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Proverbs 21:19
It’s better to live alone in the desert than with a quarrelsome, complaining wife.

Discuss.

Now that the $15 minimum wage ordinance has passed, Seattle Times editorial columnist Jonathan Martin predicts that “Seattle’s politics are going to snap back to the center…”

With an alliance of big labor and Occupy Wall Street activism, the radical $15 wage idea shot from outer political orbit to inevitability in little more than a year. Never mind that it is an unproven experiment, with as much potential to close businesses as it has to boost low-wage workers’ paychecks.

But as the $15 movement held a dance party, literally, at City Hall on Monday, I could hear an almost sigh.

It was the sound of Seattle’s politics — after a spin around the dance floor with the far-left — snapping back to its more natural state of deliberate, bland, center-left policies.

Sigh. I want to like Martin, I really do. But there’s something about joining that paper’s editorial board that turns its writers a little stupid.

First of all, “unproven experiment” is redundant. That’s the whole purpose of conducting an experiment: To prove something. And yet in the exact same sentence in which Martin goes out of his way to double emphasize the unknown consequences of a $15 minimum wage (it’s not just an experiment, mind you, but an unproven experiment!), he goes on to assert certainty as to its outcome: “as much potential to close businesses as it has to boost low-wage workers’ paychecks.” The experiment is totally unproven, says Martin, yet the relative probability of potential outcomes is totally known.

Um… huh?

Indeed, if you dissect the logic of that sentence further, what it is actually asserting is that the $15 minimum wage will close businesses. We absolutely know that it will “boost low-wage workers’ paychecks”—that’s merely the mechanism of raising the minimum wage. So to say that it has “as much potential to close businesses as it has to boost low-wage workers’ paychecks,” is to express certainty that it will close businesses.

Hell, that doesn’t sound “unproven” at all. At least to Martin.

But I digress. My real beef with Martin’s column is not that sloppy sentence. It’s with his equally sloppy presumption that the $15 minimum wage is somehow outside of the center of Seattle politics.

It was a deal brokered by the mayor between business and labor leaders. Polls showed the proposal enjoying overwhelming public support. It passed the city council by a unanimous 9-0 vote. What could be more politically centrist than that? Yes, the speed in which we moved on the issue—one year and four days from when striking fast food workers first made the $15 an hour demand to the moment the city council met it—was remarkable for process-obssessed Seattle. But that was a testament to the speed in which the issue achieved consensus.

No, there’s nothing leftist or “radical” about a minimum wage or a millionaires tax—certainly not here in Seattle, where such proposals pass easily. Indeed, if anything is far outside the center of Seattle politics it is the Seattle Times editorial board and its relentlessly anti-tax, anti-goverment, anti-Seattle agenda. I mean, this is a paper whose publisher has been one of the leading national voices in favor of eliminating the inheritance tax at a time when income and wealth inequality is growing to such extremes as to threaten the very being of our democracy.

Now thats radical!

Martin’s effort to define policy as left, right, or center is purely arbitrary, and totally detached from public opinion. He scoffs at the notion of council member* Kshama Sawant’s proposed “millionaires tax,” yet if we were to put a 5 percent tax on incomes over $1 million on Seattle’s ballot in 2016, do you think it would pass? Of course it would! Because here in Seattle, taxing the income of the wealthy is a centrist policy!

On economic issues, it is the Seattle Times editorial board that is far outside the mainstream.

* Yes, that’s right, she’s a council member. 93,682 Seattleites voted for Sawant. So how far outside the center of Seattle politics could she really be?

– Wildland fire season is coming and the more we put carbon in the air the worse it gets

– The 50th Anniversary of Mississippi’s Freedom Summer: Remembering What Fannie Lou Hamer Taught Us

– You’ve heard the expression, “You catch more flies with honey”? Well, Republicans would catch more flies with sanity.

– Maybe I’m wrong, but I think “As far as I can tell, there’s no video, as the Seattle Channel’s appetite for zoning meetings is lower than mine.” may be the greatest opening sentence in the history of language. Also, the actual piece on the Rainier upzone is interesting if you’re into that sort of thing.

– Oh hey, PZ Myers is in town. If you go see him, try not to be an asshole.

– The Aziz Ansari bit on 50 Cent not knowing what grapefruit is is one of my favorites. Now the plot thickens.

In the immediate wake of the passage of Seattle’s highest in the nation $15 an hour minimum wage, the International Franchise Association announced plans to file suit against the ordinance on the grounds that it discriminates against franchise owners. From their press release:

“The Seattle City Council and Mayor Murray’s plan would force the 600 franchisees in Seattle, which own 1,700 franchise locations employing 19,000 workers, to adopt the full $15 minimum wage in 3 years, while most other small business owners would have seven years to adopt the $15 wage. … The City Council’s action today is unfair, discriminatory and a deliberate attempt to achieve a political agenda at the expense of small franchise business owners.”

Uh-huh. First of all, the minimum wage ordinance does discriminate against franchisees. And if franchisees were a protected class—like gays or women or minorities—they might have a legal point. But they’re not. So they don’t. Our laws pick winners and losers all the time, for example tax credits written specifically to benefit Boeing (though without ever mentioning Boeing by name). Indeed, if the council had passed an ordinance applying a $15 minimum wage only to franchises, that would have been legal too.

So they’re going to lose their lawsuit. But that’s besides the point.

No, the real news here is that the industry association that claims to represent the interests both franchisers and franchisees—powerful corporations like McDonalds, Subway, and Dominos—is fighting to have their workers phased in to $15 over seven years instead of three. That’s it: $16.49 by 2021 versus $15 by 2017. They’re not fighting $15 at all. They just want to be treated like everybody else.

Even the fast food industry is prepared to capitulate on $15. Lawmakers elsewhere should follow suit.

Okay, the council meeting hasn’t even started yet, but its a festive atmosphere in council chambers as the throng of $15 minimum wage supporters gathers for the inevitable.

Stay tuned and I’ll let you know when it’s official, as well as fill you in on various updates.

UPDATE 1:59PM: Just like me, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka has already released a celebratory statement:

Today’s vote in Seattle will go down in history as a milestone in the struggle to raise wages and ensure fair pay for all workers. It is proof that when working people organize and make their voices heard, we all benefit.

While Republicans in Congress fail to act, Seattle, along with other cities and states around the country, is ensuring that workers receive a fair day’s pay for a hard day’s work. We have already seen progress in states from Hawaii to Minnesota, and we will continue to fight to provide every worker with a good living wage and an opportunity to achieve the American Dream.

UPDATE 2:23PM: Unlike previous council meetings, Subway franchisees and other business representatives seem to have abandoned the chambers to minimum wage advocates. No doubt there was plenty of pro-business lobbying behind the scenes, but they appear to have given up on making their case in public. Public testimony continues.

UPDATE 2:39PM: Council member Nick Licata: “Unfortunately, I was unable to attend last week for the vote on training wages.” Council member Tim Burgess: “Good.”

UPDATE 3:15PM: Council member Kshama Sawant closes her speech in favor of the ordinance: “Fifteen dollars in Seattle is just the beginning. We have an entire world to win.”

UPDATE 3:39PM: It’s official! Ordinance passes 9-0! Audience cheers, than quickly files out, leaving council to continue other business.

It could use a thorough fisking, but it’s a beautiful sunny Saturday, so I don’t want to waste more than a few precious moments calling bullshit on the Seattle Times‘ latest bullshit editorial: “Redefine franchises under Seattle’s minimum-wage proposal.”

The politics of this decision is clear. Seattle is the first city to move swiftly toward a $15 minimum wage, but not the last. National labor activists will export the model created here. Treating franchises as what they are — small businesses — would eliminate the opportunity to burn [McDonald’s CEO Don] Thompson in rhetorical effigy elsewhere.

Well, the editors are half right. The goal always has been to export the model created here to the rest of the nation, so labor negotiators have been careful to avoid creating any anti-worker precedents. But the provision determining the size of a business based on the total number of FTEs of the national chain rather than that of the individual franchise or retail store has nothing to do with burning the McDonald’s CEO in effigy. It’s all about protecting the interests of the fast food workers whose courageous walkouts first sparked the $15 minimum wage movement.

Under the currently proposed ordinance, all fast food workers would be phased in to $15 by 2018. Count franchises as separate small businesses—as the Seattle Times proposes—and no fast food worker would be fully phased in until 2025. That’s bullshit.

While it is true that local franchisees operate as individual businesses, it is totally misleading to downplay their close connection to the national chains. Giant, multinational corporations like McDonald’s and Subway have defined the low-wage business model on which their franchisees operate. Seattle’s $15 minimum wage law puts pressure on local franchisees to put pressure on corporate headquarters to readjust that model so as to accommodate paying a living wage.

Do you really think that these national chains are going to abandon Seattle? Of course not. They will be forced to find a way to help their franchises here thrive, despite paying higher wages.

And that is a model that we sure as hell want to export to the rest of the nation.

My mental health would be better if I didn’t go on the Washington State House and Senate GOP Caucus web pages. I mean it’s so nice out, and I could be enjoying a walk or a bike ride. Instead I’m pissed at a couple throwaway paragraphs some staffer for the Senate wrote. Really, I’m only taking issue with one paragraph. They’re making hay out of the fact that the state hasn’t done anything in the year since the I-5 bridge over the Skagit River collapsed.

It’s been one year since a truck with an oversized load struck a beam on the I-5 bridge over the Skagit River, sending a section plunging into the water below. But very little has changed to prevent another similar accident from happening again on any number of bridges across the state.

Agreed. It’s problematic that the state hasn’t fixed the maintenance backlog. Hey remember when the Democratic House passed a pretty conservative, freeway heavy, transit package that would have addressed some of that? Then remember how the GOP Majority Coalition GOP in the Senate didn’t pass a transit package? The GOP is the problem here.

I don’t know you guys. Do they think if they point out that there’s a problem people won’t notice their hand in causing the problem?

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.

– I’m not sure at what point we should just fire everyone in SPD who can’t follow the use of force policies.

– I didn’t even realize Tacoma Link not being free was on the table, but it’s nice to see businesses stepping up.

– Saying that women have put you in the friend zone implies that even a little non-sexytime time spent around women is tortuous. It implies that spending time around women, just talking to them or listening to them is time wasted. It implies that women are not women–not potentially interesting friends or colleagues, but sex robots who’ve granted or denied you permission to insert your girder.

– Today in Sally Clark is such a problem, Sally Clark is such a problem.

– Missing your bus stop is the worst.

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.

– Public Internet is the fight of the future.

– Maybe it has something to do with the Memorial Day weekend or a rainy day after a long spell of nice weather, but there have been an outrageous number of serious traffic collisions in Seattle and around Washington State in the past day. Here’s just a sample:

– Shorter Commissioner Tom Mielke: We have to keep arresting people for marijuana related crimes because we don’t want additional policing. (h/t on the article)

– Mars Hill is such a problem (h/t)

– Solar Tax Quacks

– Here’s Some Real Talk: ‘If Gay Guys Said the Shit Straight People Say’

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.)

 

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.

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.