THE SEATAC BATTLE didn’t end with the ballot count. Alaska Airlines mounted an extensive series of court appeals aimed at nullifying the popular vote. Immediately following the election, Alaska gained a powerful ally: the Port of Seattle. Until now, the Port of Seattle commissioners—the five elected leaders of the port, which oversaw operation of the airport—had remained studiously neutral on Proposition 1. The initiative had placed port leaders in a tricky position. Every four years, commissioners stood for election before county voters. The port commission was a stepping-stone to higher elected office. To boost their electability, most commissioners worked assiduously to position themselves as defenders of working people, even while catering to the needs of port businesses. Port commissioners built close ties with the seaport’s established longshore and metal trades unions and won over building trades unions by requiring union contracts on major construction projects. But they also cultivated ties with shipping and cruise lines, trucking companies, expeditors, tourist outfits, airlines, and airport concessions businesses, all of whom gave generously at election time. Commissioners found they could straddle these two worlds by encouraging employers to cooperate with existing port unions while doling out probusiness lease agreements and regulations and investing heavily in projects that furthered corporate interests—swanky new terminals, modern cargo and cruise ship facilities, and wide-ranging tourist marketing programs. The port-union bond represented the sort of rapprochement that epitomized the apex of labor-management relations, as imagined by many labor leaders post–World War II: unions accepted the primacy of the profit system, and in return were assured good jobs—for a portion of the working class.
The Proposition 1 result disrupted this détente and forced the commissioners out of neutrality. Just after the election, the five port commissioners—three Democrats, two Republicans—announced they would join Alaska in challenging the legality of Proposition 1.
In early December, lawyers for Alaska Airlines and the Port of Seattle told Judge Darvas that the city lacked any legal say-so over airport working conditions. The port’s intervention carried a bitter irony: here was the public commission—itself created by a 1911 popular vote that loosened the iron grip of railroad trusts over the city’s commerce—going to court to argue against democratic rule. The port and Alaska claimed that even though the airport resided within the city of SeaTac, voters had no legal authority over the port’s domain. Going further, Alaska argued that the entire initiative was invalid, both inside and outside the airport, because of several other state and federal laws.
The voter-approved law was scheduled to take effect on New Year’s Day—January 1, 2014. Judge Darvas took until December 27, just four days before implementation, to issue her decision. It was not a surprise: she ruled that the initiative was valid outside the airport, but that the city had no authority to legislate within the airport boundaries. Alaska and port commissioners celebrated; hotel, restaurant, and parking lot owners outside the airport groused, then scrambled to adjust their payrolls. Inside the airport and throughout the community, workers reacted with a mixture of resignation and anger.
For wheelchair attendant Habiba Jama Ali, the latest Darvas ruling was another low point in the long emotional roller coaster of Sea-Tac. It seemed especially cruel to her now to witness major corporations, government leaders from both major political parties, and the judicial system colluding to deny workers their due. And yet the workers continued their fight.
Soon after arriving from Somalia in 2010, Ali had been hired by Bags Inc. as a wheelchair attendant, transporting disabled and elderly Sea-Tac passengers to their flights. For Ali, aiding passengers to navigate the bustling airport reminded her of what she so desperately wanted and didn’t have her first night in America: directions and a helping hand. Lost in the maze of New York’s JFK Airport and unsure about how to get assistance, she missed her connecting flight to Seattle and wandered through the terminals, napping on benches, until she located the gate where another plane transported Ali to her new home twenty-four hours later. Once settled in SeaTac and familiar with the airport’s concourses and terminals, Ali found that caring for vulnerable people at the airport, reassuring them, and getting them safely to their flights gave her a personal satisfaction that her minimum-wage paycheck did not.
When she started at Bags, Ali and other wheelchair attendants had full-time work, even overtime if they wanted it. But when Ali was a couple of years into the job, Bags management cut shifts from eight to four hours and began requiring workers to scour the airport for spare wheelchairs before clocking in. Workers came in an hour ahead of their scheduled start time in order to find unused chairs. Ali complained to a coworker, Kadra Osman, a part-time attendant who also happened to be a staff organizer for Working Washington. “This is not right,” Osman told her. She informed Ali that other Bags workers were beginning to organize a union. Ali got involved and became a leader in the union drive.
In March 2014, three months after Darvas barred Proposition 1 inside the airport, Ali led a delegation representing Alaska’s 260 contracted wheelchair attendants and skycaps—largely Somali, Ethiopian, and Filipina women—to the Bags Inc. management offices to announce they’d formed a union. The manager refused to open the door. At the National Labor Relations Board hearing on the union election petition, the company was joined by Alaska’s top lawyer in arguing that the workers weren’t entitled to a local vote because they were covered by the Railway Labor Act, not the National Labor Relations Act. The labor board dismissed the objections and directed a secret ballot election. In the weeks leading up to the vote, Bags managers ordered workers to attend multiple rounds of antiunion meetings, spied on and threatened union supporters, and promised raises if workers voted against the union. Wheelchair attendant Mulat B. Ayalew, a union activist who worked multiple airport jobs, recalled how a Bags supervisor trailed him as he escorted a passenger from a remote gate, through the terminal, and into the airport parking lot, probably close to half a mile of shadowing. After he dropped off the passenger, Ayalew headed back into the terminal with the empty wheelchair, stopping briefly to chat with other union supporters. The Bags supervisor produced a camera and started photographing him. On July 16 Ali, Ayalew, and their Bags coworkers soundly rejected management’s campaign and voted to join SEIU Local 6. It was the biggest private sector union organizing win at the airport in a generation.
The Bags workers joined other Sea-Tac workers—taxi operators, shuttle drivers, rental car workers, and janitors—who, together totaling more than one thousand workers, had organized successfully into unions since the launch of the Sea-Tac campaign.
OUTSIDE THE AIRPORT PERIMETER, where $15 now was the law, the sky didn’t fall. The owner of MasterPark had contributed more than $30,000 to the Vote No campaign in the fall, warning of layoffs should voters approve the initiative. By early 2014 he had dismissed any talk of layoffs as “foolish” and had installed a huge banner outside his main lot advertising $15/hour wages. He and other Sea-Tac parking lot operators reported a huge uptick in job applicants.1 Scott Ostrander, the Cedarbrook Lodge manager who had tearfully warned of worker layoffs if the initiative passed, unveiled a $16 million hotel expansion plan—sixty-three more hotel rooms and a new spa, requiring twenty-five more employees to staff the growing facility.2
The litigation over SeaTac Proposition 1 advanced quickly to the state’s highest court. In June 2014, Habiba Ali, Mulat Ayalew, Alex Hoopes, Saba Belachew, Samatar Abdullahi, and more than one hundred other airport workers and allies jammed into the hearing room of the Washington State Supreme Court to watch oral arguments.
Our expectations were high, but it took fourteen months for the court to rule. Finally, in August 2015, the Supreme Court issued its decision: the initiative was valid in its entirety. Workers and community members rejoiced, but another six months elapsed before Alaska exhausted long-shot appeals and Proposition 1 became settled law.
In March 2016 I met wheelchair attendant Assadollah Valibeigi one morning at a Starbucks near his apartment. Gleefully he showed me two consecutive pay stubs: one was for $9.47 an hour; the next for $15.24, the new inflation-adjusted minimum at Sea-Tac. In one fell swoop, Valibeigi’s biweekly take-home pay had increased by several hundred dollars.
And since the High Court ruled that the initiative was valid, retroactive to January 2014, Sea-Tac workers began receiving significant back pay awards. In the spring of 2016 Habiba Ali went to the Bags manager with other workers to claim her missing wages. A part-time worker, she got a check for $6,300 after taxes. Some full-time workers got as much as $28,000. “All the people were yelling when we got the money. We were so happy,” Ali recalled. “I never believed until they gave me the check.”
For Ayalew, the raise and back pay—$24,000 owed him by three different airport contractors—meant that he could cut back from brutal eighty-hour workweeks to spend more time with his wife and toddler son. A hospital pharmacist in his native Ethiopia, Ayalew had dreamed of going back to school to get a degree in pharmacy or nursing. Now that could happen.
The awards didn’t make Valibeigi, Ali, Ayalew, and their colleagues rich, but it gave them opportunities that were unimaginable before Proposition 1: they could work less, go back to school, live in simple comfort, send money to needy relatives, not worry month to month about making rent, and even consider a down payment on a modest home.
Though a union stalwart, Ali harbored doubts for the two years that Proposition 1 languished in court limbo. Maybe, after all, workers were doomed to fail, she thought. But, now, she said, “I believe we can do anything.”
Likewise, Mohamed Sheikh Hassan, the Orcas Mosque leader, saw the Sea-Tac campaign not just in economic terms; it was about raising people’s expectations and cementing their roles as civic activists in a new land. In particular, Hassan had seen Muslim women, normally consigned to behind-the-scenes roles in the patriarchal community, stepping forward. In decades to come, Hassan predicted, “It’s going to be a lesson that once upon a time there were immigrant refugees from East Africa who started fighting for this fifteen dollars. They were there among the others, and women were there fighting too. We will teach our grandchildren.”
JUDGE DARVAS’S POSTELECTION ruling notwithstanding, the 2013 SeaTac ballot win radiated outward, surging on the crest of the growing national discourse on income inequality. The first community to benefit directly from the SeaTac momentum was the city of Seattle. A month after the SeaTac vote, one hundred workers, activists, and organizers marched fourteen miles from Sea-Tac Airport to join up with fast-food workers outside Seattle City Hall, a poignant symbol of the next step in the fight for $15.
It was not surprising that Seattle became the next city where the battle would touch down. Indeed, even before the SeaTac ballots were counted, Seattle’s stage was being set by two developments.
The first development centered on Socialist Alternative (SA), a national political organization with a few dozen active members in Seattle. In 2013 SA members decided to run a candidate against Richard Conlin, a sixteen-year incumbent on Seattle’s city council. Conlin owned a liberal reputation but had alienated Seattleites by casting the sole vote on city council against a popular paid sick leave ordinance. To take on Conlin, SA tapped a community college economics professor, a union member and Indian immigrant who had played a leading role in the 2011 Occupy movement: Kshama Sawant.
Two weeks before her own Seattle primary election, Sawant came to SeaTac to support the airport workers. In Occupy and now as a political candidate, Sawant had earned a reputation as a fiery speaker, unreservedly calling workers to unite in class struggle against Boeing, Microsoft, and the other big corporations that dominated the regional economy.
Speaking at the packed, contentious July 2013 hearing inside SeaTac City Hall, Sawant brushed aside our campaign’s admonition that speakers refrain from harsh, polarizing rhetoric. She rendered a blistering critique of Alaska Airlines and “corporate politicians” from both major parties. After the hearing, I debriefed the evening with a group of workers and union staff. What was the highlight? I asked them. The size of the crowd? Our clergy who spoke? The community members? The answers were immediate and forthright: none of the above. “We liked that Indian lady from Seattle!” a worker exclaimed. “Yes—she was the best,” another said. Heads nodded and everyone seemed to agree: Sawant’s lashing assault on corporate greed had stirred their passions and provided a level of moral clarity that our polished talking points lacked.
Sawant went on to score 35 percent of the vote in a three-way August 2013 primary, earning the right to face Conlin in the general election. Sawant and her party ran on a demand to raise Seattle’s minimum wage to $15. Socialist Alternative members and supporters—many recruited out of the Occupy movement—staged rallies for $15, were a constant presence at union and community social justice actions, and door-belled aggressively. Conventional electoral wisdom says a progressive candidate has to appeal to moderate voters in order to win a general election, but Sawant’s literature and stump speeches contained no such restraint. Sawant issued unabashed calls for worker justice, rent control, and a tax on millionaires. Sawant’s bright red $15 Now! yard signs sported the image of a shouting worker with a raised fist—hardly the stuff of moderation.
Fortuitously for Sawant, a synergy developed between her campaign and SeaTac’s. The prolific coverage of SeaTac by Seattle’s TV and radio stations, newspapers, and blogs raised the visibility of Sawant’s own signature issue. In her speeches she frequently hailed the airport workers and their initiative.
Many of us in unions were glad to see Sawant’s candidacy but were skeptical that she could win. Over the years Seattle has seen its share of radical candidates who occasionally rattled the political establishment but in the end fell well short of winning office. While moved by the reaction she elicited in SeaTac, I figured it would be the same this year. Most unions made the practical decision to endorse Conlin, assuming he would cruise to victory.
But in the weeks leading up to November’s election, Sawant’s yard signs started sprouting up in working-class neighborhoods throughout Seattle. Coming home from SeaTac late at night, I would drive along the residential streets in my south Seattle neighborhood and see Sawant’s $15 Now! signs newly planted in front yards or taped to apartment building windows. As Election Day neared, it seemed that this year, with the synergy between the SeaTac initiative and the Seattle race, a socialist might actually win. Conlin campaign staffers likely reached the same conclusion at about the same time. In late October they started desperately calling around to unions for help. But their panic came too late: the unions that endorsed him wouldn’t turn out for his last-minute get-out-the-vote push.
On Election Day Conlin held a narrow margin over his challenger, but as late votes were tallied in succeeding days, Sawant surged ahead. She won by 3,000 votes out of more than 180,000 cast. Under the banner of $15, Seattle had elected its first socialist in a century.
The second major development to set the Seattle stage focused on the mayor’s race. Incumbent Mike McGinn, a former Sierra Club leader who was holding elective office for the first time, faced off against State Senator Ed Murray, a long-time politician and leader in the state’s marriage equality fight. By the late summer, with the SeaTac initiative dominating political headlines, both mayoral candidates endorsed the principle of a $15 minimum wage for Seattle. Both candidates staged events with fast-food and other workers protesting low wages. Murray, seeking to consolidate his business support, said he would support bringing labor and management together “to adopt a $15 wage standard . . . in a way that does not hurt small businesses.” He proposed phasing in pay raises and exempting some companies.3
Between these two liberal candidates, Murray was more moderate on economics. He secured the endorsement of the chamber of commerce and the restaurant association—two employer groups we were fighting in SeaTac. The two big SEIU local unions, including Rolf’s SEIU 775, also endorsed Murray, not because his position on $15 was stronger than McGinn’s, but because union leaders believed there was a better chance that Murray could deliver a wage agreement. SEIU 775 president David Rolf committed hefty staff resources to get out the vote. On November 5 his bet paid off when Ed Murray was elected mayor.
The work of 2013 gave Seattle progressives an unprecedented political environment as the New Year arrived: a $15 minimum-wage initiative just adopted to the south of the city, ongoing high-profile fast-food worker protests in Seattle that echoed the national scene, a firebrand socialist elected to city council on a $15 platform, and a mayor who said publicly, “We know it’s not a matter of if we will get to $15 per hour, but when and how we get there.”4 A poll in early 2014 showed that 68 percent of Seattle voters supported a $15 minimum wage.5 It seemed to me that Seattle’s $15 minimum wage was inevitable; the only question up for grabs was the pathway. Two widely divergent approaches quickly emerged.
Sawant called for a mass movement, building on SeaTac and her electoral victory. In early January 2014 nearly one thousand people jammed into city hall for the inauguration of the newly elected city leaders. Most were there for Sawant, not the mayor.
“Join with us in building a mass movement for economic and social justice, for democratic socialist change,” Sawant declared, “whereby the resources of society can be harnessed, not for the greed of a small minority, but for the benefit of all people.”6 The crowd went wild with applause. Well, most of the crowd. Scattered through the assembly I could see small clusters of the more establishment politicos—elected officials, city hall staff, mainstream activists—wearing expressionless faces, perhaps just now coming to recognize that what had transpired in the election was not a fluke, but a harbinger of the dramatically shifting political terrain. Sawant and her Socialist Alternative party announced the formation of 15 Now, a grassroots organization that would lead the fight for $15 in Seattle and beyond.
With equal determination, the new mayor was committed to take the fight away from the burgeoning mass movement. He wanted a mannerly negotiation process, not the messiness of chanting socialists and their allies besieging city hall. Keenly aware that a labor-business wage battle in Seattle would make the SeaTac initiative fight look like child’s play, Murray assembled an Income Inequality Advisory Committee (IIAC). Murray’s committee was twenty-four handpicked business, political, community, and labor leaders. There were no minimum-wage workers on the panel, though the mayor wisely named Sawant to the committee, along with other city council members. Murray charged the IIAC with developing a wage proposal in four months. To chair the panel, he tapped SEIU’s Rolf and Howard S. Wright, scion of one of Seattle’s richest families and part owner of Seattle’s iconic Space Needle.
Media coverage marveled at how the mayor’s co-chairs were “men on opposite sides of the debate,”7 but that description overlooked the more salient truth that the two cochairs, along with the mayor, were committed from the outset to cut a deal behind closed doors. Wright, being a practical businessman, understood that $15 wages were coming to Seattle and it was his responsibility to deliver an agreement that mitigated damage to business. If $15 was to be the minimum wage in Seattle, then business wanted it phased in over as long a period of time as possible. Wright also hoped that the negotiations would provide businesses an opportunity to win something they had not been able to achieve legislatively in Washington State: the ability to count tips or benefits as part of worker wages, in effect establishing a subminimum wage for many workers.
Rolf wanted to reap the harvest of the 2013 grassroots organizing. Having pushed Murray to embrace $15, Rolf also was now obliged to demonstrate to the mayor that he could deliver unions to sit down and reach a deal peacefully with business. For his part, Mayor Murray recognized that if he didn’t steer a $15 negotiation process from city hall, Sawant’s movement would lead it from the streets. Murray would have to manage his business and labor constituencies closely to make sure things didn’t blow up. The payoff for a successful deal would be his coronation as a “big tent” mayor.
The IIAC set to work in early 2014 with public forums, two commissioned academic studies, a slew of media appearances, and a weekday symposium with national speakers. Unions mobilized rallies of fast-food and other low-income workers and turned out for the forums.
Six days after Sawant’s inauguration, the new city council member and a leader of the Transit Riders Union led the founding meeting of 15 Now in the Seattle Labor Temple. It was held on a Sunday afternoon, scheduled to cater to workers. Hundreds of workers, students, retirees, and community and union activists filled the main meeting hall. The room was sweltering. Speakers celebrated the momentum for $15, but also voiced wariness of the mayor’s IIAC and the loopholes and exemptions that already were being bandied about in the blogosphere—long implementation terms, exemptions or tax breaks for many businesses, a lower minimum wage for tipped employees; perhaps not even $15. To push back against these concessions, Sawant and the other 15 Now leaders recognized they needed leverage, well beyond mobilizing demonstrations.
They found that leverage by taking a page out of the Sea-Tac playbook. 15 Now leaders declared that if the IIAC did not produce an acceptable deal, they would begin gathering signatures in April to qualify for a November ballot initiative. Were people in the hall ready to collect the signatures needed? Sawant asked. The crowd roared its approval.
A citywide initiative was the ugliest imaginable scenario for the mayor and the IIAC’s two cochairs. It would pit the new mayor’s labor and business constituencies against one another. Each would doubtless spend millions in the run up to a vote. A ballot fight would shred the city’s cordial political culture and make it much more difficult if not impossible for Murray to advance his other policy priorities. The mayor and his cochairs certainly recognized that 15 Now was not issuing an idle threat. In January Socialist Alternative began to lay the groundwork by establishing 15 Now committees in working-class neighborhoods.
In addition to the organizing, Sawant and the 15 Now activists asked the larger Seattle unions to help fund initiative signature gathering. But Rolf’s SEIU 775 and most other unions balked, placing their faith in the IIAC process. “It would be unwise for any group to assume future significant SEIU financial support for an initiative as long as there’s a viable path to achieving a new minimum wage policy through the council,” Rolf told reporters in early March.8
This was, I thought, a terrible mistake, a failure to recognize what produces bargaining concessions in the first place. In my experience bargaining union contracts and negotiating with politicians, I found that labor negotiators—both paid union staff and also union members—nearly always overestimate the importance of what happens at the bargaining table. The process of negotiating can become all-consuming. In that environment it becomes natural for participants to overvalue factors like the strength of the spokespeople, the authority of facts and data, the logic of the argument, or your relationship with your management counterpart. You begin to believe that the bargaining room is the center of the struggle. But it’s not. It’s just the place where workers reap the rewards of the pressure that they’ve been able to impose on an adversary through collective workplace or street action, economic or political leverage, and media coverage. And the bargaining rewards will be in direct relationship to the amount of power that workers have been able to exert away from the table.
Working people had forced political leaders and the business establishment into a discussion of how to establish a $15 minimum wage. It took demonstrations of worker power to get to the point where the incoming mayor felt obliged to lead on raising wages. But the IIAC bargaining table would yield the best results for workers only if, once the committee was formed, that outside pressure were escalated. It was the wrong moment to ease up on the pressure of mass action.
Some Seattle union colleagues explained to me that they were comfortable focusing on the IIAC for the time being; if that failed, they reasoned, unions could pivot to the initiative route. They were anxious about the potential cost of an initiative, and a few were concerned that if unions showed too keen an interest in 15 Now’s initiative during the IIAC discussions, then they wouldn’t gain the trust of business and political committee members, talks would fail, and the mayor would blame them. They were committed to the inside game.
By mid-March, discussions inside and outside of the IIAC began to look at how the city could offset the business cost of wage increases, especially for small firms. Mayor Murray publicly talked about a multiyear wage phase-in, a popular idea especially if applied to small businesses. Union leaders suggested tax breaks. Business leaders said they wanted to be able to count tips and the cost of health benefits toward a $15 “total compensation” figure.
On March 15 Sawant announced to a rally of more than six hundred supporters that she would support a three-year phase-in of the new wage for small businesses.9 Some of the IIAC leaders expressed surprise at Sawant’s proposal. Perhaps they expected—or even hoped for—only unyielding demands from the socialist firebrand; inflexibility from Sawant would be easier for the political establishment to brush aside. But in announcing the phase-in plan, Sawant was demonstrating political agility and signaling her movement’s readiness to draft an initiative that had a credible chance of getting voter approval. And Sawant warned rally goers that they should be worried about the trajectory of talks inside the IIAC. “Right now, the debate is moving in the direction of total compensation and tip credit,” she said. “That is a bad direction.”10
“Tip credit”—or more accurately, tip penalty, since it penalizes tipped workers—was an issue that Washington State unions had kept at bay for years. Repeated drives by the restaurant and big business lobby to pass subminimum-wage legislation for tipped workers were defeated by huge union mobilizations in the state capital. Unions noted that tip penalty was “a direct grab into the pockets of some of our state’s lowest paid workers.”11 Tips are not something workers can depend upon. “Whether or not I make a living shouldn’t be up to what’s basically a gift from customers. That’s what my job should be paying me,” a Seattle restaurant worker told the community group Puget Sound Sage, reflecting a common sentiment.12
But now in liberal Seattle, of all places, the tip penalty zombie was coming back to life. Thousands of restaurant and hospitality workers, baristas, hairdressers, cosmetologists, and tourism industry workers stood to lose the most with this subminimum wage for tipped workers. UNITE HERE had members at six downtown Seattle hotels, but their union lacked a seat on the IIAC. And labor’s cochair on the committee had already shown his cards on the issue. “I don’t care what’s in the deal as long as there’s a ‘fifteen’ in it,” I heard Rolf tell his union staff. More publicly, Rolf explained why unions thought tip penalty was a bad idea, but in failing to label it as a deal breaker, he signaled to business that it could end up in the final package.
On April 14, 15 Now activists made good on their promise to advance a ballot initiative, submitting to the city clerk their proposal for a $15 minimum wage, with a three-year phase-in for small businesses and nonprofit organizations. The paperwork was a necessary step before signature gathering, which the organization said would begin at the end of the month—the same time that the mayor set for the IIAC’s recommendations. On April 26 some five hundred people—mostly rank-and-file union members and political and community activists—mustered in a local high school gymnasium for a 15 Now conference to debate the elements of the proposed initiative and plan the signature-gathering drive.
The 15 Now initiative filing and mobilizing increased urgency behind the IIAC’s closed doors, where substantive discussions had distilled down to the mayor and three labor and three business representatives. “Staving off an initiative battle was, in fact, the driving force behind Murray’s commitment to getting a deal,” observed reporter Josh Feit.13
On the morning of May 1, as thousands of people were getting ready for Seattle’s annual May Day March, Mayor Murray convened a press conference to announce that the IIAC negotiators had reached a deal. With cochairs Rolf and Wright standing behind him, Murray stepped to the podium and declared, “Seattle workers are getting a raise.” He unveiled the terms: not $15 now or anytime soon, but rather a three- to seven-year phase-in of a $15 minimum wage for all workers in the city, with subsequent minimum wages tied to cost-of-living increases. Some one hundred thousand workers would benefit. The length of phase-in varied based on the size of the business and whether it offered health benefits. Most workers—70 percent—would have to wait five to seven years before the $15 minimum wage kicked in.14 And the tip penalty was included: tipped workers in businesses with under five hundred workers would make less than their nontipped counterparts—as much as $3/hour less—over the next decade, until 2025, when the penalty would sunset. It was not a clean-cut deal. To describe the arrangement required a four-column chart showing the different minimum-wage levels for distinct groups of workers over the next ten years.
The deal, Murray explained, met his two objectives: getting low-wage workers to $15/hour while staving off an initiative fight. Wright called the agreement “the best outcome given the political environment,” noting that it accomplished business’s need for an extended phase-in period and for allowing health benefits and tips to count against wages. Rolf proclaimed that “with this announcement today, Seattle is leading the way toward a better economy and more robustly shared prosperity.”
The deal indeed marked a watershed, allowing Seattle to claim the mantle of being the first major US city to establish a $15 minimum wage. But it did so without forcing businesses actually to provide $15 wages for several years. That afternoon, as I walked in the May Day parade, the bright spring sunshine beaming down on marchers, I heard workers, community activists, and union staff trading opinions about the deal. The palpable pride of having achieved the historic agreement, of having struggled and forced the business and political establishment to concede something they wouldn’t do on their own, was tempered by the disappointment of a long phase-in period and the health-care and tip offsets. The IIAC deal had yielded significant concessions to business in exchange for the right to say Seattle had won $15. One colleague who was close to the negotiations lamented, “We left money on the table.”
Beyond the specific terms of the agreement and the nationally broadcast sound bites, the mayor had achieved a political masterstroke. Murray got to claim credit for leading a wage fight that he didn’t create, and in securing the deal he won the allegiance of union and business leaders in opposing any contentious voter initiative.
Sawant and 15 Now were savvy enough to recognize that the voters wouldn’t adopt a better deal than what the political establishment had bestowed. They suspended the initiative drive. The socialist council member railed against the insider agreement. Sawant noted that during the long phase-in period the rising cost of living would erode actual gains, and she warned of the precedent-setting danger of redefining wages to include tips and health-care benefits. But she recognized the overall historic achievement, as well as the reality that $15 was forced upon the political establishment. “Today’s first major victory for fifteen will inspire people all over the nation,” she said. But, she cautioned, “We need to recognize what happened here in Seattle that led us to this point. Fifteen was not won at the bargaining table as the so-called ‘sensible compromise’ between workers and business,” but rather was “a reflection of what workers won on the street over this last year.”
Yet there was something essential missing in the victory. Largely lost in the exuberance was the painful reality that unions had allowed the IIAC process to relegate worker power building. The Seattle fight for $15 had sprung from the Sea-Tac campaign, which in turn owed its roots to SEIU’s 2011 Fight for a Fair Economy campaign. FFE had elevated the need to launch large-scale union organizing campaigns alongside the fight against income inequality. It properly recognized the necessity of building worker power, not just to fight for economic redistribution, but to rebuild the US labor movement. The initial call from New York City fast-food workers in late 2012 was for “$15 and a union.” Sea-Tac workers had continued organizing for union recognition, before and after the ballot initiative drive, which itself was a power-building struggle. But in Seattle, SEIU leaders pointedly dropped the “and a union” portion of the rally cry for the prize of a closed-door wage deal. They preferred to cast their lot with a Democratic mayor rather than with a party of upstart socialists. In relegating the goal of building worker power, they missed an opportunity to build a new kind of labor movement.
PARALLEL TO SEATTLE, a $15 minimum debate was unfolding seven hundred miles to the south in San Francisco. But a different approach by San Francisco unions produced an equally distinct result.
As 2013 ended the two West Coast cities shared similar political attributes—active labor movements, with about 16 percent union density in each city; liberal mayors and city councils eager to raise wages; and a rising economic tide that was lifting worker expectations for better pay. As Seattle’s mayor was calling for higher wages, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee also announced his support for a minimum-wage hike. Lee, too, wanting to head off the growing street movement, promised to assemble a labor and business committee to hash out a solution. “We’ll do this the Ed Lee way,” his spokeswoman said. “Get everyone in the room.”15
But unions didn’t trust the mayor to get to $15 on his own. In April 2014 SEIU Local 1021, the largest city union, along with community allies, filed an initiative to bring the city’s minimum wage to $15 in two years. Business leaders fumed. The union-led initiative “flies in the face of collaboration and partnership,” complained chamber of commerce CEO Bob Linscheid. “This initiative is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to influence the outcome of the consensus-building process that will begin this week under the leadership of Mayor Ed Lee.”16
But labor’s leverage worked. Two months after the San Francisco initiative filing, the mayor’s panel announced agreement on a ballot measure to increase wages to $15 within three years, surpassing the Seattle timeline. “All San Francisco employers will be paying $15 an hour by 2018,” declared San Francisco supervisor Jane Kim, who brokered the deal. And, pointedly contrasting her city’s agreement to Seattle’s, she noted, “There will be no tip credit, no health care credit. These are pure wages workers will be bringing home to their families.”17 The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, recognizing that the union-drafted alternative was worse for business, got behind the agreement. In November San Francisco voters approved the measure with a resounding 77 percent yes vote.
Goodwill hadn’t driven the San Francisco agreement to a more successful conclusion than Seattle. Nor was the Bay Area political alignment more hospitable. Labor simply pursued a strategy grounded in a recognition that power from the outside produces better results at the bargaining table.
Just as San Francisco voters set a new standard in wage laws, voters across the bay in Oakland overwhelmingly approved a single-step leap in the city’s minimum wage from $9/hour to $12.25/hour, plus five paid sick days per year. A month later, in December 2014, two months in advance of his mayoral reelection, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel rushed a phased-in $13/hour minimum wage through city council. In May 2015 the Los Angeles City Council voted to raise the city minimum wage in stages to $15/hour by 2021. The same month the city of Emeryville, California, a small city tucked between Oakland and Berkeley, set a new standard—a $16/hour minimum wage, to be instituted in stages by 2019. Tellingly, none of these wage laws included Seattle’s concessions on tips or health-care benefits.
In the four years following the 2011 Fight for a Fair Economy launch, seventeen states, from Massachusetts, Vermont, and Connecticut, to Nebraska, South Dakota, and Arkansas, to Alaska and Hawaii, adopted higher minimum-wage laws. Things moved fast. In the spring of 2015, New York governor Andrew Cuomo proposed a $10.50 minimum wage, assailing a $15/hour floor as too high. But within a year he had recanted his lowball offer, approved a $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers, and secured agreement with state legislators on phasing in a $15 minimum for all workers.18 Within hours of the New York bill signing, California governor Jerry Brown put his signature on a similar phased-in $15 minimum-wage bill.19
Corporations and their political patrons were on the defensive, trying to limit the size and speed of the raises. Thirty miles south of Seattle, Tacoma businesses headed off a $15 minimum-wage initiative by offering a $12/hour ballot measure to compete against it. “There are two ways to be at the table—sitting around it, or on the menu,” the local chamber president explained. The $12/hour business measure won out.20
Where politically feasible, such as in Missouri, North Carolina, and Alabama, business executives killed local movements by getting legislatures to adopt state laws preempting local wage laws. But business was playing catch-up to the unfolding national narrative. In the three and a half years since the November 2012 New York fast-food worker call for $15/hour and union recognition, some seventeen million workers won pay raises through voter initiatives, legislative action, administrative rule making, or because individual companies raised base wages.21
None of this happened out of political benevolence or enlightened business attitudes. Across the country, emboldened fast-food, child-care, home-care, airport, and other low-wage workers were moving the political dial with job actions, walkouts, civil disobedience protests, and shareholder meeting rallies. National days of action, managed closely by SEIU and its FFE affiliates, garnered widespread TV coverage in dozens of media markets. Courageous workers spoke out, shining a light on grinding poverty—seventy-nine-hour workweeks, abusive supervisors, the misery of living in one’s car, chronic hunger, and mounting debt.
The wage fight also aligned with other struggles. The Black Lives Matter movement joined with the fight for $15, Walmart workers, and allies to link the fights against police brutality and economic inequality. The Reverend William J. Barber II, the North Carolina pastor and founder of the Moral Monday movement, marched with McDonald’s workers and spoke to a fast-food workers’ convention about the moral imperative to raise wages. Day laborers—mostly undocumented workers in the informal economy who wouldn’t benefit directly from statutory pay increases—added the demand for immigration reform and became some of the most reliable attendees at wage protests. As with Sea-Tac, these budding alliances showed early glimmers of a new kind of labor movement that fused the range of contemporary social and economic fights into a single struggle.
Yet even as the workers and unions tallied up wage victories and supporters celebrated, there was a set of figures that told a different story: in the four years since SEIU leaders declared a dire emergency and launched the Fight for a Fair Economy, private sector union density continued to decline. The “7 percent problem” that SEIU leaders talked about with such urgency in the winter of 2011 had become, by 2015, a 6.7 percent problem. What began as a bold vision to organize private sector workers and rebuild worker power had largely tapered into an exciting—yet limiting—campaign around wages. SEIU’s Fight for a Fair Economy certainly had changed the national discourse about low pay, but had not reversed the overall downward slide of unions.
And then, as if to put an exclamation mark on matters, came the 2016 elections. The campaign and its aftermath, from Bernie Sanders’s remarkable insurgency to Donald Trump’s brutal and ugly win, laid bare the deep alienation and pain felt by broad swaths of working people and exposed the full scope of the union movement’s existential crisis. The problem facing America was, indeed, much more profound than an imbalance of income, and uncomfortable questions about the purpose and survival of unions could no longer wait for a more convenient season.