What If the Minimum Wage Were $15 an Hour?

[xchrom]

http://www.thenation.com/article/179251/what-if-minimum-wage-were-15-hour


Kshama Sawant speaks about her support for raising Seattle's minimum wage to $15. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

It’s the afternoon of February 18, a typically rainy, windy day in Seattle. The glass facade at City Hall offers a spectacular view of downtown, the wet streets descending to the Puget Sound waterfront. Inside, a waterfall cascades down a terrace near the main staircase. The City Council chambers are crowded to overflowing, and television camera crews are standing off to the side in anticipation of newly elected Democratic Mayor Ed Murray’s first State of the City address.

Wearing a gray pin-striped suit and a lilac-patterned tie, his face slightly florid, Murray strides up to the podium and leans into the microphone. He opens with a call to confront the city’s challenges with renewed enthusiasm, then zeroes in on his top issue. “We face the largest income disparity in our history,” he says, “and this disparity strikes at the very cause and core of what it means to be a democratic society.” Honoring a “moral obligation” to disrupt the cycle that has created massive wealth as well as income and employment gaps between the city’s whites and minorities, the mayor announces: “I have committed to a process to raise the minimum wage in this city and have set a goal of $15 per hour.” America, he adds, is watching: “We have an opportunity to create a model that can be replicated across the country.”

To Murray’s left—as far to the left as she can go without falling off the platform—is newly elected Councilwoman Kshama Sawant. An avowed socialist who wooed the electorate by pushing her own $15 minimum wage proposal, she sits stone-faced at a computer console alongside her City Council colleagues as the mayor outlines his plans for economic reform.

In the weeks since the election, the two have been working together, sometimes uneasily, to focus attention on wage inequities in their city. Murray is hoping to build on the energy that Sawant’s campaign has generated, while playing on the fears of political and business leaders that, if they don’t accept a wage hike through legislation, voters will embrace a more radical measure through a referendum. Sawant is hoping to use the mayor’s effort as a slingshot to catapult her broader arguments about inequality and economic injustice into the mainstream.

[el_bryanto]

1. That's an old tactic - but it's regularly been very successful.

"Look we can have some manageable reform now, or we can wait for the radicals to take over and then you won't like it very much." It's a problematic strategy (because it denigrates those with more leftist positions, and because it's designed to keep those who are already in power in power) but it is also effective at getting smaller reforms sooner.

Bryant