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Higher Minimum Wage

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Next month, people in SeaTac will vote on Proposition 1-- it would lift the minimum wage to $15 an hour for workers at the airport and its nearby hotels, parking lots and car-rental agencies. That’s a 63 percent increase over Washington’s current minimum wage of $9.19 an hour, the highest of any state.

A year ago, Jorge Sanchez of Long Beach, California was struggling to support his family on $9.75/hour as a dishwasher at a hotel.
Sanchez, 56, threw his support behind hiking the minimum wage to $13 an hour for hotel workers in this city just south of Los Angeles.
But the Colombia native soon experienced an unintended consequence: The same month he got a $3.25-an-hour bump in pay, Sanchez’s employer cut his workweek from 40 to 30 hours.
“Measure N was good because it raised our wages. But what the hotel did was cut our hours, so it hasn’t made a change,” he said.
Unlike Sanchez, Hilton bellman Donald Blackwood still works a 40-hour week and pulls in an extra $800 a month thanks to the city’s “living wage” law.
“Now, I have enough money saved up to buy a car,” he said.
Both the SeaTac and Long Beach measures are part of a stepped-up effort by labor and community activists nationwide to end what they call poverty-wage jobs.
In Seattle, both mayoral candidates are plugging an hourly minimum standard of $15 or more.
Prop. 1 proponents say it would lift low-wage workers out of poverty and give them more money to spend at local businesses, pumping an additional $54 million into the economy. Opponents say it would drive up labor costs and force employers to lay off workers, reducing jobs by 5

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