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Will Tacoma Adopt An Even More Ambitious Minimum Wage Hike Than Seattle?

Ashley Gross
/
KPLU
Workers fillet salmon at Northern Fish Products, a Tacoma business that says a $15 minimum wage would lead to cutting some jobs

Tacoma voters have a big choice to make by next Tuesday: Do they want to move even faster than the city of Seattle in lifting their minimum wage?

If they adopt Citizens’ Initiative Measure No. 1, Tacoma’s minimum wage would jump to $15 an hour for businesses with annual revenue of more than $300,000 and would kick in by early December. By contrast, under the city of Seattle’s minimum wage law, the earliest some businesses have to pay $15 an hour is 2017.

Voters in Tacoma have an alternative: Tacoma City Council Initiative Measure No. 1B, which phases in a $12-an-hour minimum wage by 2018.

A Rallying Cry

For progressives ranging from Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a $15 minimum wage has become a rallying cry.  Maximilian Hyland cares so much about it that he has been heading out once a week to knock on doors.

Hyland is part of a group of activists that got the $15 minimum wage initiative on Tacoma’s ballot. On a recent Friday evening, after getting off work as a Montessori teacher, Hyland went door to door in the Hilltop neighborhood, trying to persuade voters. Mostly, people aren’t home, so he tucks a flyer into their screen doors.

But he does manage to speak with one voter – a retired man named Edward Vandenberg. He tells Hyland he supports a $15 minimum wage, an amount he never earned working on Tacoma’s tideflats or as a substitute teacher’s aide.

“Everything I did was under $15 an hour,” he said. $15 an hour sounds fair, he said.

While Seattle chose to phase in the higher wage as a way to give businesses time to adjust, Hyland says Tacoma workers need the wage now.

“Fifteen dollars an hour is already a compromise position — when we have hard data that says you need more than that to survive in this city without social services,” Hyland said.

He points to a self-sufficiency calculator created by the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County.

According to that, a single parent with one child in Tacoma needs to earn $20 an hour to get by without any public assistance. A person without a child needs to earn about $11 an hour. Washington state’s minimum wage right now is $9.47.

Crunching The Numbers

Credit Ashley Gross / KPLU
/
KPLU
Ross Swanes, president of Northern Fish Products. The family-owned company is more than 100 years old.

These days, the minimum wage is on the minds of a lot of Tacoma business owners, including Ross Swanes of Northern Fish Products.

He gave a tour of his warehouses, where workers tend racks of salmon in two smokehouses, slice salmon into fillets and unpack boxes of everything from squid and prawns to lobster tails and tobiko fish eggs.

“Everything that swims or lives under the water, we try to sell it,” Swanes said.

Swanes says he has about 80 full-time employees in Tacoma. Newcomers earn about $10 an hour. But workers earn more as they gain more skills, and he says the average wage is $16 an hour.

Swanes says he started crunching the numbers when he first heard about the $15 minimum wage idea.

“You know, I ran a calculation of what it would cost us, and that was terrifying to me,” he said. “It was going to cost us about $300,000.”

Swanes says he came to the conclusion he would have to cut some jobs in Tacoma and move that work to his facility in Pacific County to keep labor costs down.

“That’s an awful thing,” he said. “I mean, we’ve got a lot of people who have worked here a long time and we were going to have to make some really hard decisions.”

So Swanes contributed money to the $12 for Tacoma campaign, the group supporting the competing minimum wage proposal on Tacoma’s ballot, Initiative 1B.

Tacoma Mayor Marilyn Strickland and the city council came up with that measure after convening a minimum wage task force.

“[Raising it to] $15 an hour immediately is a little too extreme and too much of a shock for Tacoma’s more fragile economy compared to SeaTac Airport and the city of Seattle,” Strickland said.

Initiative 1B would index the city’s minimum wage to the rate of inflation after it reaches $12 an hour. So would the $15-an-hour measure. The competing initiatives have led to a kind of confusing ballot with two parts.

“The first question is, ‘Do you want to raise the minimum wage in Tacoma, yes or no?’” Strickland said.

In the second part, even if people vote no on part 1, they’re still supposed to choose either the $15 or $12 option.

’A Real-World Experiment’

Opponents of the $15 measure say it will lead to job loss. University of Puget Sound economist Andrew Monaco says the research is mixed.

“Some studies have shown that there’s higher unemployment after a minimum wage increase,” he said. “Other studies see little to no impact on the employment.”

Tacoma would leapfrog cities such as Seattle, San Francisco and L.A. if voters adopt the immediate $15 option. SeaTac’s minimum wage for hospitality and transportation workers is $15.24 an hour.

“We’d be the frontier, real-world experiment in what happens when you increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour,” Monaco said.

Monaco says a wage hike could have a big impact. Tacoma has a poverty rate of 18 percent, which is higher than the state’s poverty rate of 13.4 percent.

’We Can Not Live In Abject Poverty

After knocking on doors, Maximilian Hyland welcomed other volunteers back to his apartment. One of them was Joe McCoy, a father of three, who said he earns $10  an hour working in Puyallup at a food processing plant.

He says he bikes more than an hour each way to save gas money and sometimes donates blood plasma for extra cash. His family’s on a wait list for subsidized housing.

“We’ve got our little lottery number and we’re just hoping that we can not live in abject poverty,” McCoy said. “We’re hoping we’re going to be one of those people that they say, ‘Okay, you get to actually live like a human being.’”

McCoy says if the $15 wage passes, it would make sense for his partner to get a job, too, because then they could afford day care.

“I really, really hope it passes, and I’m going to do everything in my power to try and make sure it does,” he said.

If he gets his wish and the $15 wage passes, McCoy says he will start job-hunting in Tacoma.

In July 2017, Ashley Gross became KNKX's youth and education reporter after years of covering the business and labor beat. She joined the station in May 2012 and previously worked five years at WBEZ in Chicago, where she reported on business and the economy. Her work telling the human side of the mortgage crisis garnered awards from the Illinois Associated Press and the Chicago Headline Club. She's also reported for the Alaska Public Radio Network in Anchorage and for Bloomberg News in San Francisco.