Dori: Seattle’s new nanny law benefits unions, doesn’t help nannies, hurts families

As predicted, it was a unanimous vote to pass Seattle’s new nanny law — a bill of rights for domestic workers. You want to talk about a classic example of what government is all about around here? This will not help the nannies and the house-cleaners. It will certainly not help the residents who pay them. This is about two things and two things only.

The new nanny law requires employers to give nannies paid breaks. So if you hire a nanny for, say, a nine-hour day while you and your spouse are at work, you have to give them a half-hour lunchbreak and a couple of 10-minute breaks. That’s tough to do if you’re a nanny. If the kids are climbing on the roof, you say, “Sorry, I’m on my break, can’t do anything about it.”

By the way, if you’re sitting on the couch watching a DVD with the kids, that’s not break time, that’s working. You’ve got to get a break that’s not watching a DVD.

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If you’re a nanny you can’t just leave the kids alone, so the way the law works is that the families have to pay the nannies for the breaks they didn’t take. So if these nannies make $15 an hour, and you’ve got to pay them for 50 minutes of break time they didn’t take, then that works out to about $12.50 a day. That’s more than $3,000 per year that you have to pay your nanny for nothing.

But here’s the thing — almost none of this goes to the nanny. It goes to taxes and it goes to union dues. The Service Employees International Union was pushing for this nanny law. The union gets rich off this — they get more members and more dues — and the politicians get more power. Because the unions support the whack-jobs on the Seattle City Council. It’s all about power, money, and control, and everyone else loses. The nanny gets virtually nothing extra, and the family has to pay $3,000 more a year in childcare costs.

This is the Seattle City Council unanimously deciding to jack up the cost of child care. They claim to care so much about working families, but clearly they don’t. Very few of the council members have kids. They don’t know what it’s like to raise a family and to try to make ends meet. You’ve got Mike O’Brien, growing up in Clyde Hill with a silver spoon in his mouth and not wanting for anything for a day in his life. These people have no problem adding thousands of dollars in childcare costs to the people of this city.

Oh, and as part of this new nanny law, five positions will be created to oversee the law at a total cost of $690,000 per year. So the Seattle City Council gets to give five of their cronies a $140,000-per-year gig to oversee the house-cleaner and nanny law. And the families of Seattle get royally screwed over in the process.

You are being screwed over at the city, county, state, and federal level. It’s all about the power of politicians — don’t ever forget that.

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