Redefining the Minimum Wage

Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

Business has been brisk at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, with a record number of passengers spending record amounts of money eating and shopping. But for an estimated 6,500 workers at the airport and its nearby hotels, car rental agencies and parking lots, the activity has not translated into economic security, let alone prosperity. Wages for airport-related jobs average an estimated $11 an hour, ranging from less than $10 an hour for airline contractors, like baggage handlers and cabin cleaners, to about $13 an hour for car-rental employees. That could soon change. Although the votes are still being tallied, the people of SeaTac, the small city south of Seattle where the airport is, have shown support for a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage of the airport’s transportation and hospitality workers to $15 an hour, starting Jan. 1. That would make the minimum wage at Sea-Tac airport considerably higher than Washington State’s minimum of $9.19 an hour. It would be more than the $12.93-an-hour minimum at the San Francisco International Airport, which was enacted in 2000. And it would blow away the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, in place since 2009, and exceed a proposal in recent legislation, sponsored by Congressional Democrats and supported by President Obama, for a new federal minimum of $10.10 an hour. All of which makes $15 an hour sound too high. Hardly. Over the last half-century, American workers have achieved productivity gains that...

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In Washington State, Home of Highest Minimum Wage, a City Aims Higher

Wages have a direct effect on workers' compensation benefits as they usually determine the rate of the benefit paid for temporary and permanent disability. Today's post was shared by Steven Greenhouse and comes from www.nytimes.com

Washington already has the highest state minimum wage in the country, at $9.19 an hour. Soon, voters in this tiny city south of Seattle will decide whether to push the local minimum even higher. If a majority of the voters here say yes to a referendum known as Proposition 1 when their mail-in ballots start arriving this week, a minimum wage of $15 an hour would be required for many businesses in SeaTac, more than twice the federal minimum of $7.25. The measure would lift wages for thousands of workers at one of the nation’s busiest airports, Seattle-Tacoma International, which is within city limits. But business and labor leaders say the economic and political implications, with local democracy going where state and federal legislators mostly fear to tread, could be equally profound.