Seattle Workers Hail 'Historic Moment' as City Sets Course for $15 Minimum Wage

By Nicky Woolf, Guardian UK

01 April 15

By 2017, all workers in the city of Seattle will earn $15 an hour – after a long battle by city workers who felt they weren’t getting a fair deal

early 40,000 low-wage workers will get an instant pay rise on Wednesday, when Seattle begins to phase in a landmark $15 minimum wage law that was passed amid controversy last year.

Beginning April 1, the minimum wage for an employer with more than 500 employees rises from just over $9 to $11 per hour; for smaller employers, it becomes $10 per hour.

Over the next few years, stepped increases in the minimum wage will continue, until all workers in the city of Seattle earn at least $15 an hour by 1 January 2017, more than double the federal minimum wage.

For minimum-wage workers like Crystal Thompson, who has worked at a branch of Domino’s in South Seattle, earning minimum wage for the past six years, the new legislation is life-changing.

Thompson, 33, is a single mother. Her son, who has a mild form of autism, sleeps on the living room couch in her two-room apartment. She doesn’t own a car. She has worked at Domino’s for six years, earning minimum wage, without a meaningful pay rise.

She told the Guardian that Domino’s classifies her as a customer service representative, but due to chronic short-staffing she does a whole range of things. “I cook,” she said. “I cashier. I do everything but deliver pizza. I pretty much run the store.”

She said she doesn’t get a lunch break. “I’m on my feet eight, 10 hours … it’s kinda tough. People are struggling from paycheck to paycheck. Struggling to pay the rent, struggling to [keep the] lights on, having to live off food stamps and government subsidies.

“We work really hard, and the cost of living is very high in Seattle,” Thompson continued. “We work hard for these corporations, you know? They can afford to pay us a little better.”

That’s why, in 2013, Thompson, along with fast-food workers across the country, went on strike to demand better pay. In many cities the striking workers were shrugged off. But in Seattle, the city’s politics were ripe for the idea of a hike in the minimum wage.

She told the Guardian that she didn’t take part in the first of the strikes, because she was afraid for her job. But the Working Washington campaign, which helped organise the strikes, educated her about her rights. “We were actually able to organise my store, and get a couple more workers [to join the strike],” she said.

When they went back to work, community members and local councillors walked them back to work, “and brought papers to show that was our right, and they weren’t supposed to take any actions against us … it’s our right to strike and organise”.

Nick Licata is a council member of the city of Seattle, and saw the machinations of passing the $15 minimum wage first-hand. He told the Guardian that the mayor, Ed Murray, saw that the idea was getting a surprising amount of local traction.

“We’ve got the second-highest percentage of millennials,” Licata said, “and the second-highest number of single-member households. You can see the profile: people who are highly educated, working well below the level they expected to earn. You can see the frustration. And rents are skyrocketing; wages stayed stagnant.”

In that environment, the idea of raising the minimum wage became hugely popular. So popular, in fact, that polling taken by independent groups showed that if the idea came up as a ballot initiative, all signs pointed to it winning outright.

That, said Licata, was a hugely powerful incentive to bring business leaders to the table with unions to force a negotiated settlement. “The business community knew it wasn’t a hollow threat,” he said. “They thought they would have to throw a lot of money into [defeating a ballot initiative].”

In the other camp, the unions thought that they could win a ballot initiative – but also knew that their resources to fight a protracted campaign for such an initiative were limited. “So both sides were oriented towards coming up with a legislative solution,” Licata said.

Not everyone is happy. The Washington Policy Center, a rightwing thinktank, released a study, apparently based on a sentence in an article in Seattle Magazine, which claimed the impending minimum wage hike was a factor in “a rising trend in restaurant closures”. (Their claim later proved to be false.)

One of the most vocal campaigners for the $15 minimum wage has been Kshama Sawant, an Occupy Wall Street activist and social justice campaigner, who was elected to Seattle city council in 2013 on a socialist platform.

“This is a historic moment,” she told the Guardian. “This is truly a historic victory for the working class of Seattle, and nationwide, and internationally.” The campaign for a $15 minimum wage is gathering strength in Minneapolis, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, Sawant said.

“Initially, big business had no intention of giving in at all,” Sawant said. “Then, they had to make huge concessions, because the public opinion shifted so dramatically in favour of a fight against income inequality.

“This is a testament to how much the public mood has changed since Occupy.”

Thompson was there for the final vote on the minimum wage in Seattle’s council chamber, which passed the legislation unanimously. “That was pretty cool,” she said. “I didn’t think it was going to happen – we were all really shocked.

“When people come together from different walks of life, we can make things happen, you know?”