Labor should have never supported her to begin with, this heel turn is minimally surprising at best

"Hollingsworth’s legislation pits small business and workers against each other when really they have a common enemy in big business, the ultra wealthy, and policies that allow them to concentrate greater wealth in fewer hands, Henderson argued."

the billionaire class're
socially engineering
Us to Death but
hey have you
SEEN their
Yachts?!

to Die
for!

It's always the billionaires, isn't it? Jeff Bezos and his ilk are busy renting all the shitty one bedroom walk-ups in Seattle. And he personally buys up all the Top Ramen at the grocery store.

I’ve always seen a minimum wage job as a starting point, not an end goal.
Do the job well, and ask a lot of questions in order to learn more and expand your knowledge base and skills. Parley that into a better paying job either within that organization or another one.
Oh wait. Never mind.
I forgot that isn’t how we do things anymore.

Hanna, you are so wrong. B&O Tax is what allows the City of Seattle to exists. Small Businesses such as restaurants are what pay the lion’s share of B&O Taxes. Restaurants are having an extremely hard time making it right now with rising food costs and labor costs. A Tip credit allows restaurants a better chance to survive. Many restaurant employees that are tipped can make over $100 per hour. The tip credit makes total sense for the sake of restaurant viability and thanks to Joy for recognizing it. We are lucky to have a small business owner as a City Councilmember.

Small business owners are constituents, as are their employees (provided that they live in Seattle). While the employees can theoretically take their labor elsewhere, the businesses have a more binary choice: Stay in business or close, depending on what their revenues are.

But not all small businesses are alike. A popular bar with a favorable lease, for example, can almost certainly afford to pay a higher wage. A small lunch place or gift shop downtown, operating out of a half-empty office building is a different proposition.

Then there's the question of family-owned businesses, with various family members working there, often under the table. Provided the family members aren't being somehow coerced, it's probably best for the city to keep its nose out of it.

There's no easy answer here, which is why reducing everything down to a junior high level of reportage doesn't help.

“allowing these "small" business owners to pay their workers less than larger businesses”

I’m not sure why Hannah used quotes around small in her piece - the city is simply following the definition set forth by the US Small Business Administration. Hopefully the new editor will bring some guidance.

As for the merit of the arguments against, if it doesn’t pass I guess we’ll find out fairly quickly if this was a bluff (sort of like the departure of small operation landlords).

@4 you're absolutely begging for an "ok boomer"

@6 Catalina, dear. Let’s say the little gift shop has 2 employees and is open for 10 hours/day (11-9) 7 days a week. If the little gift shop is going to break because $54.40/day or $1,686/month or $20,236/year is going to drive them to the poorhouse, they’re not a viable company.

The horrifying part is I never see Joy calling for landlord rents to drop. She doesn’t call for rent regulation. Rent is one of the biggest expenses that any small business has…and yet…we’re always asking the minimum wage workers to make up the profit losses from rent increases.

Joy and Rob Saka are two of the biggest “run to the left and legislate from the right” assholes I have ever seen in this council’s history. Never again.

TheMisanthrope dear, Our little gift shop has to buy inventory as well. Then there's utilities, taxes, licenses, FICA, insurance, losses, spoilage - all those little things that go into running a business.

I don't know why CM Hollingsworth hasn't called for commercial rent reductions (or if she has). One would think that rent has already been reduced, based on the vacancy rates, but that's not something landlords like to discuss.

thirteen12 dear, I do think our dear ASaxman5537 makes a good point. My first job in Seattle was selling popcorn at the corner of 4th and Union. Then I worked at The Westin, The Olympic, The Sheraton, an internet marketing firm, and finally found my niche with the city. I started as a travelling electric hostess and am now a person who advises strategically. If I had stayed at the popcorn stand, I would have been crushed to death when they demolished Rainier Square.

But allow me to digress: As I sit here, the Blue Angels are screaming directly over Chez Vel-DuRay, and we've yet to see an outraged slog post about it. Is The Stranger losing its edge or just giving up that particular battle?

@10 From Kidder Mathews:

Overall, the retail market in Seattle remained relatively strong with a vacancy rate of 3.2% and an availability rate of 3.2%, both slight increases compared to last quarter. Vacancy has been hovering below 4% since mid-2016. While this was the fourth quarterly increase over the past six quarters, the rate is significantly below the national average and retains one of the lowest vacancy rates on the West Coast. Suburban markets continue to outperform Downtown Seattle, which is expected to persist in the near term.

The average asking lease rate decreased -0.4% quarter-over-quarter but increased +0.4%, year-over-year, a significant decline compared to recent historical rent growth trends near +5% per year between 2020 and 2022. While recent increases in vacancy may push rents down a little further, positive market fundamentals, continued tightening of supply, and economic recovery will likely prompt growth in future quarters.

…

So, either Kidder Mathews is lying about vacancy rates or you are mistaken. And, retail rent has increased nearly 11% over 3 years and it had been skyrocketing prior to the pandemic.

Joy never addresses these topics because centrist-conservatives like you and her never seem to want to rustle the landlords’ jimmies while the minimum wage worker is never deserving of a living wage.

TheMisanthrope dear, I never asserted that rents have decreased; I only speculated, based on what I have observed working downtown. And even the report you cite says that the suburban areas are out performing downtown Seattle when it comes to retail. In another Kidder Mathews 2024 report on office space, Kidder Mathews states "In February, there were more than 85,000 daily workers on average in downtown Seattle — a 16% increase from the same period last year, according to the Downtown Seattle Association. But that’s just around half of pre-pandemic levels." Anecdotally, I can tell you that the Seattle Municipal Tower once had three locally-owned restaurants and is now down to one, and a similar situation exists in the B of A building to the north.

You can call me a conservative if you wish. I don't mind. I'm not a conservative, but I suppose I hurt your feelings or something.

Seattle's minimum wage law should never have contained phase-in or tip credit provisions. At that time (2014), Washington state's minimum wage law contained neither; Seatac's minimum-wage (2013) also did not contain such provisions. Seattle's law contains them because CM Sawant was running -- and hard! -- to leap aboard that bandwagon, and so she sold out Seattle poorest workers to the bosses.

Seattle's voters made very clear, several times, our intent to eliminate poverty wages. The Council should be -- and should have been, back when Sawant was still there -- working to remove those provisions, not to retain them.