SEATAC- MINIMUM WAGE HISTORY PROJECT LABOR ARCHIVES OF UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON LIBRARIES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & HARRY BRIDGES CENTER FOR LABOR STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

LYNN THOMPSON INTERVIEW ON

INTERVIEWEE: LYNN THOMPSON

INTERVIEWERS: MEGAN BROWN

SUBJECTS: LYNN THOMPSON, THE SEATTLE TIMES, MEDIA, SEATTLE-SEATAC MINIMUM WAGE ORDINANCES

LOCATION: THE SEATTLE TIMES OFFICES

DATE: SEPTEMBER 11, 2015

INTERVIEW LENGTH: 44:03

FILE NAME: Thompson (Lynn) 09112015.mp3

MEGAN BROWN: This is an interview with Lynn Thompson. It’s September 11th, 2015. So Lynn, would you mind just introducing yourself? Spelling your first and last name for us, and telling us what you do.

LYNN THOMPSON: Sure. Lynn Thompson, L-Y-N-N T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N. I’m a reporter for The Seattle Times, and during the $15 Minimum Wage fight here in Seattle, I was covering Seattle City Hall, Seattle politics.

MEGAN: Now, when was it that you realized that the minimum wage was going to be something that needed to be covered in depth?

LYNN: The first initiative was in SeaTac and that got quite a bit of attention. I believe our business section covered that. It was still—it was new and it was surprising, people were kind of scratching their head and saying, “Where did this come from? Why $15? Why SeaTac?” And so it was obviously part of a national movement to raise the wages of fast food workers. I believe in addition to the really focused effort at SeaTac to get something on the ballot there and raise wages of the airport workers, there were also some actions around the fast food workers. Time’s a little bit blurry now, but in advance of the actual election in Seattle and the actual committee trying to hammer out an agreement on the minimum wage there were walkouts among fast food workers and there were several. Again, it was kind of like “Huh, how’s this going to work?” I think nobody thought that it would turn into a movement. It seemed like, “Well—Sure they’re underpaid, but is walking off the job actually going to change McDonald’s?” I think on the part of the journalists I think there 1 SEATAC-SEATTLE MINIMUM WAGE HISTORY PROJECT | LYNN THOMPSON ON THE SEATTLE TIMES was some skepticism about “what’s going to come of this, how big is it going to be?” So there was some uncertainty about where it was going. But it was obviously new and so interesting. I think we covered from pretty early on.

MEGAN: Could you tell us a little bit more about the kinds of conversations that were happening between journalists about the fast food strikes for example?

LYNN: Yeah, I think there was a sense of “Well, how many people are we talking about? What kind of influences is this going to have?” It’s that question of “How newsworthy is this?” In hindsight it seems like there was a really concerted national effort to try to bring attention to low wages. There were efforts in Congress, I believe. The national minimum wage was $7.25, which was just astoundingly low. And tipped workers didn’t even make that much; they weren’t guaranteed that much. So, this was part of a larger conversation about wages, wage stagnation. It was also, in Seattle, [it] had the added urgency I think because Seattle was increasingly becoming unaffordable to a lot of working people. A lot of middle class people were leaving the city, moving further south where they could still get more affordable housing. So it had—there was a definitely timeliness to it. But when it first broke it was more us saying, what’s this about? What’s this significance? Eight people at McDonald’s downtown and eight people in Ballard are going to walk off the job, how newsworthy is that? I don’t know how much we covered those first walkouts just because I don't think we had a sense of how significant or that they were part of the national movement in the beginning.

MEGAN: Did you cover any of the fast food walkouts?

LYNN: I didn’t.

MEGAN: Okay. So, what’s your take on how Seattle started talking about $15?

LYNN: Well I think the fight in SeaTac got quite a bit of publicity because there were big players. So it was Alaska Airlines, the Port of Seattle, I’m not sure who else would’ve been impacted by it—Menzies, I know, is a big contractor for Alaska and a lot of minimum wage workers. And the union, which was obviously trying to leverage their power to influence this and get better wages for their workers. SeaTac is such a small town. I can’t remember how many people actually voted in the election, but a couple thousand. So it was this small microcosm of a fight. You could see that it was, from the union’s perspective, that this was doable in the sense that it wasn’t a huge city where they had spend tons and tons of resources to get the word out to everybody. They could reach a lot of workers in a short period of time. But it also laid out who the players were and the fact that business was going to resist this. Business didn’t want to give people higher minimum wages. And one of the arguments was that Washington State had one of the highest minimum wages in the country. We weren’t at $7.25 an hour; we didn’t allow an exemption for tips. So it wasn’t as bad as the rest of the country.

RIDDHI METHA-NEUGEBAUER: Can I ask you a quick question regarding SeaTac? A lot of media that we’ve seen in SeaTac emphasizes the $15 minimum wage, which is great. But there was a lot of other stuff in that legislation as well, particularly around paid sick time, there was full-time work that was somewhat guaranteed, and then there was the protections against subcontracting and the like. Can you speak to why $15 seems to have gotten more media coverage aside from the other pretty impressive provisions as well that kind of flushed out more robust labor standards?

LYNN: I think partly because it was sort of catchy. And again, my timeline is quite blurred at this distance. But and the Socialist Alternative Party came up with this “15 Now,” I think they were the first ones 2 SEATAC-SEATTLE MINIMUM WAGE HISTORY PROJECT | LYNN THOMPSON ON THE SEATTLE TIMES to come up with that, and they were active in the SeaTac fight. And I’m not sure compared to when Kshama got elected, when that occurred. And actually I think we did—there were some union folks on the East Coast who were also talking about a $15 minimum wage. They [15 Now] may not have been the first ones, but that’s my memory of when we first heard about it. I think because it was significantly higher than the current wage, it was a really concrete demand, it was clearly aimed at raising the standard of living for working people. I didn’t work on that, I wasn’t covering the SeaTac part of it—I think I might’ve written about one march—so I think the details would’ve been deeper in the story and not the headlines. So I just wasn’t as aware of those. But I think the fact that it was a pretty big number, but it didn’t seem outrageous given how expensive it is to live in Seattle, so I think that’s what caught people's attention.

MEGAN: So talking a little bit about Seattle, as the campaign for $15 minimum wage grew, what’s your read on the different groups that were involved and what were the different discussions that were being had?

LYNN: There was the political arena, and again we had the Mayor’s race and we had two—well, it started out with I think, nine candidates. But Seattle is a progressive city and they usually elect pretty progressive people, so by the time it came to the primary the two candidates to emerge from the primary, Ed Murray and Mike McGinn, were both on the record as supporting a $15 minimum wage. In fact the one debate they were sort of— Mike McGinn was saying, “Well, maybe it should $16, maybe it should be more!” So in the political arena, it was front and center because we had a mayor’s race. I think the unions had clearly made this an issue. They were big donors to the McGinn’s campaign partly because of the fight over Whole Foods in West Seattle. The Whole Foods isn’t unionized and there’s also a big hotel that’s going in that’s not unionized. And so, the unions were very active in pressing the issue in that political arena. They were also clearly active in their own realm with their workers and trying to organize workers and get them to speak out—give opportunities for the media to talk to the workers and find out what their issues were, how much they were making, what their shifts were like, kind of their conditions of employment. Then the business people in Seattle I think saw this juggernaut that was coming their way and I think there was some recognition that they weren’t going to be able to stop it. So the Socialist Alternative with Kshama Sawant were saying, “If you, City of Seattle, don’t adopt this in some way, we’re going to go to the ballot like they did in SeaTac and we’re going to get people to vote on it.” So I think business saw that there was a lot of momentum for this, a lot of support, and they should get involved and try to have some say in shaping how it would come out. I think there was one business guy on the committee that Ed Murray ended up forming who was just like, “No I’m against this,” but I think the rest were all like, “How could we make this work for us?” So politically, in the political arena, labor, business, those seemed to be the big players.

MEGAN: You mentioned the fact that the momentum just seems to be growing so quickly and seems so inexorable, this was the moment that it happened. What do you think contributed to that perception? What kinds of activities, strategies by groups who were interested in pushing that, what do you think contributed to that sense of inevitability?

LYNN: Well I think that I mentioned that the recognition that Seattle was becoming increasingly unaffordable even to middle class people, let alone working people, minimum wage people. There was fair amount of publicity about the rising rents and how much it costs to live here. I’m not sure what else there was. I mean, I think the fact that Kshama Sawant won and defeated a three-term City Council member who was very well- liked but pretty middle of the road. She was really seen as a change agent. I think that was a message to maybe the status quo in town that people were ready for a little more fiery politics and it wasn’t going to be the usual power brokers deciding this on their own and that there was going to be more populist involvement. So I think

3 SEATAC-SEATTLE MINIMUM WAGE HISTORY PROJECT | LYNN THOMPSON ON THE SEATTLE TIMES that the fact that Kshama was able to pull off this upset was kind of a warning to the business community that the mood here was for doing something.

MEGAN: So let’s talk a little bit about what happened once Murray was elected and he started the Income Inequality Advisory Committee (IIAC).

LYNN: Very good!

MEGAN: What were the conversations that you were aware of that were happening in that committee and what were the major discussions?

LYNN: It was supposedly secret. They were not open to the public. Kshama and her allies were pretty quick to publicize anything they felt was too right wing, too pro-business. I mean they would just call us up on the phone, “This is what they’re talking about! This is what they’re talking about!” Mostly we knew that there was a lot of angst in the restaurant community. I mean the National Restaurant Association was a major player in keeping the national minimum wage down and keeping the tip credit in place in a lot of states. They were opposed to a $15 minimum wage. They were also opposed to having one that didn’t give credit for people making tips. But it wasn’t just them; it was small restaurateurs like Tom Douglas and some other prominent chefs. Seattle’s got a really active food community, and so their arguments seemed to carry more weight than the National Restaurant Association would’ve carried. I think there was a concern about, “Okay, how will this affect those people?” And Tom Douglas had come out for $15 minimum wage but then he said, “Well, I never meant the tipped, front-of-house staff. I just meant the people in the kitchen.” And he sort of ended up joining the committee as kind of an observer, ex-officio member. I think there was some recognition that the committee wasn’t completely representative by all the people who were going to be impacted by this. I’m trying to remember now—I think we would hear some from the union, SEIU [Service Employees International Union] and Working Washington, about what their concerns were, where they wanted to go.

And I’m trying to think of what else. I think—what were they meeting for? Six or eight months? I can’t remember the timeline exactly. But it sounded like it took a while for them to get down to the real issues where people were really going to have disagreements. And so it was towards the end where Murray started announcing deadlines and this is when they’re going to deliver the compromise that they really started this kind of round-the-clock negotiations. So we were aware of the negotiations intensifying. The fact that there was this—they couldn’t get past the—labor really didn’t want to start giving credit for tips because they never had in the state and business really didn’t want there to be no recognition of health benefits, tips, other forms of compensation. That’s where the crux seemed to be on the disagreement. I’m trying to remember what else. I don’t remember now. Murray basically came into office saying, “This is my number one priority,” so it was one of the first things he did. I think even before he got sworn in, I think in December he named his committee and tried to make it pretty broadly representative of both business and labor and nonprofit because I think there was angst in the nonprofit sector too—“We’re so poorly funded now, where’s this money going to come from? We would love to pay our workers more, but is government going to suddenly start giving us larger grants? Who’s going to pay for it and how are we going to continue to provide services to the communities?”

MEGAN: Now I’m curious, at this point the committee is doing a lot of work. We’ve heard from different people from the committee talking about the workload so there’s obviously a lot of activity going on. From your perspective in Seattle Times, what were the kinds of conversations that were happening here in this building about how to cover the committee, how to cover the issues, and that kind of thing?

4 SEATAC-SEATTLE MINIMUM WAGE HISTORY PROJECT | LYNN THOMPSON ON THE SEATTLE TIMES LYNN: You know honestly I don’t remember really well. I remember meeting with some of the committee members, you know over coffee, and “What are the discussions, what are you guys talking about?” People doing research; people trying to find out who’s affected by this. How many people are we talking about? Who makes minimum wage? Who makes between minimum wage and $15 an hour? I did a story about existing research about other areas that had adopted higher minimum wages and the main research seemed to be out of [University of California,] Berkeley. Of course there are differences among economists about what the impacts were. So we tried to find out, “Okay. What has happened in other places where they raised the minimum wage, what’s the impact to restaurants, what’s the impact to costs, how much more do consumers pay because the employers are having to pay a higher minimum wage?” We tried to cover it from that angle—”Well, who will be affected? How will this affect everybody? What are the impacts that we can expect to see?” So we were less covering gossip about the negotiations and more of what are the bigger policy implications of this.

MEGAN: I’m curious what was the reception to that article about the potential effects?

LYNN: Well it was shock at that we would write something that said, “This isn’t a bad idea! There really aren’t huge impacts based on what Berkeley said.” They think we’re the evil empire. But you know, there were some who are skeptical. There are economists, including one here in Seattle, I think maybe Seattle U, who took a different point of view. But there are quite a few studies—you know those cross-border studies—Idaho and Washington—what happened when Washington raised the minimum wage and Idaho kept it down, did everyone go to Idaho to get their burgers and fries and stuff like that? There are a number of those around the country. There were quite a lot of research going back about thirty years on the minimum wage and the effect of wages on the economy. I was surprised that the effects weren’t greater, but that’s what these researchers who are pretty credible found. I mean they were also the researchers hired by the city of Seattle to advise the committee—what has the research shown? So that was a piece of—getting fed into the committee is some of this factual background about what the impacts had been in other places where they have tried raising the minimum wage. I think there was a lot of uncertainty because nobody had done it this much. Usually it goes up pretty gradually. So to suddenly go—which we ended up not doing of course, we didn’t go to $9.25 to $15. It is going to be gradual. But there was a lot of people saying, “Well, why $15?” After it passed I was on— CNN has this money show and they got some guy, he just said, “Why not $60 an hour? Why not $1,000 an hour?” But there was a certain arbitrariness about $15 that people didn’t—it was sort of hard to grasp, “Well, why $15 and not something else?”

MEGAN: I always found that really interesting just because in previous living wage fights there’ve been a lot of efforts to justify a living wage in all these different ways and you always end up with something like $17.28 an hour. And here you have $15. And it’s interesting because you were mentioning that the $15 was powerful. And then at the end it became kind of arbitrary.

LYNN: Well, I mean that it was powerful because it seemed like a big number, but I guess aspirational like it’s worth fighting for this. But there were other people saying, “Well, gosh! To be able to afford a house or an apartment in Seattle, you have to make like $17 an hour or $21 an hour or something like that.” So there was a sense of this isn’t going to be a magic bullet but suddenly everybody is going to be able to afford, that everybody is going to live here and their lives will be comfortable.

MEGAN: We talked a little bit about the business perspective and I’m curious, do you know if folks like workers were concerned with arguments about how minimum wage was going to kill jobs? That kind of argument? How much traction do you think that that particular argument got?

5 SEATAC-SEATTLE MINIMUM WAGE HISTORY PROJECT | LYNN THOMPSON ON THE SEATTLE TIMES LYNN: It definitely was out there and it definitely was kind of the conservative position that people would take just their jobs and go somewhere else. I think there was a sense that business was doing well in the city, the economy was doing well, we’re still coming out of the recession but there were all the dot.com businesses, Amazon. I think there was a sense that business could afford it so I don't think that it did get a lot of traction. And I think again, there was research showing that there wasn’t a loss of jobs in places where they had raised the minimum wage.

RIDDHI: Can I ask a follow-up question to that?

LYNN: Yeah.

RIDDHI: Especially back to the business community. They talked a lot about, in SeaTac and in Seattle, they talked a lot about how this was going to close a lot of businesses, Armageddon was going to happen, it was going to be over, but it didn’t happen. Have you had a sense of after the legislation passed in SeaTac and after the Supreme Court ruling as well in the Alaska Airlines [suit], and winning that effort and subsequently here in Seattle after the minimum wage kicked in on April 1, how were people feeling about the minimum wage now after all of that?

LYNN: Yeah I think it’s very widely accepted.

RIDDHI: Even in the business community as well?

LYNN: Well, I don’t have best friends who are running titans of the industry but Bob Donegan’s1 a really interesting example because for other reasons they had to close their main flagship restaurant down on Alaskan Way because of the Sea Walk construction, which may or may not—maybe that’s just coincidental. He basically said, “We’re going to pay everyone $15 an hour and we’re going to not give them tips.” So he basically embraced it and said “let’s see if it works.” Now I haven’t followed up to ask him how that is working. And it doesn’t seem—have there been a couple recent stories like New York Times following up on what’s going on? Oh there was the guy, I forget the small company2, where he decided he was going to pay his smallest employee $70,000 an hour, what was the fallout from that? And there was some fallout but he felt like it was the right thing to do. So I think there’s a pretty broad recognition that people have been underpaid, wages have been stagnant for decades and this a good thing to do. Obviously Alaska Airlines, they’ve appealed the Supreme Court ruling, and they fought the thing in SeaTac and the Port of Seattle went along with them because they’re their biggest contractor. I don’t think there’s a lot of support for that position, but that’s Seattle liberals: “I think that’s outrageous that they’re continuing to fight giving these workers a little bit more money.”

MEGAN: Well speaking of Seattle liberals, I’m curious what your take is what about Seattle made this process unique and what made it possible?

LYNN: I think we’ve had progressive politics for a long time. I think Democrats have pretty much held office for forty years. All the state representatives are Democratic. I think we’ve had maybe two county executives in forty years who’ve been Republican. So I think there’s a history of strong support for labor, for working people. I wouldn’t say antipathy towards business, but a feeling that business has to do its part, that it can’t just get rich off the backs of the workers. And a real concern about the city being livable. I think San Francisco’s held up as

1 President of Ivar’s, a Seattle-based seafood restaurant chain. 2 Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, Seattle. 6 SEATAC-SEATTLE MINIMUM WAGE HISTORY PROJECT | LYNN THOMPSON ON THE SEATTLE TIMES the place where nobody can afford to live anymore and they don’t have that blue collar, middle-class anymore. They’ve lost a lot of those jobs. And so there’s this sense that, “Well, we don’t want to be San Francisco or New York,” which is obviously extremely expensive. So I think there’s a real energy and urgency around that. Being conscious about what kind of city we want to have and that we want a wide diversity of people to be able to live and work here. It’s also good for the environment. Seattle’s got a pretty good environmental streak in it. If you have to commute an hour, twice a day, to get to a job here, but you can’t afford to live here, that just adds traffic and pollution. So I think it fits in with a lot of the values that a lot of people here have.

MEGAN: So since you’ve covered—you cover politics in Seattle. What do you think the impacts of the fight for minimum wage and the passage of the minimum wage ordinance have been on politics in the city?

LYNN: I definitely think there’s been more activism on the left. It’s sort of shifted the debate a little bit to the left. More energy around affordable housing—that was the Mayor’s next committee. I think we’ll see Kshama Sawant getting reelected. The Port of Seattle race—the two most progressive, environmentally minded candidates, out of a field of nine, both made it through the primary. There were some candidates with a lot of business backing and business experience who did not do well. So I think it has made a heightened awareness of some of the issues and I think it’s energized a lot of young people around politics in the city. There are a lot of apartment dwellers. I think for quite a long time it was a lot of the land—some of the land use decisions were being driven either by the downtown business community or the single-residents. And now I think that balance has shifted a little bit and now there’s more concern about people who live in apartments, rents, affordable housing, and what’s the role of developers in that mix. How do they contribute to paying for housing?

There was also pushback on the Mayor’s Affordable Housing Committee because he just wanted to rezone the whole city, which seemed like really a pro-development stance. There’s also some limits to this kind of young progressive—how progressive that really is, to turn the whole city to developers. I’m trying to think of—since I’m not covering the City Hall now, I’m covering the East Side, I’m not as intimate with it. We changed our way of electing the City Council, which is pretty significant. That was kind of concurrent with, I think, Murray’s election. And to go from all at-large to district representation, which is considered to be a little more progressive and you get more diversity on candidates and they don’t have to spend as much money. I think that is also a big change and I think it also makes downtown business interests a little less powerful. I think they’re not the main deciders anymore about the direction of the city. They’ll certainly still have an influence. So I think overall it’s been a little bit of a shift to the left.

MEGAN: You mentioned that you are now covering the East Side, which makes me think that these kind of things just don’t happen on accident in local areas. So what do you think the impacts are more broadly?

LYNN: Well, I think the union was hoping that it would spread more rapidly and I haven’t seen of any evidence of it kicking in on the East Side at all. They generally tend to be more conservative, generally more pro- business. So I think that the fact that the fight’s gone to Tacoma suggests that there is a more receptive political audience in Tacoma and frankly maybe more working class people who’d be impacted by a raise in minimum wage. The East Side is pretty prosperous. Not that there aren’t working people and poor people because there are, but I think there’s a feeling that most people over there are doing pretty well. Less blue-collar workers, less minimum wage workers. I haven’t seen—the union kind of made noise about taking the fight to Bellevue but it hasn’t happened.

7 SEATAC-SEATTLE MINIMUM WAGE HISTORY PROJECT | LYNN THOMPSON ON THE SEATTLE TIMES RIDDHI: What are your thoughts on what this legislation, both in SeaTac and Seattle, means for definition of work? Or labor standards? Improving labor standards as a whole, not just within Washington State but maybe even more broadly nationally?

LYNN: I definitely think it raised people's consciousness about some of those issues. The fact that the franchise, whatever their called, the International Franchise Association something sued over this, I think that really raised people’s awareness of how even those—it’s like McDonald’s, there’s these individual franchises have all the support of the corporate but they have the legal status of kind of a small and independent business. I think that people felt like, “Well, that’s not right.” And I think the NLRB—National Labor Relations Board—has had some rulings that had come out of this fight about well, actually the franchises are part of the larger corporations and they get the advertising, they get the PR, and they get the marketing and all this stuff and it’s not a level playing field with small local independent businesses. But it seems like it’s pressing that boundary of making corporations more responsible for the wages of their workers. There was also—you guys probably saw this one too—when the New York Times did a big piece on Starbucks’ scheduling and how they had some computer doing people's schedules. So you know, a single mom might be working a three-hour shift in the morning and four-hours in the afternoon, and completely didn’t work for her having kids. So I think that—it was just like that! [Snapping fingers] Starbucks said, “We’re not going to do that.” Whether that’s played out or not, but I think there is more awareness of some of these working conditions that are just not acceptable, they completely take advantage the workers to maximize the company’s profits and I think people see how that’s not fair for the workers. So I think there is receptivity to some of those issues you talked about.

RIDDHI: And in terms of covering both the SeaTac Campaign and the Seattle Campaign, they both are very different. What was it like interacting with folks who were on the ground knocking those doors at SeaTac and who were in the IIAC [Income Inequality Advisory Committee]?

LYNN: I didn’t cover the SeaTac one, so I know it was more retail politics, it was more going out and just getting people to show up and vote and registering people because it was that small a city where they could reach everybody. So this was not that. This was a committee of influential people hammering out an agreement that everybody accepted was going to guide what the city did as law. It was more political I think, less union versus business and both sides going in as much as they could to fight each other.

MEGAN: That brings up a question that I forgot to ask earlier. I don’t think we’ve talked about this with other people, but do you know how the actual composition of that committee came about?

LYNN: I don’t. I mean I can tell from the business representatives that they tried to get, what I would call, kind of movers and shakers, people who have a lot of influence on other businesses, people had a lot of respect but also that they were influential business leaders. So whatever that they came up with would be a credible, I think, with other businesses. And I don’t know—obviously there were union representatives on there and Mayor Murray’s very good friends with David Rolf, which you probably came across in your interviewing. And so, it started—Murray was sympathetic of the aims of the movement and I think David Rolf has been real instrumental in the overall strategy—“How do we get this? How do we make this happen? And not just here but around the country?” And I’m trying to remember—I talked to several of the folks that represent the nonprofit communities. I think they tried to get influential, highly regarded people to make it a powerhouse committee, whose negotiations and ultimate decision would be accepted and supported by most of the community. But I don't know picking individual people. I’m pretty sure David Rolf had a say who the union reps were, but I don’t know about how did they come up with the individual people that they came up with. That’s a question for the Mayor’s office. He’s giving interviews. I don’t know if he’s on your list. 8 SEATAC-SEATTLE MINIMUM WAGE HISTORY PROJECT | LYNN THOMPSON ON THE SEATTLE TIMES

MEGAN: Yeah, we’re in touch with folks that are at his office, working out a schedule.

LYNN: Yeah, he’s a busy guy.

MEGAN: So thinking overall now the campaigns for minimum wage and how it played out politically, what do you think some of the key lessons are for how this works?

LYNN: I think because Murray made it a campaign promise and made it a priority not coming up with a resolution and a recommendation wasn’t an option. So there was a lot of pressure to come up with a recommendation. I mean it’s interesting to me that in New York they’ve adopted a $15 minimum wage but only for fast food workers. Why that? Why not raise the minimum wage? So it’s interesting politically but I think it was obviously a high stakes issue and high stakes negotiation and they were not going to let it collapse. Even though it came close to deadlocking a couple of times. When the union said that they were going to the East Side and try to bring the fight to Bellevue, there were obvious differences. There wasn’t a socialist driving, promising a citizens’ initiatives from the left, there weren’t a lot of high profile union leaders with a lot of influence, the Mayor was not out in front saying, “We’re going to do this.” It just didn’t have that political sense of urgency. So, in some ways it was a unique situation. But we’re seeing other cities adopting it. I don’t know to what extent they follow the compromise that Seattle worked out. But they are all stepped and graded on the dollar an hour, dollar a year, phased-in, that kind of thing. So I think the model is something that businesses felt it could live with and could adjust to. So it’s clearly had some influence around the country.

9 SEATAC-SEATTLE MINIMUM WAGE HISTORY PROJECT | LYNN THOMPSON ON THE SEATTLE TIMES