Seattle leaders sympathetic to complaints of low wage workers

Fast food workers in Seattle are taking their complaints about low pay and wage theft to city hall.

Councilmembers hosted a brown bag discussion Thursday with members of the Good Jobs Seattle movement, which is calling for a $15 per hour minimum wage. Some workers also complain that they’re being cheated out of some of their pay. Councilmember Tim Burgess said the city passed a wage theft law two years ago.

“We’ve been frustrated and we’ve asked the city attorney and we’ve asked the police department to put more emphasis on that and we might have to get more proactive on how we ask for that because we’ve not had one prosecution.”

The city of San Francisco has an office of Labor Standards Enforcement and councilmember Nick Licata suggested Seattle needs a similar department to track worker complaints and enforce the wage theft law.

Otherwise, he said, “It’s going to be sporadic and it’s going to be a shotgun approach and you need education, you need cooperation and there needs to be the certainty that there will be follow up,” said Licata.

Washington’s minimum wage is $9.19 an hour and some low wage workers say they need food stamps to make ends meet. They claim that $15 an hour represents a liveable wage, a pay scale workers say would support their needs and stimulate the economy.

John Burbank, with the Seattle-based Economic Opportunity Institute, recently told KIRO Radio’s Linda Thomas that paying an estimated one million workers in Washington a higher hourly rate would help everyone because those workers are more likely to spend their money at local businesses “creating more economic dynamism.”

On May 30, some fast food workers staged strikes across Seattle, forcing some restaurants to close for the day.