This isn’t my fight. I’m new here, but I read up on it and I can’t even believe it’s up for debate. SeaTac should raise wages for airport workers for too many reasons to count, but what’s more, the reasons against it are all lies.
I’ve been researching this the past 6-hours and it just makes sense. Wages at airport positions should rise just as they have in every other American west coast airport. Plain and simple.
Wages along the west coast pay as high as $15+ all the way down to about $11+full medical in Vancouver, BC. Why should Seattle workers get less? Clearly this hasn’t caused airfare to rise.
The biggest lie that caught me was this one:
1 – 90% of workers affected by the wage increase live outside of SeaTac.
2 – This won’t help SeaTac residents, but encourage those from outside the area to take the jobs…
Which is it???
It can’t be both, and claiming it is just proves the opposition is lying.
Ivar’s restaurant claimed in a KUOW (NPR) story to be paying about $13.90/hour plus full benefits for these jobs. An extra dollar-ten wouldn’t be a 10% increase, but about a 5% percent increase. That’s nominal. That’s easily absorbed.
The Bigger Lie is the Move-Up Job
The gentleman from Ivars also said that the counter position isn’t meant to be permanent, but a stepping stone toward higher paying employment. NPR didn’t question him on it, and shame on them, but I will.
Ivars still runs a ratio of about 15-20 staffers to managers, right? So that means only 15% of employees escape the lowest paid positions. While it’s noble and wonderful that you promote from within, what about the vast majority of employees who are never promoted? Clearly they have families too. Clearly they struggle to get to work. Don’t we care about them too?
I appreciate the value of letting employees work their way up the ladder, but these positions are NOT filled by teenagers, but working adults with real life expenses to contend with. I’ve never been to a continent with an Ivar’s, but I’m sure your seafood is delicious… wouldn’t it taste better if it wasn’t made by subsidized and slave wages?
If you don’t pay your employees enough to meet their basic minimum requirements to even live, aren’t you doing a disservice to the social safety net by forcing tax payers to subsidize your profits?
But it doesn’t matter
If Ivars or other businesses can’t afford to pay a wage sufficient to sustain their workers without them having to rely heavily on the social safety net, they have no business being in business.
Maybe I’m looking at this from a European perspective, but if you can’t pay your employees a wage sufficient to live off of, why wouldn’t they spit in my food, take every opportunity to rob you blind, and quit on a moment’s notice.
Last Thing… “Better Employees”
The opposition to Prop-One has said that if it passes, it will cause a flood of highly trained workers to rush into the SeaTac area. That’s actually a good thing. If you can get better workers for minimum wage, as you already know, you’ll hire them. Wouldn’t you like Seattle to be known as the city with the best damned staff in all the world?
In short, while none of this will ever affect me personally, it’s pretty obvious that this initiative will help literally everyone, even if they don’t live within the city limits, which the NO campaign argues they both do and do not… when I see dishonesty so rich and deep as that, I automatically know which way to cast my vote.