The City of Seattle just announced an increase in the minimum wage of the city from $9.32 per hour to $15 an hour over the next few years.
Very significantly, the raise will be tied to increases in the cost of living so that it will continue to rise automatically. Equally significantly, the legislation will phase the different wage floors for tipped employees so that soon restaurant and bar servers, hotel workers, valets, car parkers and washers, and others who are commonly tipped will not have their tips counted against their wages.
SEIU Local 775 President David Rolf said the new legislation will pump $500 million new dollars into the local economy proving that better wages make a stronger economy.
Back on April 7th, 2014 we reported that a working class transportation suburb of Seattle called SeaTac had raised their minimum wages to $15 an hour and that employment increased, destroying the only pathetic argument the extreme radical right has against increases in the minimum wage–and other wages.
At that time new Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle said he favored increasing the Seattle wage and adding that a higher minimum wage creates a lot more jobs than building one 94 foot long yacht.
Economist Dr. Richard Levins and I made this argument in our book Getting America Back to Work in which we argued that after 35 years of wage stagnation and decline, the American economy lacked the spending power and consumer demand required to build employment and a robust economy.
With a completely dysfunctional Congress that cannot agree whether the sun rises in the west or the east, more and more cities and states are considering raising the minimum wage by state legislation or city ordinance.
The moral justification for raising the minimum wage is just as strong as the economic justification. In the richest country in the history of the world with the largest economic inequality in the history of the world and a sputtering economy and dying middle class, any moral point of view demands that wages be raised for the good of working families and for the good of the United States of America.
Photo source: FB/15now