Adumbration

The Seattle City Council appears predisposed to attempt raising the minimum wage to as high as $15 per hour (currently at $9.19 in Washington).  The agenda planned for a council meeting on Tuesday (3/18) has an hour dedicated to presentations by supporters, and 20 minutes reserved for comments; no time allowed for opponents of such a measure.

A. Call to Order
B. Items of Business

1. Presentations by Organizations Supportive of Raising the City's Minimum Wage to $15.  

Presenters: Jess Spear, $15NOW; Sejal Parikh, Working Washington's Good Jobs Seattle Campaign; Rebecca Smith, National Employment Law Project; Nicole Vallestero Keenan, Puget Sound SAGE   (60 minutes)

C. Public Comment  (20 minutes)
D. Adjournment

I don't need to guess about what the $15NOW people might have to say - a recent Seattle Times report (3/11/2014, Lynn Thompson) gives examples of their rhetoric

“Won’t increasing the minimum wage be a ‘job killer?’ ” asks one of the handwritten queries. The suggested response, drafted by participants at a February organizing meeting, reads, “Let’s remember, it was the blatant greed and criminality of Wall Street and Corporate America that crashed the economy in 2008 — not low-wage workers. The policies of big business have been the real ‘job killers.’ ”

A non-sequitur such as this would not stand up in rational discourse, but can easily fill up time during a city council meeting, especially when the $15NOW claim about the 2008 crash is itself so riddled with misconception as to distract attention from the fact that $15NOW and their ilk appear to not care that increasing the minimum wage will indeed lead to job losses. 

The activists reject the idea of a phased-in measure. They reject the idea of counting tips or other forms of compensation, such as health-care benefits, in lieu of higher hourly pay. As the name suggests, they want $15 an hour and they want it now.  “Our goal is to get a win for workers in 2014,” said Jess Spear, organizing director for 15 Now and a former Sawant campaign worker. “We’re building a mass movement as a strategy to get that done.”

As with other promoters, Jess Spear and the $15NOW activists evidently feel entitled to play with people's livelihoods.  The CBO predicted half a million people will lose their jobs across the USA if the federal minimum wage is increased to $10.10 - I can scarcely imagine what promoters of a $15 minimum in Seattle can be thinking will keep even greater damage from being concentrated in Seattle with a 50% larger mandate.  On the darker side of democracy being when the common people know what they want, rejecting a phased-in measure would at least make the connection to job loss more obvious, as the sudden shock to business would be that much harder to compensate.  But to claim a "win for workers" with this measure needs to add the word "some", because many workers will be lose out big time if this passes, which will be a tragedy.

Another group supporting 15 Now is Casa Latina, a nonprofit that organizes and runs a hiring hall for day laborers and domestic workers. The group’s worker committee voted in 2013 to raise the hourly wage it charges to $15.

Sadly, while the connection between minimum wage and availability of work is not that difficult a concept, there seems to be a willful ignorance among the people who support increasing it.  The connection between higher prices and reduced demand is so ubiquitous that they are missing what is all around them, missing even their own purchase of goods and services, of how they buy less of something when the price is higher.  How can they fail to see how a 50% mandated increase to the  price of unskilled labor will lead to less employment?

I am not hopeful for the fate of unskilled labor in Seattle - the local pols are stacking the deck for making a large increase to the minimum wage, and naysayers don't have much of a voice.  As one member states - “If I were against $15, I wouldn’t be on the mayor’s committee”