State bill to kill $15 minimum wage is actually a bad idea

I was a big opponent of the $15 minimum wage movement in SeaTac and Seattle. I thought it would hurt businesses and employees. In SeaTac, so far, we’ve seen mixed results (mixed being we didn’t see catastrophic downsides for businesses, but we’ve seen some significant changes, and the truth is, for either the pro or con side, we won’t see any meaningful results until it’s been in place a while). In Seattle, obviously, we’ve seen nothing because it hasn’t been implemented yet.

But before we see the results in either cities, a state senator out of Federal Way has a plan, he says, to move this issue forward that will be a “grand compromise.”

According to The Seattle Times:

State Senator Mark Miloscia dropped a bill today, SB 6029, that would scrap local authority to raise the minimum wage, meaning it would nix Seattle’s $15 per hour minimum wage approved last year. Instead, Miloscia’s proposal would index the wage to both urban inflation and personal income growth.

The wage would rise annually with inflation, and also increase when the state’s per capita personal income growth rises. If the state entered a recession and personal income growth fell, however, the wage wouldn’t drop with it, according to Miloscia.

The combination should allow the minimum wage to increase by about 45 cents each year, according to Miloscia’s calculations.

Now, obviously, if you live in Seattle and are on your way to $15 an hour, you won’t like this idea.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray is quoted as saying “It’s simply an attempt to deprive workers of the raise they’re about to get in a few weeks” – as if that raise was earned. It wasn’t.

Now, I like the basic premise of this bill. On paper, I like the idea of slowly raising the wage commensurate with the cost of living at an amount that won’t kill businesses…

But if I were in office, I wouldn’t support the bill.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe the $15 minimum wage will ultimately be bad for business and employees, particularly low-skilled ones and the younger workers who will find themselves out of work as a result.

But the city of Seattle passed it. The residents elected the city leaders and the mayor and they acted within their power to institute this policy change. I disagree with what they did, but I’m not in power and people who think like me weren’t elected.

And in SeaTac, voters went to the polls and said they wanted to try this experiment. I would have voted no, but my side doesn’t always win elections (in fact, in WA, my side almost never wins).

I’d vote no on the state senator’s bill because I’m fine with cities and voters leveraging their power to push change they feel is for the betterment of the community. I believe enough in the process that if this fails – and I think it will – these leaders will be kicked out of office and replaced by smarter leaders who know what they’re doing. Or they’ll walk back the changes.

Now, I’m slightly less sympathetic to Seattle than SeaTac because in the case of SeaTac, the people actually got a vote. They had the public debate, they heard both sides, and they voted. In Seattle, it was done behind closed doors and there was never a debate as to whether or not this was a smart idea.

But this is our system and I’d rather have the people decide what’s best for their individual communities. Some state lawmaker from Federal Way doesn’t know what’s necessarily best for Seattle, nor does some Seattle lawmaker know what’s best for Federal Way.

Now, there’s nuance here for sure. The argument from the state lawmakers could be he’s doing what’s best for the state, and that supersedes individual cities, and I understand that argument. I’d just rather first err on the side of giving locals the power before the state steps in, the same way I’d rather the state keep power and engage in decision-making before the federal government steps in. The people want to see if this works. Let’s see what happens.

What say you?