How Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage Victory Began in New York City's Zuccotti Park




Seattle now joins a growing list of cities -- including San Francisco, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, San Jose, and Washington, D.C. (along with two adjacent Maryland counties) -- that in the past few years have seized growing frustration over the widening income gap and declining living standards by establishing local minimum wages substantially above the federal level of $7.25. Unions, community groups, and progressive politicians in San Diego, New York City, Oakland, Los Angeles, and other cities are already taking steps to follow in Seattle's footsteps.


The gridlock on Capitol Hill -- where Congress hasn't boosted the federal minimum wage, stuck at $7.25 an hour, since 2009 -- has helped catalyze a growing movement in cities and states. But this upsurge in government-mandated wage hikes didn't come about suddenly; it is the result of years of changing conditions, effective grassroots organizing, and changing public views about the poor.


In 1996, Congress enacted and President Bill Clinton signed so-called "welfare reform," limiting the time people during which can receive assistance. Although liberals justifiably decried this approach, it ironically helped shift public opinion and stereotypes about the poor. Increasingly, Americans came to view low-income people as the "working poor," a group considered more sympathetic than the so-called "welfare poor."

The mainstream news media began to pay more attention to low-wage workers, while academics and journalists expressed growing concern about the "Walmartization" of the economy -- meaning the growing number of low-wage jobs with few benefits. In 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich' s book, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which recounted her experiences toiling alongside hard-working low-wage employees who couldn't make ends meet, became a best-seller, reflecting a changing national mood about people who earn their poverty on the job.

All these trends came to a boil a decade later, when a handful of activists took over Zuccotti Park in New York City to draw attention to the nation's widening wealth and income gap. Occupy Wall Street, which began in September 2011 and quickly spread to cities and towns around the country, changed our national conversation. At kitchen tables, in coffee shops, in offices and factories, and in newsrooms, Americans began talking about economic inequality, corporate greed, and how America's super rich have damaged our economy and our democracy. Occupy Wall Street provided Americans with a language -- the "1 percent" and the "99 percent" -- to explain the nation's widening economic divide, the undue political influence of the super-rich, and the damage triggered by Wall Street's reckless behavior that crashed the economy and caused enormous suffering and hardship.

Even after local officials had pushed Occupy protestors out of parks and public spaces, the movement's excitement and energy were soon harnessed and co-opted by labor unions, community organizers, and politicians.

The past two years have seen an explosion of worker unrest, especially among Walmart employees, workers at fast-food chains, janitors, and hospital workers. Walmart workers have engaged in strikes and civil disobedience at big-box outlets and at company headquarters in Arkansas as part of an escalating grassroots campaign to demand that the nation's largest private employer pay its workers at least $25,000 a year.

Employees at McDonalds, Taco Bell, Burger King and other fast-food restaurants have gone on strike to demand a base wage of at least $15 per hour. Two weeks ago, more than 1,500 McDonalds workers and supporters converged on the company's corporate headquarters outside Chicago -- and then to the company's annual investor meeting -- to bring their message to its top executives. More than 100 protesters were arrested. They pointed out that while the company pays an average of between $7.13 and $8.84 an hour, McDonald's CEO Don Thompson pulled in $9.5 million last year -- the equivalent of $9,247 an hour. Last year, a National Employment Law Project (NELP) study revealed that the low wages paid to employees of the 10 largest fast-food chains cost taxpayers an estimated $3.8 billion a year by forcing employees to rely on public assistance to afford food, healthcare, and other basic necessities.



Overall, 73 percent of the public -- including 90 percent of Democrats, 71 percent of independents, and 53 percent of Republicans -- favor raising the federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 an hour to $10.10 an hour.

Immediately after the Occupy Wall Street protests began, candidates and elected officials -- at the federal, state and local levels -- began echoing its themes and nation's growing inequality and the greed of the super-rich.




In the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, some GOP candidates attacked Mitt Romney for being an out-of-touch "crony capitalist." In his campaign against Obama, Romney opposed a hike in the minimum wage. But this May, Romney urged Republicans to endorse a $10.10 minimum wage, arguing that it would help GOP candidates "convince the people who are in the working population, particularly the Hispanic community, that our party will help them get better jobs and better wages." But so far Congressional Republicans have refused to budge.

So in the face of gridlock in U.S. Capitol Building, local activists and their allies in city halls have taken matters in their own hands.



On the same day in November that the SeaTac measure won, so did Murray and Kshama Sawant, a Socialist candidate for Seattle City Council who had been active in the city's Occupy movement and who made the $15/hour minimum wage a centerpiece of her campaign.

"Is this going to be a city for the rich?" asked Murray after winning the mayoral race. "Or is this going to be a city that's diverse economically, racially, ethnically? That's the challenge before us."


Rolf was adept at playing the inside/outside game. While pushing to forge an agreement among the task force members, he worked with Seattle's labor movement and community activists to keep the pressure on city officials and to keep the issue in the media. He made sure that economists and other experts were available to educate the public, politicians, and journalists and to rebut the business leaders' warnings that the $15 minimum wage would kill local jobs.



Progressives have clearly won the moral argument. Americans believe that people who work should not live in poverty. So business groups have to resort to persuading the public that raising the federal minimum wage -- or adopting a living wage or minimum wage plan at the local level - will hurt the economy. Business lobby groups and business-funded think tanks -- including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its local affiliates, the National Restaurant Association, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Employment Policies Institute (an advocacy group funded by the restaurant industry) and other industry trade associations -- typically dust off studies warning that firms employing low-wage workers will be forced to close, hurting the very people the measure was designed to help.


Moreover, most minimum-wage jobs are in "sticky" local industries -- such as restaurants, hotels, hospitals and nursing homes and retail stores -- that can't simply flee to another city.


"Seattle has made a significant step. We are leading the nation," said Mayor Murray after Monday's vote. "We need a movement in America. The federal government is stuck. States are stuck. The cities must lead."

Peter Dreier teaches Politics and chair the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His latest book is The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame (2012). He is also coauthor of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century, a third edition of which will be published in August. This article originally appeared in The American Prospect.