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About Northwest labor press. (Portland , Ore.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (April 1, 2016)
PAGE 4 | April 1 , 2016 | NORTHWEST LABOR PRESS MAKING A STAND: About three dozen members and supporters of ATU Lo- cal 757 mobilized for a March 23 TriMet board meeting, and stood up as lead- ers and allies asked the board for more a respectful tone from management. TriMet provocation From Page 1 The Fight for $15 The Right Wage for a Working America David Rolf — president of Service Employees In- ternational Union (SEIU) Local 775 in Seattle — has been a leading figure in the national fight for a $15 minimum wage. When fast food strikes erupted nationwide in 2012 and 2013 behind the slogan “$15 and a union,” it was thanks to be- hind-the-scenes work and resources from SEIU. The strikes were especially successful in Seattle, where the union and many allies went on to pass a $15 ballot measure for airport workers in SeaTac in 2013. After it became a campaign issue in Seat- tle as well and pro-$15 mayor Ed Murray won of- fice, Rolf was appointed co-chair of the task force that wrote the $15 minimum wage ordinance, which passed in 2014. Now he’s written a book about the movement: “The Fight for Fifteen: The Right Wage for a Working America.” The North- west Labor Press interviewed him by phone. Where did $15 come from, and why are we hearing about $15, and not $10.10 an hour, or $20 for that matter? The real answer is: It’s a bold moral aspirational goal, along the lines of the eight-hour day. One can talk about the relative economic justifications of $15. If you look at the high point of the spending power of a minimum- wage earner — 1968 — and you accelerated the minimum wage according to the increase in pro- ductivity since then, it would be $21 an hour. If you accelerated it according to inflation, it would be between $10.50 and $11 an hour. So $15 is a relative midpoint. But this was not cooked up in a science lab. This was workers on the ground, first in Brooklyn in November 2012, deciding that $15 was worth going on strike over. That wasn’t any more scientific than why we have an eight-hour day instead of an 8.25- or 7.79-hour day. It was a firm round number that workers felt motivated and inspired by. First SeaTac then Seattle going to a $15-an- hour minimum wage got a lot of national at- tention. A lot of observers who aren’t in Seattle may think that the wage is already $15 there now. Can you tell us about the compromise and the reality? It’s quite complex. And this is how we got consensus with a majority of the busi- ness community and a unanimous vote on city Council. There are essentially four different rates of acceleration to $15. For big businesses who don’t provide healthcare to their employees, it’s a three-year path - $11, $13, and $15. This is the $13 year; next January it will be $15. Think Mc- Donald’s or Target, Amazon, Rite Aid … big companies with 500 or more employees nation- ally that don’t provide healthcare for employees. For those that do provide health care benefits — say Nordstrom, Macy’s, Safeway or QFC gro- ceries — they have an extra year, so it’s a four- year phase-in. For small employers (under 500 employees nationally) who don’t provide health- care, it’s a five-year phase-in. And for small em- ployers whose employees do receive healthcare or tips that add up to the minimum wage of $15, there is a “phase-in, phase-out” tip and health care credit. But everyone has to be at a clean $15 seven years from the original passage, which is the year 2021. There’s a lot of complexity. It’s really the product of the mayor and the negotiators — my- self and Howard Wright on the business side — feeling like we had to have not just a majority vote on the task force but a strong majority if we were not going to be subject to potential efforts to amend or repeal via ballot measure. What has been the impact, so far, of the incre- mental raises? Workers have more money. Has Seattle become a ghost town with business closures? San Francisco and Seattle, which are the two highest-wage cities in the country, have the largest number of restaurants per capita in the United States, higher than New York, higher than Washington, D.C. We have seen overall growth in the number of restaurants operating in Seattle. We have about 3 percent unemployment. There’s a waiting list to rent a construction crane in Seat- tle. Our biggest problem is that more people want to live here than there are housing units. So there are really fast rates of housing price inflation. I think that gets to my next question which is: How do you answer the argument that if you try to raise the minimum-wage significantly, it will cost jobs and actually hurt the people it’s trying to help? It’s a lie. It’s never happened. Not Turn to Page 10 allow “newly hired union em- ployees to go to the ATU offices on District paid time for pur- poses of orienting them to their membership in ATU” would be unlawful under a 2013 law, Stevens wrote. That law, ORS 243.670, says a public employer may not use public funds to assist, promote or deter union organizing. It was drafted by pro-union legislators, and was meant to stop public employers from spending public money fighting union cam- paigns — like University of Oregon, which spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal work to frustrate and delay a union campaign by college pro- fessors. Nothing in the bill’s leg- islative history suggests that it was supposed to apply to al- ready unionized workers, or that it was supposed to ban union orientation from taking place on paid time. “That is a real distortion of what we were trying to do,” says State Sen. Michael Dembrow, who sponsored the bill. But in case TriMet’s legal in- terpretation of ORS 243.670 doesn’t hold up, Stevens’ memo also says paid-time union orien- tation “may violate the Oregon constitution” — because it’s an expenditure of public money for a non-public purpose. TriMet spokesperson Mary Fetsch didn’t answer a question from the Labor Press as to whether the legal opinion came from in-house or outside attor- neys. But Fetsch said by email that TriMet’s position is that it violates Oregon law for employ- ees to go to the union hall on paid work time for “long orien- tations that last hours.” “Members certainly can go to the ATU union hall on their per- sonal time, and the ATU may make orientation presentations to new employees of reasonable duration during TriMet’s orien- tation on its property,” Fetsch wrote. In the past, TriMet trainers dropped new hires off at the Lo- cal 757 hall for a one- to two- hour paid union orientation at the end of a training shift. At the March 23 board meet- ing, Oregon AFL-CIO Secre- tary-Treasurer Barbara Byrd told TriMet board members that the point of Oregon’s Public Employee Collective Bargain- ing Act was to encourage a har- monious and cooperative rela- tionship between government and its employees. “Our federation is concerned by signals that TriMet manage- ment has not made a good-faith effort to maintain a productive relationship with ATU. In fact the entire labor community is concerned about poor labor- management relations at TriMet. TriMet management sets a bad precedent, and their conduct sends a bad message to other public employers.” After union president Block addressed the board, TriMet board chair Bruce Warner said he’d be more than willing to meet with union leaders, and would work with them to set a date for a meeting. “The entire labor community is con- cerned about poor labor-management relations at TriMet. TriMet management sets a bad precedent, and their conduct sends a bad message to other public employers.” — Oregon AFL-CIO secy.-treasurer Barbara Byrd
