(*Update, Seattle just became the first major American city to pass a $15 minimum wage 10 minutes ago!!)
Fans of Socialist Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant will love this breaking Seattle labor news:
Seattle council is expected to raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour on Monday, the highest in the US. The move will benefit about one quarter of the city’s workforce, particularly women and minorities, as it lifts the lowest paid to more than double the federal minimum wage over the coming years.
It is also likely to boost local campaigns across the US, from San Francisco and Chicago to New York state, to raise the incomes of minimum wage workers after Republicans in Congress blocked President Obama’s proposal for a national increase.
More:
Kshama Sawant, the only socialist city councillor in the US whose election campaign last year became a driving force behind the minimum wage legislation in Seattle, said it fell short of what she wanted to see because of delays in implementation and loopholes, such as a “training wage” for younger people.
But she still hailed it as an “historic victory” for working people. “A hundred thousand low-wage workers in Seattle will be seeing their wages raised to $15 an hour over the next 10 years. That would imply a transfer of roughly $3bn from the top to the lowest-paid workers. Such a transfer has not happened in so many decades because mostly what’s happened is the flow of wealth has been from the bottom up. This is really raising the confidence of working people around the country,” she said.
The AFL-CIO supports the $15 minimum wage:
Trade unions also backed the new law, including the local branch of the AFL-CIO."This ordinance not only will lift many, many workers out of poverty, it tells the business establishment in no uncertain terms that the game is changing, that working people are tired of watching the 1% get richer while the rest of us get poorer," it said.
I have a Monday poll to conduct too: