A few thoughts on Seattle’s New Minimum Wage Proposal

Lots of discussion and some confusion about the mayor’s recently announced minimum wage proposal (actually it’s the work of a committee of business, labor leaders, and politicians that he convened).

To me, the most useful quick and dirty metric for thinking about the proposal is to look at the proposed minimum wage increase in 2014 dollars and then ask how it relates to the current minimum wage.

That’s the number you get when you do this equation:

Proposed Seattle Minimum Wage in 2014 dollars/Current Washington Minimum Wage

If the final minimum wage increase ends up being $13.25/hr in 2014 dollars as Goldie has argued on his Horse’s Ass blog, that is a little more than 1.4 times what the current state minimum wage is now (and 1.7 times the current federal minimum).

Fifteen dollars an hour in current dollars would be around 1.6 times the current state minimum and almost twice as high as the current federal minimum.

Some people didn’t want to raise the minimum wage at all. Some people wanted it to immediately be 1.6 times greater than it is now. Those are the two polar extremes.

But everybody who supports raising Seattle’s minimum wage didn’t necessarily support immediately making it 1.6 times higher than it is now. Indeed, I suspect as more people have drilled down on the details, they’ve come to understand that this is an issue with a lot of moving parts and dependencies.

One poll showed that 68% of Seattle voters favored raising the minimum to $15 an hour, but I doubt those people are a monolith. What that poll shows is that Seattle voters want substantive action on this issue. That’s why business can’t just put its head in the sand and stonewall.  Nevertheless, the poll doesn’t say that every single member of that 68% would oppose a reasonable compromise.

That seems to be what Murray’s commission has delivered: a compromise proposal that gets us to a minimum wage around 1.4 times greater than it is now, which is about where I thought things would end up. It’s a big enough increase to show meaningful substantive action on the issue and no bigger.

If this plan passes the Council, I can see why some of the more hardline folks on the left will be disappointed. They haven’t had this much wind in their sails on an economic justice issue since the early 1970s. But I can also see why organized labor is going to walk away feeling pretty good about the outcome.

This is precedent they can use moving forward, and it’s probably closer to a number that can play in less liberal and affluent cities than Seattle. So it doesn’t seem like some crazy anomaly.

I hope the hardline folks will eventually put things in perspective, follow suit, and feel good about it too. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

If you had told most left-of-center folks in 2012 that Seattle business leaders in 2014 would sign off on raising the city’s minimum wage to 1.4 times the state minimum (already among the highest in the nation), I think most people would have seen that as something to be psyched about.

It may not be a perfect win, like the Seahawks blowing out the Broncos in the Super Bowl back in January. But it’s a win nevertheless