with anyone who wants to come along with me! And I’ll start with writing!”

Ah to be 26 years old with millions in the bank and your whole life ahead of you. Best of luck, Rashard.

– I’m pretty excited about what’s happening on Pike/Pine

– Solid headline.

– Rasmussen says he thinks WSDOT has been “keeping things very close to the vest,” in part because of a lack of information from the tunnel contractor, Seattle Tunnel Partners. And he says it seems increasingly unlikely that the tunnel will open by its 2016 target date.

– I had never thought of bossy as a problem before.

So one benefit of suddenly finding myself with a lot free time on my hands is that I finally got around to upgrading HA to the latest version of WordPress in an attempt to address the performance issues that have been plaguing the site for quite some time. For the moment, those annoying “resource limit” 508 errors seem to have disappeared.

Still, HA  feels slow to me. I’ll continue to tweak things to try to wring out better performance without upping my monthly hosting bill. This was a big update. A lot of things changed under the hood, and I was forced to deactivate some old plugins. So if you find some things broken, let me know.

And if you find some things working better, let me know that too. For example, the comment editor now magically contains a long demanded spellchecker and a fullscreen option. Yay!

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Osaka, Japan.

This week’s contest is from Google Maps, good luck!