$15/an hour minimum wage in seattle good bold move lets all follow the lead!!!!

Seattle Mayor Details Plan for $15 Minimum Wage By KIRK JOHNSONMAY 1, 2014 Photo Mayor Ed Murray of Seattle on Thursday announced a plan to increase the city’s minimum wage in stages. Washington already has the highest statewide minimum wage in the nation, at $9.32. Credit Steve Ringman/The Seattle Times, via Associated Press SEATTLE — Mayor Ed Murray presented on Thursday what he described as an imperfect but workable plan to increase the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage and one of the highest anywhere in the nation, through a series of complex and phased-in stages. Just as crucially, he said, the plan has broad political support, with a coalition of labor and business groups ready to push hard for it at the City Council, starting with the first hearings next week. But the plan, which in many other cities might be seen as a liberal Democratic agenda at the frontier of social and economic engineering, was immediately attacked not from the mayor’s right, but from his left. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Kshama Sawant, a Socialist Alternative Party member who was elected to the Seattle City Council last year on a single-minded drive to raise wages, said the plan had been “watered down” by business interests on the mayor’s 24-member committee on income inequality, of which she was also a member. In a packed news conference at City Hall right after Mr. Murray’s, she called on her supporters to continue their effort to gather signatures for a possible ballot initiative on wages this fall. The campaign might also put pressure on the Council to make the mayor’s plan better for workers, she suggested. “Every year of a phase-in means yet another year in poverty for a worker,” Ms. Sawant said. “Our work is far from done.” Mr. Murray, a Democrat and former state senator, formed his special committee on income inequality this year — headed by a labor union leader and a business executive — and gave them three months to find common ground. While running for mayor last fall, he, like Ms. Sawant, pledged to support a $15 minimum wage. The result, in an agreement reached late Wednesday, with 21 of the 24 members supporting the plan, he said, was a two-tiered minimum-wage structure. Employers with more than 500 workers — no matter where those workers are around the nation — would move on a faster track toward $15 than smaller employers. Tips and employer-paid health care benefits also would be factored in getting to the $15 level for smaller companies, at least in the earlier years of the plan. The result is a disparity, at least in the rate of pay increases, if not the final destination: Some workers would get to $15 an hour as early as 2017, with a cost-of-living adjustment after that tied to the Consumer Price Index, while other workers, at smaller companies, would not see $15 until 2021. Washington already has the highest statewide minimum wage in the nation, at $9.32. “It is complicated, but the situation is complicated,” Mr. Murray said. The end result, he said, would be historic and important, solidly built on the common ground found by business and leaders. Compromise, with no one getting everything they wanted, he said, was the key. “We are going to decrease the poverty rate in the city by raising the minimum wage. We are going to improve lives of workers who can barely afford to live in the city,” Mr. Murray said. “At the same time we’re going to do it in a way that doesn’t harm those folks who are the great job creators of the city — the entrepreneurs, the homegrown businesses.” One of the chairmen of the mayor’s committee, David Rolf, the president of a Seattle chapter of the Service Employees International Union, said the package of compromises in the deal was delicate and could unravel if too much is tinkered with by the nine-member City Council. But he said he thought the chances were good that the plan would pass quickly, possibly deflating the forces led by Ms. Sawant who are trying to take the issue to the voters. All nine members of the Council, Mr. Rolf said, have pledged support in principle to a $15 minimum wage, and two who were members of the income inequality committee supported the package that emerged. “I believe that if the Council passes this agreement within the next few weeks that the public won’t support a ballot measure fight,” Mr. Rolf said. “And certainly the labor movement is not going to support a ballot measure fight.” A version of this article appears in print on May 2, 2014, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Seattle Mayor Details Plan for $15 Minimum Wage. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe Next in U.S. Republicans Weigh Odds in Primaries in Iowa and Mississippi Seattle Mayor Details Plan for $15 Minimum Wage By KIRK JOHNSONMAY 1, 2014