Jake: Seattle’s minimum wage is $22.14. The real minimum is zero

My first job paid about $5.50 an hour.

I was 15 or 16. My best friend’s dad ran a foundation repair company, and he hired me for two reasons. First, I knew his son (most jobs in life come through relationships). Second, I was small enough to fit. My buddy and I spent eight hours a day playing mole, shimmying under crawl spaces with five-gallon buckets and digging out room for the real crew. I also learned how many dead cats and rodents are under old houses. It’s more than you think.

It wasn’t going to make me rich, and that wasn’t the point. I was in the working world, picking up skills I could trade for better pay later. If I wanted to get rich, that was on me, not on the guy signing my checks.

I didn’t figure that out on my own. My hard-working parents explained it. First jobs pay the minimum because you walk in with zero skills. Even at the minimum, my buddy’s dad was paying me more than I was worth. Between the training and the mistakes, you could argue he lost money on me for a while. Then I got better and more reliable, and he had an employee worth the investment. That’s how this is all supposed to work.

Now look at today. That $5.50 from 2000 is roughly $10 after inflation. Starting Jan. 1, Seattle’s minimum wage is $22.14 an hour. When I saw that number, I did a double take.

How can a small business pay a beginner that much? The answer is simple: they can’t.

I asked a friend who owns a family restaurant in downtown Seattle. She’s staying anonymous, but she let me share her text:

“Small businesses will go out of business because of this. I raised my prices one more time recently. I’m not going to get any new customers because my food is already expensive,” she said. “This is so ridiculous. City Hall is out of touch. They should come talk to business owners, not just sit behind their desks and make laws. I’ve been here 7.5 years and have not seen one councilmember come talk to me about anything they are making laws for.”

Seven and a half years, and not one visit.

Politicians love to brag about raising the minimum wage. It’s an easy campaign line. What they don’t mention are the jobs that vanish, the hours that get cut, and the first-job openings that disappear because a business can’t afford to take a chance on a kid with no experience.

The UW did a study on this when Seattle was in the headlines about a decade ago, raising the minimum wage to $13 an hour. They found that entry-level jobs dried up and the ones that remained got significantly fewer hours even if the hourly pay was slightly higher.

Every business has a ceiling. I was a barista for a few years, and a coffee shop can only charge so much for a latte. That price decides what it can pay the person making it.

Seattle keeps insisting otherwise, but reality is undefeated. Minimum wage jobs were never designed to support a family or fund a great life downtown. They exist to give people their first skills on what should be a long road to a career, and that career probably won’t be in the minimum wage job.

So let businesses hire. Let them invest in new people, train them, and pay them more as they grow. Stop punishing the struggling employers who are still here.

If the city chases out every company that hires entry-level workers, will city leaders still be bragging about having the highest minimum wage when the jobs are gone?

My old boss and mentor Dori Monson said it best: “The real minimum wage is zero.”

Watch the full discussion in the video above.

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