Five voices on raising the minimum wage

Washington already has the highest minimum wage of any state in the country, and there are plenty of people who want to see it higher.

The first salvo came in November when SeaTac residents voted to boost the minimum wage to $15 an hour for hospitality and transportation workers. The proposition was one of last fall’s most contentious ballot issues.

Now wage wars are looming elsewhere in the state, and it looks like the next stop could be in Seattle.

New Mayor Ed Murray has asked an advisory committee to come up with a plan to raise the minimum wage by this spring. He also ordered salaries of city workers to be bumped up to at least $15 an hour.

Gov. Jay Inslee urged lawmakers in his State of the State address in January to increase the current rate of $9.32 an hour to around $11 or $12.

This week, President Barack Obama announced that he’s planning to raise the minimum wage for contract workers to $10.10 and, in his State of the Union speech, pushed for lawmakers across the country to raise the minimum wage.

It’s an issue that clearly won’t be going away anytime soon.

Here are five perspectives on the minimum wage and what an increase would mean:

Erin Shannon, Washington Policy Center

Predicting cutbacks in hiring and employee hours, Shannon, director of the Small Business Center for the Washington Policy Center, believes a high increase in the minimum wage would have a negative impact on the very workers that the increase is supposed to help.

“Those at the very bottom of the work chain, those new to the job market, those learning a new skill, those who are perhaps immigrants or English is their second language,” she said. “That’s the Catch-22 of the higher minimum wage: it’s great for the people who get that wage, but it’s not great for the people who don’t get that wage.”

Washington’s minimum wage has been tied to inflation since 1998, and whether another hike is necessary on top of that could largely depend on the answer to one question: Who makes minimum wage?

“In Washington state, just 8 percent of minimum wage earners are single parents with children,” Shannon said. “Nearly 60 percent live with a family member or a spouse who also works.

“The majority of these workers are younger. The idea of the minimum wage worker being this single parent raising a family with a sole source of income is by far the exception.”

David Rolf, SEIU

Rolf, president of SEIU Healthcare 775NW, has different thoughts about who the minimum wage earners are.

“Seventy-seven percent of them are adults. Twenty-five percent of them are over the age of 40,” Rolf said. “They are mostly women. They are disproportionately people of color. It’s not mainly people saving for college or going to a movie on the weekend.”

Rolf thinks a minimum wage increase in Seattle will trigger debates in a number of other cities.

He said an elected official as far north as Lynnwood contacted him about raising the minimum wage.

“I think this is a national movement,” he said. “Social movements are incredibly hard to control. If we were to get in a time machine and go back to 1966, there wasn’t a place you could write a letter to the Civil Rights movement.

“It was hundreds of independent and quasi-independent movements. I think we’ll see more strikes, more city initiatives, more city council action.”

George Lovell, University of Washington

Lovell, a political science professor at the UW who serves as the chair of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies, says that people who work for low wages are a moving target that often can’t be pinpointed by annual surveys.

“The trend has certainly been that the age is being pushed up, and the level of family responsibility has been pushed up over time,” Lovell said. “I think a lot of people are in this type of job long-term, but they’re not necessarily staying at one job long-term. “

The broader economic issue, Lovell says, is that there has been a prolonged period of static wages, which is unprecedented.

“There’s a drag on the economy because of the large and growing pool of people who are living at subsistence levels and don’t have a lot of money for consumer spending,” he said.

Lovell says a dramatic boost in the minimum wage would affect more than just those earning it.

“If it goes up, then other wages are going to go up, as well,” Lovell said. “It’s pushing up a floor, but that tends to push up a lot of things other than just the floor. They have to keep steps in employment, and people want to distinguish themselves from minimum wage workers.”

Dave Lindberg, caregiver

Thanks to a recent raise, Lindberg, 70, now makes $11.30 an hour.

His pay might not be directly affected by an increase in the minimum wage, but it could eventually be moved up by the raising of the wage floor.

“It was the first increase of wages that we had in five years,” said Lindberg, who is the sole earner for himself and a 38-year-old son with a handful of health conditions. “It was a critical point, a pivotal point in our lives. It really, really helped.

“People come up and talk to me with smiles on their faces, because now they can put more gas in their car, now they can buy another loaf of bread. It’s a real thing.”

When faced with a cutback in hours in the past, Lindberg had to pick between paying for gas and car insurance or paying for his medication.

“I made a choice to keep my medication going and stop driving,” he said. “But the point is, I didn’t have a choice — I was forced into that.”

Steve Neighbors, TERRA Staffing Group

Neighbors is chairman of the board at TERRA Staffing in Everett, a hiring agency that has placed thousands of people in positions in Washington and Oregon, from minimum wage earners to engineers.

He said he worries that something like this could have unintended affects.

“I get really nervous when I see a bold, bold thing like this happening that could cause a real destabilization in our economy,” Neighbors said.

“The old adage young people have is, ‘I can’t get a job without experience, but I can’t get experience without a job,’” he said. “If I have to pay $15 an hour for a worker, I’m not going to be looking at unskilled, first-job type people.”

Still, Neighbors isn’t worried about the $15-an-hour figure heading north.

“I don’t think it would fly in Everett,” he said. “I think we have a much more sensible City Council here. I don’t even think it would be a target here.”

Minimum wage state by state

Here are the highest current minimum wages in states across the country: