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| Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle, right, after the City Council approved a minimum wage that is more than double the federal minimum. The $15 rate is the highest among the nation’s big cities. Credit Ted S. Warren/Associated Press |
N.Y. TIMES
The City Council here went where no big-city lawmakers have gone before on Monday, raising the local minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than double the federal minimum, and pushing Seattle to the forefront of urban efforts to address income inequality.
The unanimous vote of the nine-member Council, after months of discussion by a committee of business and labor leaders convened by Mayor Ed Murray, will give low-wage workers here — in incremental stages, with different tracks for different sizes of business — the highest big-city minimum in the nation.
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“We’re living in this bubble of Amazon, but that’s not going to go on,” said Tom Douglas, a prominent restaurateur in Seattle, referring to the local boom in jobs and economic growth from hiring at Amazon, the online retailer, which has its headquarters here. Mr. Douglas said the new law will inevitably result in costs being passed on to consumers. “There’s going to be some terrific price inflation,” he said.
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The vote, economists and labor experts said, accentuates the patchwork in wages around the country, with places like Seattle — and other cities considering sharply higher minimum pay, including San Diego, Chicago and San Francisco — having economic outlooks increasingly distinct from those in other parts of the nation. Through much of the South, especially, the federal minimum of $7.25 holds fast.
Eight states plus the District of Columbia have already increased their minimum wages this year, the most to have done so in a single year since 2006....“In past rounds of minimum wage increases, proposals sought chiefly to restore the value of the minimum wage lost to inflation over the decades,” said Paul Sonn, the general counsel and program director at the National Employment Law Project, a New York-based group that supports raising the minimum wage. The increases in places like Seattle, Mr. Sonn said, go beyond playing catch-up. “The $15 proposals make real gains,” he said.
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Washington State already has the highest state minimum wage in the nation, $9.32, but more than 24 percent of Seattle residents earn hourly wages of $15 or less, according to the city,