$15 minimum wage in Seattle (Bellevue: neighborhood, school district, college)

[beautifulseattlehomes]

The NY Times had an article about aspects of this yesterday. In a nutshell, our "recovery" has grown jobs but most of the jobs are at the bottom of the income ladder, specifically in the fast food industry. It highlights how many middle income jobs disappeared during the Great Recession and have stayed gone never to come back, tumbling families out of the middle class and into the ranks of the working poor!

The continued loss of manufacturing in our country coupled with the growth of high paying highly skilled jobs has created a vast gulf between those with highly desired skills and those that simply don't have the skills to compete!

We say we don't want a $20 hamburger and I don't think anyone does but I also know that we as a society and indeed our social fabric, fail when large numbers of our population go hungry and without! So where is the give?

America chases cheap labor around the world finding the lowest paid workers to make so many of the things we consume. I for one would pay 20 for the 8 dollar t shirt at Target if it meant bringing jobs back to our shores. And yes I would pay more for the hamburger if it meant that the people making it were earning a living wage. It may not be $15 an hour but it is certainly higher than it is now.

[sean98125]

The jobs aren't coming back to the US, even with $20 burgers or more expensive clothing. Companies are going to do what they can to preserve their profit margins and shareholder returns.

All that will happen is that there will be fewer workers at Target or at McDonalds, making $15 an hour, while many of the tasks that used to be performed at $9 an hour are automated or performed by the customer.

It wouldn't take a lot to have a machine make fries or burgers or to dispense sodas. Customers can place their own orders on a touch screen. All you'd need is a few staff members to feed the hoppers on the machines and to hand the food to the customer.

$15 minumum wage will be good for the people who will still have jobs, but like we saw with the textile, manufacturing and steel industry it will suddenly become more cost effective to automate processes that humans performed simply because they were cheaper than machines. Once they are more expensive, the machines will win out.

[RotseCherut]

I love it when people complain about how all the jobs went overseas and now we need to force businesses to raise their wages for low wage workers as a result of it.. Seriously, this is a conundrum.. Do you realize most of the jobs went overseas because this government via unscrupulous unions and political officials enforced so much regulations and forced these companies to pay bloated salaries for their workers which made it become quite a burden to operate in the country. As we saw in the auto industry, many car manufacturers went bankrupt, but many other companies jumped shipped and went overseas. Not only were they not forced to pay their workers based on an industry standard, but didn't have to pay for endless vacations, early retirement and constant lawsuits as these businesses were constantly sued by their employees and crooked unions looking to benefit off these regulations and our bloated/crooked legal system. Of course, why would these companies want to keep enduring these losses when they could just operate overseas and not deal with all the drama of operating within our borders?

So, before you are so fast to complain about how wrong it was that our companies went overseas and the need to enforce more government regulation on businesses, just remember your mindset is what caused these problems in the first place!

[NorthWetter]

I agree with RotseCherut on this one. The smart money is on the Eastside. The only bright spot for Seattle proper is Amazon, and even then you have politicians like Swant wanting to unionize it, tax it and otherwise interfere with their business. The congestion, high levels of property crime, isolation of neighborhoods (really glorified suburbs) and ideological government make the expense not worth it for me to live here.

Putting tolls on the I-90 is going to do nothing but divide Bellevue and Seattle even more.

In my opinion, $15 an hour is really more of a reaction to the jobless economic recovery that we've had over the last few years. The thought of making people more prosperous by simply legislating them more money is overly-simplistic and absurd.

The real question that Seattlites should really be asking their politicians is: where are the jobs that can pay a living wage without government price controls?

[PrincessoftheCape]

Kshama Sawant makes my skin crawl every time she's on the evening news (which seems like every night, these days). She's so dramatically out of touch and wrongheaded about everything that it's a wonder that she hasn't managed to get herself randomly devoured by a pack of wolves, or jumped out of an airplane without a parachute, or leapt into a volcanic fissure. This woman is the sort of dangerous, insidious pestilence that people fifty years ago would have had the good sense to imprison. Now, Seattle rah-rahs around her because a segment of its population is too gluttonous for government handouts to see the forest for the trees. This fifteen bucks and hour for burnouts is really just icing on one big hammer and sickle-adorned cake. She won't be satisfied until the unwashed masses are all unemployed and rallying to her rebel army.

[HandsUpThumbsDown]

^ lol

Talk about "dramatically"

[BATCAT]

Originally Posted by PrincessoftheCape

Kshama Sawant makes my skin crawl every time she's on the evening news (which seems like every night, these days). She's so dramatically out of touch and wrongheaded about everything that it's a wonder that she hasn't managed to get herself randomly devoured by a pack of wolves, or jumped out of an airplane without a parachute, or leapt into a volcanic fissure. This woman is the sort of dangerous, insidious pestilence that people fifty years ago would have had the good sense to imprison. Now, Seattle rah-rahs around her because a segment of its population is too gluttonous for government handouts to see the forest for the trees. This fifteen bucks and hour for burnouts is really just icing on one big hammer and sickle-adorned cake. She won't be satisfied until the unwashed masses are all unemployed and rallying to her rebel army.

I'm not as far to the left as Sawant myself, but I voted for her mainly just because I wanted to have the amusement of this kind of hyperbolic freakout.

[kyled]

I believe that's called sadism.

[Wilson502]

Originally Posted by NorthWetter

I agree with RotseCherut on this one. The smart money is on the Eastside. The only bright spot for Seattle proper is Amazon, and even then you have politicians like Swant wanting to unionize it, tax it and otherwise interfere with their business. The congestion, high levels of property crime, isolation of neighborhoods (really glorified suburbs) and ideological government make the expense not worth it for me to live here.

Putting tolls on the I-90 is going to do nothing but divide Bellevue and Seattle even more.

In my opinion, $15 an hour is really more of a reaction to the jobless economic recovery that we've had over the last few years. The thought of making people more prosperous by simply legislating them more money is overly-simplistic and absurd.

The real question that Seattlites should really be asking their politicians is: where are the jobs that can pay a living wage without government price controls?

Yep so true, and the answer to your last question is obvious, that would require more thought than just simply rallying for a $15/hr minimum wage without thinking of what the negative consequences might be.

[wutitiz]

I see this as a sticky wicket and a test for mayor Ed Murray. If he can navigate through it, without too much damage to the Seattle economy, he might well have a case for becoming the first gay gov. in US history.

He has to come up with a version that is sufficiently watered-down to cause negligible damage, yet appears sufficiently robust not to draw Kshama's ire.