How Employers are Subverting the SeaTac $15/hr Minimum Wage Law

The latest on the SeaTac Prop 1 $15/hr minimum wage initiative that was passed last November (the campaign for which was run out of the top floor of the building where I work) appeared in a story, "Seattle Port commissioners listen to SeaTac wage activists," written last week for the Puget Sound Business Journal by Ana Sofia Knauf. Here are the first two paragraphs:

SeaTac wage activists attended a Port of Seattle Commission meeting on Tuesday [January 7] to appeal to commissioners to get a $15-per-hour minimum wage reinstated at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. 

On Dec. 27, King County Superior Court Judge Andrea Darvas struck down part of a city of SeaTac ordinance that would have increased the minimum wage from $9.32 per hour to $15 per hour for some employees at the airport, which is run by the port, as well as others outside the airport. Her decision limited the minimum-wage increase to some hospitality workers in the city of SeaTac. Wage activists have appealed her decision to the state Supreme Court.

Service Employees International Union distributed video of a KING 5 TV story on the port commission meeting.

But last week I also got the worker perspective on the implementation of Prop 1 from a young Latina acquaintance who rides the bus I take from the light rail stop in SeaTac. She works at one of the hotels located next to the building where I work.

According to my friend, her employer, in order to get out of paying the $15/hr minimum wage passed by initiative, is laying off staff to get below 30 employees, the trigger for the $15/hr wage. My friend will earn $15/hr this month, but next month she will go back to $9.32/hr, except that the number of rooms she cleans will go up to 19 from 17.

"Very bad," she said.

Her English isn't very good, and my Spanish is unspeakable. So I had difficulty understanding what she was trying to say, but I think that was what she was getting at. I had her repeat it twice.

Now she has more work for less pay. Isn't capitalism beautiful?

Desolation Row

International Boulevard in SeaTac is a nightmare, but it is an accurate reflection of what one could call "default America." It's a cultural baseline. A suburban commercial strip -- two to three lanes flowing in either direction north and south with a 40-m.p.h. speed limit -- dotted with fast food outlets, filling stations, airport hotels and 7-Eleven convenience stores. It's hell on earth American style.

At lunch (it was the first day of business in the new building) I walked from the local to the airport light rail stop to see how long it is going to take me each day (I drove the local's Astro Van from the old building today instead of taking the train). Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes of sucking in carbon monoxide and smelling fry grease; the car and trucks and hotel shuttle buses that zoomed by blocked out any hope of a decent thought. Such an environment is so hostile to the pedestrian, so bleak for anything human, that I find myself praying for the downward slope of peak oil.